User:DalinSeivewright/Developer Journal

This page is used by Dalin Seivewright to post his developer related thoughts, open source code, and concepts. The journal entries are on this page while the discussions for every entry are available on the discussion page. If you wish to to join in on the discussion or if there isn't one already started on a particular entry, feel free to start one yourself.

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Journal Entries

Thursday, April 26th, 2008

Recently I started a little (read: extremely small) project in UnrealScript to try and get back into the swing of things. After just finishing the moving Jumper, I was semi-inspired by the concept of 'jumping'. I decided to make a 'jumper' that would instantly jump a player to where they wanted to go. This would make cross-map travelling a breeze and is a decent alternative to the Translocator (and safer). I got a prototype weapon up and running in no time, which kind of surprised me. The jumper weapon itself is very simple. Once you shoot in a direction, a trace occurs and returns the hit location of your shot. Then you can use the secondary fire mode to transport yourself to that hit location. In the movie, the effect that occurs when the person jumps is neat, but not entirely practical for a fast paced game like UT2004 in which effects shouldn't last very long. Therefore I decided to use the affect that... erm... forgive my non-knowledge of X-men, but the blue guy that can teleport places.  :\ This effect is a puff of smoke where he teleports from and teleports to and is rather quick to dissipate. This effect for my jumper weapon would do well as its 'neat' and gives other players the knowledge that a player just teleported 'somewhere' without being too distracting. The Translocator in UT2004 has a use limit on it that recharges and when you pick up the Flag and translocate, you drop the flag. Being that I've never been a fan of the Translocators use-limit, I won't be including one with the Jumper. I will however only allow the jumper to be used every 3-4 seconds or so. This would cut down on lag from spamming the effect and will perhaps cut down on the 'lame' factor. As far as I stand on the dropping the flag issue, I just don't know if I want to do that. The idea of instantly jumping from one side of the map to the other puts into effect the need for a faster paced game and allowing Jumpers to use such a device to carry the flag from the enemy base to their base would require players to be quick about what they're doing. Allowing the flag to be jumped would also most likely require the addition of 4-5 extra seconds before they can jump, just to be fair.

As of yet, the AI's use of the weapon is non-existent as they just don't know how and I've made some fixes to the HitLocation to prevent players from not jumping due to them not being able to fit in a given location (for example, a small hole). I've added a check to put them as near to the HitLocation as they can go. Which also brings up a humorous bug I squashed while trying to find a solution to the afforementioned bug. Using the Jumper and shooting at a location like the corner of the wall then turning around to jump, you could actually Jump yourself on the other side of the wall (if there is another side).

Anyways. I don't forsee any problems with not finishing this. I may or may not release it but I doubt it would have any practical use as 1. UT2004 as far as decent servers using customizations that don't relate to IG or RPG and 2. It probably isn't very appealing. Nonetheless, we'll see. As usual, I plan on release it as open source, just for fun.

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Thursday, April 24th, 2008

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