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Please ask your basic (newbie) questions in here. - by scumble
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Ziemanskye on 27/6/2008 at 18:14
Okay, I'll start by admitting I didn't read all of that.

But first here's what I understand of why the rope arrows were never "complete": the climbing code works based on a static mesh - it doesn't really care what the mesh is, but it does care about the origin (and consequently, what direction the mesh is "facing"), and it's outer collision area. Hit the mesh from the front/back, and you go into climbing mode, hit it from the sides and you don't, walk into the top of it and you transition down into climbing mode. If you can climb it or not is a property you can add to a smesh.

One (relatively) simple bit of unrealscript (and some slightly icky math) could have made the rope arrows work, if we had the ability to use it: just make the "rope" mesh always rotate to face the player's position (on the right axis, of course). But we can't do that, and I don't think we have trigger-script actions to do it with the scripting tools we do have. I will admit that I never actually considered the lack of rope arrows that much of a loss, so I genuinely haven't looked.

Second - yes, the scripting system is a bit borked. The lack of If/else is kind of false though - there's loads of "if", and you just need two different scripts for "else". I'm not really arguing this with you though - It would have been nice to not have to do it the long way and involve a bajillion extra variables/flags/messages between objects. I'm not a good programmer, but I can do it, so the lack of things like that seemed kind of dumb/weird to me too. Just thought I'd say: if you want to do that kind of thing, you do it the hard way, but you can still do it. (I think one of the devs showed up around here once to say the lack of UScript was attributed to the extra overhead the interpreter needed on the Xbox, and they were already out of memory/processor and cutting every corner they could find)

Third, the climbing gloves hack you suggest would be a huge thing to do. New Garrett/animations for a start, but you've also got to mess with a lot of the materials to take the Climbable properties off. As for "smallest" surface he can climb, that's probably going to be a 32x32 face given that's just under how wide Garrett is (he's 33 units, in my experiments), but that's just a guess: I didn't lament the loss of the ropes, and the climbing gloves weren't much more of a feature, yay or nay, to me.

Finally, as for pulling the rope down, well, I suppose you could, though you might have trouble stopping it again, but as far as I remember, Ascottk's rope arrows did actually solve the issue of how long to make the rope. Again, that was a while ago and not something that interested me much, so could be misremembered.
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