A question!

Posted: Sun Jan 24, 2010 6:06 pm Post subject: A question!

1) I'm making a map and I'd like to know where I can find the cloak item. I can't see it in the item list, where there are the rest of the items, jetpack, portable turret, sentry etc. I hope it's not tricky to explain how to make them appear. :D

2) Can you somehow adjust the probability for spawns? Say, I have 5 spawns for example, of which I want one to be "rare", so that players won't spawn on it as often as they do on the other 4. I know I could just create 200 spawns and make one of them in the location where I'd want a "rare" spawn, but I want to use a less troublesome method if there is one.

This kind of is my first map so more questions may emerge if terms that I don't know the meanings for are used. :D

Thanks in advance for your possible answers!

Posted: Mon Jan 25, 2010 5:38 pm Post subject: Re: A question!

Ok, so I found out how to get cloaks on the map. All I'd like to know at the moment would be if there is the possibility to adjust the probability of spawns or not. :S

So if anyone knows a way to adjust it, or knows for sure that it can't be done any other way than making loads of spawns, please tell me! :D

Posted: Mon Jan 25, 2010 6:43 pm Post subject: Re: A question!

yes, i know for instance, szico made that in one of his maps, he had an area you had to discover before you could spawn that, i am not sure how he scripted it.. my best bet is, a trigger that hits a target activate which is connected to a spawnpoint that is turned off (dunno if that is even possable)

Posted: Tue Jan 26, 2010 1:09 am Post subject: Re: A question!

I'm afraid the only method I can think of involves a very large amount of entities, depending on how many spawns you have. There would probably be a way to script this, but that's out of my area.

Posted: Wed Jan 27, 2010 3:15 pm Post subject: Re: A question!

Thanks for your replies!

Posted: Wed Jan 27, 2010 6:32 pm Post subject: Re: A question!

BobaFett's "silent spawn" system (I think that is what he named it...) could be modified to handle this quite well. In summary, you can first determine probabilities by using the random function of Icarus and then check for certain possibilities, e.g. make a random (0,10) set variable and then do one check for values < 1 for a 1/10 chance of getting the special spawn and use the remainder for normal spawns. Then upon determining which set of spawns to use, you can use a dummy entity, like an info_notnull, to first move to the origin you want with set_origin, then use set_copy_origin on the players to move them to that location (because just using set_origin on players doesn't work). In this way you can have an indefinite number of possible spawnpoints and control the probability of spawning at any of them, without using up any additional entities.

Posted: Wed Jan 27, 2010 8:15 pm Post subject: Re: A question!

Posted: Thu Jan 28, 2010 4:59 pm Post subject: Re: A question!

That would work, but of course you are limited by the number of parms to determine the possible number of locations. If you enter in the origin coordinates manually in set_origin and use nested if and elses, you have potentially limitless possible spawn locations. That and I'm not 100% sure that getting a vector from a parm works in MP, maybe it does but I don't remember.

Another interesting point is that you can actually use set_origin on the player to set the origin value without actually moving the player, and then use set_copy_origin again on the player to move to the location specified by set_origin. Since set_copy_origin requires a targetname, this means you will have to have some initialization script or otherwise that sets targetnames on players (and a different targetname for each player), but assuming you can get this working, what you end up with is effectively a teleportation system that uses 0 entities.

Posted: Fri Jan 29, 2010 5:53 am Post subject: Re: A question!

Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 5:52 pm Post subject: Re: A question!

Don't know if you're aware, but BobaFett informed me that you can teleport a player with a script. Downside is that it doesn't work on client 0 without JA+ (or so I hear).

Use SET_ORIGIN to set the origin to a certain value, and then SET_COPY_ORIGIN to copy the player's origin to themselves. You won't have any teleportation effects, but if you use a ref_tag or even manually typed coordinates to give the location, you have not used any entities and yet still teleported the player.

May or may not work with your current system, or maybe you're already doing that...just saying, it's incredibly useful to have a 0-entity teleport.