Months of work possibly wasted, looks for a solution! Help greatly appreciated.

[crazyfingers]

Months of work possibly wasted, looking for a solution! Help greatly appreciated.

I've put a lot of time these past couple months into making an RPG style map where getting hits with certain weapons increases your run speed, among other things. I used a console command trigger in kismet to accomplish this (setspeed X).

All my solo play throughs seemed to work fine, even published it and played it in offline mode and everything went smoothly.

We did our first group play through in class yesterday. Half the powerups i'd made (centered around gaining run speed) simply didn't work. The map wasn't very fun to play since runspeed was the major focus for 2 of the 3 weapons i had made, not to mention jump height (also set in a console command).

As this was my first map i didn't know that console commands, even those fired through kismet wouldn't work.

I'm hoping there's some setting i'm just overlooking in my map that i need to disable that will allow me to use these kismet console commands in a multiplayer game.

Any help is greatly appreciated. I naively thought i could do all these gameplay tweaks through kismet but it looks like i was probably wrong. If need be I'll try my hand as scripting but its getting late in the quarter and this thing is due in a few weeks, any links to such resources might come in handy, especially ones focusing on increasing player run speed, and jump height.

 

[ambershee]

I'm not sure that console commands will work, because they're not intended for use in a multiplayer environment at all; they're supposed to be there for developers to tinker with things.

I have a feeling you're going to want to script things. The quickest, dirtiest route would be a new pawn class, with functions to over-ride it's movement statistics, and powerups / weapons or whatever that invoke them.

 

[Sjosz]

Confirmation: Console commands will not work in an online/multiplayer environment. It would seem that you're best off looking into UnrealScript, so you can manipulate the data on runspeed and jumpheight manually in there.

 

[crazyfingers]

This might sound crazy, but what i might try to do is when the player uses the weapon that's supposed to increase their runspeed, i'll teleport an invisible interp actor to their location. The pivot point of this object will be offset just enough as to be perfectly at their back at teleport.

Once teleported directly behind them i'll fire off a matinee that translates the X or Y position relatively to their location so it will basicaly move in the direction of the player.

A delay loop on the teleport will cause the interp actor to update direction with the player causing them to always be moving in the direction their facing.

hmm, on second thought this might cause the interp actor to cause the player to "fly" since it will be pushing directly towards them, if they look up it might cause them to go into space.

Just thinking out loud here, maybe we can come up with something.

 

[ambershee]

I think that'd be more hassle than the scripting >.<

 

[Sjosz]

It would indeed be a lot easier to write that stuff up in unrealscript than to make a hard matinee type sequence out of it (I doubt it even fully works with firing, jumping etc). There should be plenty of resources out there to help get you where you need to be. http://udn.epicgames.com/

 

[Angel_Mapper]

Let's see if I can do this from memory...

class SeqAct_SetPlayerSpeed extends SequenceAction;

var() float NewGroundSpeed;

event Activated()
{
    if(Pawn(VariableLinks[0].LinkedVariables[0]) != none)
    {
        if(NewGroundSpeed == -1)
            Pawn(VariableLinks[0].LinkedVariables[0]).GroundSpeed = Pawn(VariableLinks[0].LinkedVariables[0]).default.GroundSpeed;
        else if(NewGroundSpeed >= 0)
            Pawn(VariableLinks[0].LinkedVariables[0]).GroundSpeed = NewGroundSpeed;
    }
}

defaultproperties
{
    NewGroundSpeed=-1
    VariableLinks.Empty
    VariableLinks(0)=(ExpectedType=class'SeqVar_Object',LinkDesc="Player")
}

 

[crazyfingers]

Thanks for the reply angel, I appreciate the help, but at this point i think i'm just going to have to overhaul some of the systems of my map and pull its scope back a bit.

I was really down about the speed upgrades not working, but i do have a few other pretty neat features, so i might as well push through and see how it goes.
It would just be really hard to try to figure out how to integrate scripting with my kismet, or overhaul the whole thing into pure mutators, though it would be really cool.

Maybe after i release the map it'll inspire some scripters to push it a little further into a mutator that can be played on any map.

 

[crazyfingers]

Quick addition before i let this post slip into nothiningness:

Been Toying with the editor a bit and i've got a really cool "Jetpack" move tied to the impact hammer now that sends the player up, then forward.

When the player hits themselvs with the impact hammer as if to impact jump, i teleport a physics volume with zero G that shoots them into the air a bit, then i hit them with large, negative momentum and they zip forward. I'm going to put a constant AE damage on them as they fly forward to make the move worth using, since chances are you wont actually have a good impact hammer hit ready when you hit the ground.

So yeah, i'll tie the EXP they have with the impact hammer into this and hopefully it'll be fun .