Hello all,
Once again, a random idea has popped up into my head. A random idea that might be a very good one. If it works, that is. As you know, there is a BuildingSet mod in the modpack made by CouchcaptainCharles. It's an excellent mod, but has several weird things in it. Most importantly, the buildings are not solid, so you can walk straight through them. This is because the buildings are handled by the game as if they were blades/guns attached to a motionless character. I had the idea to change this and make the buildings BE a motionless character instead, because there IS collision detection between two characters. I'm not sure if this would work for large objects, but it's worth a try.
<!--sizeo:3--><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo--><i><b>More info about how this idea would work ingame:</b></i><!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec-->
Provided that, when using my idea, the walk patch IS working properly, there are a lot of things that would need to be changed:
1) The detached sections from some buildings (like the headquarters observatory) can still be weapons, just like now, so that they can either be there or not. But because you can't walk through the building, you can't walk through the detached section either. Unless the detached section is outside the building.
2) A problem occurs for the interior, because you can't walk through the walls anymore, you can't get into the interior anymore either. What I would like is that when you "talk" to the "building", you will be teleported to the interior automatically. Then it would seem as if it is a regular locator, but it works through a dialog file. It would work a bit the same as the corpse dialog did. You don't actually see the dialog at all. Then, when you are inside, the owner would be there and you can talk with him/her normally. It would also be possible to generate the owner as second character in front of the building-character. Pluspoint of that is that the owner is animated again, like usual.
If this idea works, I reckon it can be made much less obvious that the game handles the buildings weirdly, because:
1) There is collision detection with the building (but how to prevent the building from being moved around by the player pushing it, like what happens with motionless characters?)
2) You can use the dialog file to teleport the character to an interior location (but how to teleport back to where you came from? CCC made a random locations mod that is in the modpack, but not used, that might show some useful code for this)
3) You can add a second animated normal character in front of the building-character as the owner.
To change all this, though, we would first have to test if you can actually use a building as character model, then test if there is collision detection with this "building", then see how "talking" to this "building" works.
<!--sizeo:3--><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo--><i><b>Test results so far:</b></i><!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec-->
Test results so far have been very poor. I have added a new motionless character to Oxbay_Port. That much worked. Then I added B_town.gm from the RESOURCE\MODELS\AMMO folder into RESOURCE\MODELS\Characters folder and changed the added character's model to "B_town". The game refused to load the scene and instead crashed to desktop. I didn't actually expect this to work, but after several attempts at making the game accept the ammo model as a character model, I am still no further in convincing the game that a keep really is a person.
So I will be needing help in converting an ammo model into a character model that the game will accept. Once that is done, we can see how it looks ingame and whether the collision detection between the building-character and the other characters works.
If you want to help, download my testfiles <a href="http://pieter.piratesahoy.org/char_buildset_test.zip" target="_blank">here</a>. <!--coloro:#FF0000--><span style="color:#FF0000"><!--/coloro-->WARNING:<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc--> Adding this into your game WILL crash your game as soon as you try to load to Oxbay port. As far as I know, the "B_testbuilding.gm" file will need to be changed into a .gm file type that the game will accept as character. Please try and do something with this. Inez's tool should be able to help, though I don't know how to make it work.
Once again, a random idea has popped up into my head. A random idea that might be a very good one. If it works, that is. As you know, there is a BuildingSet mod in the modpack made by CouchcaptainCharles. It's an excellent mod, but has several weird things in it. Most importantly, the buildings are not solid, so you can walk straight through them. This is because the buildings are handled by the game as if they were blades/guns attached to a motionless character. I had the idea to change this and make the buildings BE a motionless character instead, because there IS collision detection between two characters. I'm not sure if this would work for large objects, but it's worth a try.
<!--sizeo:3--><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo--><i><b>More info about how this idea would work ingame:</b></i><!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec-->
Provided that, when using my idea, the walk patch IS working properly, there are a lot of things that would need to be changed:
1) The detached sections from some buildings (like the headquarters observatory) can still be weapons, just like now, so that they can either be there or not. But because you can't walk through the building, you can't walk through the detached section either. Unless the detached section is outside the building.
2) A problem occurs for the interior, because you can't walk through the walls anymore, you can't get into the interior anymore either. What I would like is that when you "talk" to the "building", you will be teleported to the interior automatically. Then it would seem as if it is a regular locator, but it works through a dialog file. It would work a bit the same as the corpse dialog did. You don't actually see the dialog at all. Then, when you are inside, the owner would be there and you can talk with him/her normally. It would also be possible to generate the owner as second character in front of the building-character. Pluspoint of that is that the owner is animated again, like usual.
If this idea works, I reckon it can be made much less obvious that the game handles the buildings weirdly, because:
1) There is collision detection with the building (but how to prevent the building from being moved around by the player pushing it, like what happens with motionless characters?)
2) You can use the dialog file to teleport the character to an interior location (but how to teleport back to where you came from? CCC made a random locations mod that is in the modpack, but not used, that might show some useful code for this)
3) You can add a second animated normal character in front of the building-character as the owner.
To change all this, though, we would first have to test if you can actually use a building as character model, then test if there is collision detection with this "building", then see how "talking" to this "building" works.
<!--sizeo:3--><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo--><i><b>Test results so far:</b></i><!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec-->
Test results so far have been very poor. I have added a new motionless character to Oxbay_Port. That much worked. Then I added B_town.gm from the RESOURCE\MODELS\AMMO folder into RESOURCE\MODELS\Characters folder and changed the added character's model to "B_town". The game refused to load the scene and instead crashed to desktop. I didn't actually expect this to work, but after several attempts at making the game accept the ammo model as a character model, I am still no further in convincing the game that a keep really is a person.
So I will be needing help in converting an ammo model into a character model that the game will accept. Once that is done, we can see how it looks ingame and whether the collision detection between the building-character and the other characters works.
If you want to help, download my testfiles <a href="http://pieter.piratesahoy.org/char_buildset_test.zip" target="_blank">here</a>. <!--coloro:#FF0000--><span style="color:#FF0000"><!--/coloro-->WARNING:<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc--> Adding this into your game WILL crash your game as soon as you try to load to Oxbay port. As far as I know, the "B_testbuilding.gm" file will need to be changed into a .gm file type that the game will accept as character. Please try and do something with this. Inez's tool should be able to help, though I don't know how to make it work.
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