varying Lock Difficulty

nhivanye on 11/4/2005 at 18:13

Lock Picking is controlled by a lock difficulty info archetype which specifies how many rings and the size and location of the "hot spots" for each ring. A lock archetype is linked (flavour 'lock') to the info difficulty archetype (Note this is a link between archetypes and not between objects so all objects created from that archetype will have the same difficulty and changing the archetype link will affect all objects already existing).

Create a new lock difficulty info and then a new lock archetype (as a subclass of an existing lock to keep its appearance) and link them. Then if you only create one lock object (or two one on each side of a door) from that archetype it will have a unique difficulty which you can play with to your heart's content.

scumble on 12/4/2005 at 10:00

I notice you've created a wiki page, but could you remember to put in a heading and Categories? Just look at other pages for pointers.

nhivanye on 12/4/2005 at 10:14

Ok added heading plus category - hopefully the right one.

Krux on 12/4/2005 at 15:05

Can the "hot spot" property be modified? Decreasing the area of the hot spot to make it more difficult would be a nice touch in FMs I think. For instance, right now it jiggles and makes more noise the closer you get until you're on it and it clicks. Limiting that to a very small area around the target spot would be ideal.

I'm at work atm and can't check it out myself. Thanks for the info though!

nhivanye on 12/4/2005 at 15:24

Quote:

Every lock info has a variable number of pick stages between 1 and 6. These are represented by the rings when picking the lock. More than 6 pick stages crashes the game. Each pickstage can have some number of "hotspots". I've only managed to get the first hotspot to work though.

Each hotspot has 4 parameters: min radius, max radius, min angle, max angle. The angle parameters control the direction of the pick which goes into the centre of the rings. Even if you make the min/max angles the same there's a region of about 45 degrees in which the ring will start to move and the lock can be picked. This is why the four main directions work so often. The min/max radius control whther the pick is to stick staright out of the screen (radius zero) or lay flat in the screen (radius 1.0) or somewhere in between. Even if you set the min and max to the same value it's not too difficult to get the lock picked although the this parameter has a much narrower range of acceptance than the angle.

In general making locks difficult to pick is best achieved by making each lock individual which will stop the player from just flicking through the standard positions for a lock of type X.

I can't see anyway of changing lock difficulty by script (ie to have different lock difficulties depending on difficulty selected by player)

Fian on 9/5/2008 at 19:29

I don't understand how to change a lock on an object to have a different combination. (The word archetype means nothing to me). Any chance of giving some step by step instructions on how to take an existing lock and change its settings so that you have to pick it another way? I don't feel the need to create new custom locks, but it would be nice if 2 chests next to each other were not picked in exactly the same way.

Judith on 9/5/2008 at 20:29

If memory serves, locks put in actor class browser (WorldObj -> Environmental -> Lock, or something like that) have different names, they look differently and every class has it's own settings; some are easier to open, some are not. Try to check there to find the one you need.

Fian on 9/5/2008 at 21:42

OK, I was able to figure it out, by just progressing a bit further in KomagTut's excellent tutorial (I wish my business documents were this detailed). In the section where he has you add a lock to a door, you follow the same logic to add a lock to a chest. So here is a summary of how it is done:

Add a chest to your world
click on the lock on the chest and delete it
Add a new lock near the chest via Actor Class Browser (“WorldObj” – “Environmental” – “Lock”)
Switch to Create Links mode (Rigid Attachment)
Click on top of chest and then shift-click on lock
then in the properties on the top of the chest, find m_parentBone and assign the lock to that.

Beleg Cúthalion on 10/5/2008 at 06:36

Is it enough to delete just the old lock or is there still some lock meter floating around? I hate it when multipieced objects don't vanish completely when I press DEL...gives me a feeling of dirty relics.

Flux on 10/5/2008 at 09:05

Enough to delete, but you know pressing delete sometimes won't do. Right-click and delete.

Fian, you can then assign a different lock static mesh, in case you don't want all difficult-to-open locks look like gold-fancy locks.