/me blinks. I'd call Eidos Interactive and see if you can buy the rights to their Glacier engine.
Basically, I think most of the stuff will have to be hand-done, and I think it will be very difficult. You can detect collisions between the rope and the objects in a map with a simple traceline, but I don't think you'll be able to bend it properly around anything, without some major performance hits. You can definitely create and draw the rope entity in both taut and loose states with a little physics simulation and some TriAPI work. On the HUD side, I wouldn't even really bother doing the hand gripping the rope, I'd simply have it coming out. If you must do it like that, use V_CalcGunAngle in view.cpp, I believe, to control the angle at which your model is positioned, that way you can accurately simulate the rope going back and forth. However, in general, it would probably be a better idea to do it with a less static method, i.e., something more like a tractor beam rather than a rope. That would be far simpler with the same effect on gameplay. Sorry to be a pessimist, but I just doubt that the rope thing will work out that well. Actually, thinking about it a little more, if you treat the rope as a bunch of short segments, kinda like those hard plastic jumpropes, and then hard-lock the beginning of each segment to the end of the last one, and use TraceHull to prevent the rope from going through anything, you might be able to do it the way you're talking about, but that's some serious tracing, and it will probably take up a lot of CPU cycles. Persuter At 03:45 PM 10/12/2002 -0400, you wrote:
This is a multi-part message in MIME format. -- [ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ] Let's say in my game I want the player to be able to "lasso" an NPC, and have the attachment be persistent. That is, once roped, the NPC cannot get free of the rope until the player let's go. For argument's sake imagine the rope is around the NPC's waist, once attached. I know that: - I'll need a HUD animation to show the player's hand gripping the rope. - When the NPC tries to run away or move closer to the player, I'll have to change the rope entity to make it look loose or drawn taut. In addition, I assume that in the NPC think code I'll have to check for the rope being attached, and, if as the NPC I'm at the end of the rope, to halt my movement, to simulate the rope preventing my walking or running away. My main questions are: How do I create and draw the rope entity? Is there a convenient way to show the rope in a taut and "loose" state? Also is there any way I could detect collisions between the rope and objects in the map, so I could bend it properly around an intervening tree for example, or will that be too huge a headache to bother with? Lastly, how will I position or draw each end of the rope so it that the NPC-end looks like its realistically wrapped around the waist of the NPC, and the player-end is gripped realistically by the player's hand in the HUD animation? If anyone has a good idea/strategy or sample/example on how to make this happen I'd love to hear about it. Details please. Thanks. -- _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders
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