TresCom Forums

...and attaching a gun to it that fires until the helicopter is "killed"

I feel that something like this is definitely achievable with the current engine. It would probably look awkward as hell but it would still be a nice thing to test out. I think the two hardest parts would be the actual rigging of the helicopter and the scripting. I looked at Drac's Silver Shore level and noticed you can attach guns to CDinos and make them shoot continuously until they are killed. I think putting the minigun from Armory onto a helicopter's hull would do the trick. I just don't know if you can angle the gun so that it's pointing at the player from a reasonable height that a helicopter would be at lol. Since your rigging it to a dino skeleton I guess another challenge would be changing the sound effects that the dinos normally use. I guess you could give the "dinosaur" no sounds, and make its sound material something metal so that when you shoot it you hear metal pings. I'm not sure if you could change the actual blood effects that fall from dinos when they get shot to another particle. Another thing would be getting the rotor effect down right. I'm sure you can attach a rotor that uses .bmp animations to the top of the model, and when you kill it the rotors eventually shut off. I don't know what to do with the "mouth" of the helicopter besides giving it zero damage because I would want the minigun to be doing all the damage. What do you guys think?

I think my head hurts!

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I've done something similar to this in the past by using CEntityAttached to weld a human model and a gun to a Raptor with...whacky results. You simply have to make the Raptor invisible, and add a trigger to have the gun fire every few seconds or so. I attached the human and gun to the Raptor's head and modified the physics boxes so that the "human" would be collidable. Unfortunately what you end up with is this insane stiff human bouncing around, repeatedly firing its gun at nothing. However attaching everything to the CAnimal's head means that whereever it looks, it will "aim" in that direction.
As for the sound, I'd probably just mute the "dinosaur" using unique vocals and have a trigger emit a rotor sound directly from the CAnimal. You'd give the CAnimal's physics a metal SoundMaterial. I belive the particles are linked to the SoundMaterials, though I'm not sure on that. The rotor would be animated, presumably, and when it crashes you could have it switch its animation track or hide the spinning rotor model and un-hide a still rotor. The mouth wouldn't be a problem, provided your invisible CAnimal is tall enough to avoid hitting Anne (which you would probably want to do in order to ensure the chopper is high enough).

For RTJP, all of my helicopter plans would have had to do with animated instances - I'd thought about trying the same thing you'd come up with, but figured it would probably turn out too wonky.

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I had thought of something like that a long time ago, but never actually did it... mechanical movement and animal movement don't look too similar.

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Bizarre and interesting. This business about turning Raptor AI into a human or human-thing has gone on quite long enough, someone ought to put together a test this year. I have had experience with two different skeleton riggings for Tres and am probably capable of assisting, mental health permitting, mental health providing.. If all the other details are taken care of, I can see what I may come up with with TPDC and send the files back. On a weekend sometime.

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