Just thought I'd post a little something about the progress on the mod I'm working on. You guys may have interesting feedback, things I hadn't considered, etc.

Quick summary: The Detonator mod centers around gathering three items on the map -- these items are pieces that, when all 3 are collected, will give you an item known as the Pulsar, which is basically a nuke. Only one player can get the pulsar at a time. When you have this item, you can't fire any weapons or really do anything -- the only thing left to do is /use the Pulsar, which gibs you and then moves outward in a limited-radius shockwave that kills everyone in its path. The fragments then respawn again.

I've got most of the coding done. I've got the three fragments coded in, and you can hold each item. When you get all 3 items, they're removed from your inventory (STAT_FRAGMENT is reset to nothing) and you're given the pulsar. The pulsar works -- I used the Team Arena Kamikaze code as a crutch to create that (though I need it to be less powerful than the Kamikaze, which was designed for really big TA maps).

What's left:

- Disable the ability to fire weapons when you've got the pulsar
- Make sure the player drops any fragments he's carrying when killed
- Figure out how to handle item respawning; I'm thinking that I don't want the items to always respawn in the same place on the map...I like the idea of the players not knowing where they'll always be.
- Make the item models and HUD icons
- Create graphics/models for the pulsar explosion
- Make a map with the new items so I can test all this out

That's about it. I've got a lot of cosmetic details I'd like to do down the line if I can get the above list done.

In Reaction, our unique items spawn based off the spawn points in the map.  One is randomly chosen, an item is spawned there, then another spawn point is chosen, etc.

It solves alot of the problems of randomly placing something in the map, and since mappers already include spawn points in their maps, it's a good re-use of them.

That's exactly how I wanted to handle it, just hadn't gotten to that point yet -- nice to know that I was planning on the right course of action. Thanks!

Back in the days of QWTF (erp, that was a while ago), I think I remember a map that featured gameplay similar to your mod idea. IIRC though it suffered due to the lack of balance, which hopefully can be solved through the use of spawning your fragments at random spawnpoints.

Btw, love the nuke's name:

Quote

pulsar - n : a degenerate neutron star; small and extremely dense; rotates very fast and emits regular pulses of polarized radiation

Thanks! I have to put my science degree to use somehow. ;P

Anything new with your mod?

i noticed while browsing your site #### chick, you said you are mapping for a sof2 mod, which one?
your q3 map designs look nice btw  

Hey! Well, progress on the mod continues as of this week -- I had to set it aside for a couple of months as I was socked in with some work on something else.

Here's what's going on with the mod:

- I've made a .def file and a test map so I can have the fragments there (and mappers can begin to make maps -- I'm working on one and I've got one other person working on one)

- The fragment respawning ALMOST works. For the most part, the fragments work just like any other powerup or item, except that in the case of Detonator they should NOT respawn automatically after being picked up. Instead, they should not respawn at all until someone fires the pulsar.

(My thought on how to handle that was this: have a Pickup_Fragment function (just like Pickup_Item) that returns a negative respawn value (to keep the fragment from respawning); this is called in Touch_Item. Then I just need to create a Respawn_Fragments function similar to Respawn_Item, and call that function in the weapon code for the nuke after it's been set off. Right now my Respawn_Fragments function isn't working, so I need to fix that.)

Once that's fixed I'll use the player spawns to create random fragment spawning. The only problem I might run into there is that when the pulsar goes off, there's going to be a lot of players respawning. Any suggestions there?

More things that are done:

- pulsar blast is textured and modeled, but I need to do a better texture. I'm not a texture artist. :P
- HUD shows icons for fragments and nuke

Things to do:

- Work on fragment spawning
- texture fragments
- create maps (currently being worked on)
- Work on a couple of sounds (pulsar explosion/implosion, sound when a player has been given the pulsar)
- Add code to make players glow who are carrying pieces (blue for one piece, red for two)
- Add code to keep player from firing any weapon while holding the pulsar

Thanks for the kind words on the web site!

- HC

Oh, SoF2 mapping:

A friend of mine was working on a mod and asked me to map for it -- I need to remove that from my site as we haven't done any work on that just yet. Doh!