I was refering to the recharging idea for stuff like the armour on the bunker. or a pipe line to only trigger the explosion from a sudden increase of damage which can only be done my rockets, grenades
Like you said, for a vehicle recharging its not needed as a vehicle would take damage, and at certain levels of health, bits of the armour are triggered to explode off. In Tribes V it looked at first it was based on which bit you where shooting like in Halo 2 i think, but its not, its just set to come off at certain levels of health.
Anyway, like absolut said it should be considered for Beta 2, as its a unique thing in UT2004 I have not seen yet.
I was thinking more short term such as using the effect for static stuctures like bunkers.
Also I was thinking...
The armour being blown off, its more a kinetic thing. Grenade, or a rocket launcher exploding near by would knock the armour off, but machine gun fire would not have this effect unless something else explosive was triggered, another idea could be to ignore all weapon fire apart from grenades and rocket launchers forget about health, and just have it triggerd when a grenade goes off nearby.
the effect would need to be cheated, in that it ignores hand weapons and only responds to heavy weapons, as trying to do it so it actually reacts to the kinetic energy of a weapon would be very hard, its probably something you can do in HL2, just using the weapons kinetic value to move stuff.
Update:
Ive found a way now by altering the initial state of karma actors to fly into the air once triggerd than fall to ground. This I can use now for when triggering explosions...
However the damage volume I talked about before was wrong, its an event actor with a collision radius which can take damage/has a health value (same thing virtually) However there is no rehealing value after X seconds to use like I wanted. so its only good for stuff which wont have a resulting explosion such as the tree taking damage and then falling would be fine.
But having something like i said before which could only be triggerd after a sudden burst of damage such as from a grenade is not native to unreal and would require some sort of coding.
I think with the new idea where we just ignore weapons fire and only check to see if grenades/rockets explode within its radius is much easier to code, but still its additional code to do.
So i can either:
Look at creating a scripted actor which resets the health value of the actor if not enough damage was caused in X seconds to trigger it.
or just use the health as it is, but would look unrealistic if health reached 1% then 5 minutes later someone came along a fired a single shot to make it reach 0% and trigger the explosion....
U P D A T E
Wee, found it, after going through my UED book and UED script editor found a uncommented value called trigger time.
I set this value to one, so if I understand it correctly, If i do not damage the trigger enough in 1 second it wont trigger. The value is set to 50. So the only way to cause 50 damage in under a second is by the rocket launcher or grenade, and it works
firing the assualt rifle etc doesnt inflict enough damage in time.
I might use the idea for the armour plating everywhere, so only greandes and rockets can cause the armour on the walls to be knocked off/fall/explode...
U P D A T E 2
Can this post get any bigger?
Made a quick video
Put two armour plates floating in the air.
The first one i shoot is how it is currently, single shot triggers.
The second one i shoot with assualt rifle to show no effect, throwing grenade however causes it to trigger and fly off.
Of course the physics like the speed etc are not finished so they look a bit odd falling.
The video is in WMV format as none of the mpeg conversions are working on my pc they all expired. the .WMV format took the file from 200mb down to 2.80mb
www.planetunreal.com/da/fluxs/wardamage.zip
...Dont you just love the peaceful setting, autumn leaves falling, birds calling and the sound of grenades exploding....