ingame actor swaping

[scott]

im not sure if this is the right area to post this but i think it would make sense here, any way im after being able to somehow change actor when certain criteria is met, eg. when a button is pressed, when they reach a certain place, when close to something.

i hope to be able to use this so when you get close to an ai actor modeld in the shape of a car that you can press a key to change the actor so that the player becomes the car with animations between, this i hope wil create a gta style game.

if theres any one that can help me i would be greatful as i am learning how to model quickly and finding it FUN!

[Spyrewolf]

Do you mean is the actor able to drive the car or do you mean it becomes a car like a transformer toy?

if you mean the actor drives the car yes, Pickles made a demo of this also there is a demo on hike's website...

both options should be do-able but you will need to do some serious reading of the manual also a flick through pickles web book will help the scripting section is very usefull.

if you can find a "scripted player" demo/script on the site have a look through that as well as it will give you a good guideline on how it was put together.

[scott]

yea i ment drive a car, but it would be easy to make a transformer model as it would just require animation from one state to another, and could be made to act like the crouching of a person but instead of holding the button to crouch its to do the different animations.

these websites, can u give me the link to them pleas, as they sound realy useful.

if there is a demo, would it be possible to use that script and change the atributes to fit animation timing and file names?

[fps]

I would also be interested in figuring out how to do this, mostly because it would be great for damage models, weapon modifications, and things like that.

If you figure out how to do that please let me know,

Thank you,

fps

[Spyrewolf]

@scott: PM hike im unsure of his website address or what demos he has i know he has alot of stuff though,

@Fps

damage models

ok im not about to right a script for this as it is quite complex but i will you an overview on how the basics kinda works
damage models are possible, but they're tricky to set up,

you need to create a hull/body of the car bits that cant be damaged,(basic Frame)

for a car alone each part/panel that is to be damaged needs to be seperate actor, so for each panel you will need a corrisponding bone in the main hull

i.e a bone for front panel, a bone for windsheild, a bone for rear light ect... any part that you want to be damaged basically.

in the docs look up attachtoactor and see how that works

you will need to add a attribute to each part of the car(basically the same way you set up attributes for normal pawns)

in your script add attribute orders say if health of panel is 50% it has a hefty wack in it you could make the panel have a damage animation
if you set up bones in the actor(panel)

i.e = 50% damage = animationX
=75% damage = animationY
=100% damage = detach from actor

this helps instead of having heaps of actors being swapped in an out all the time you can also trigger actor material changes as well to show scrapes and scratches on the paint work

the thing about this is i've found when making damageable car is RF is that it becomes very compilcated very fast. but if you plan things out before you start you shouldn't run it to much problems

if your a novice on scripting read the docs and pickles e-book thoroughly and make some test scripts and find out how to make things before attempting to make a car for damage it is quite complex.