Node swapping
| Submitted by ghastley on Tue, 2008-06-17 17:08 | ||
In Aman'lu there is a bridge that starts off broken, then Finala starts to repair it, and finally it is complete. It's relatively easy to locate the gizmos that perform the exchange(s) and discover the calls to disable nodes and fade them out, but what I haven't figured out yet is how to use the Siege Editor to place multiple nodes in the same location. When I look at the gas file all the referenced bridge nodes are in there, so they aren't being created when the triggers fire, just being faded in and out (and enabled/disabled, so you can't walk across the broken version!) I want to do a similar bridge repair in another map, and I can't work out all the details. Right now, I'm assuming that they did something like saving the file with each bridge in place, copy the nodes out to a scratch pad file, and finally paste them all back into one file at the end, so that the editor can generate the scids and the stitches, but it's not clear how the Siege Editor decides what is the initial state it shows, and how to avoid having it drop the duplicate nodes in the same location. Has anyone done anything similar and figured it all out? P.S. It's not for Lara's map, so she can't just swim across! forums: |
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I always thought that if I wanted to create a bridge I'd mimic the setup of the one in the Dryad town near the waterfall. Of course I don't know how to build something like that in SE2, it looks like the drawbridge sections are for eye-candy only... you might actually be walking on an invisible section of an originally deactivated node.
Perhaps you could create a prefab of the nodes in question (for either bridge), then just drop them into a new map...?
KillerGremal had terrain that was inaccessable until you used levers to remove debris blocking the path in his War Hound mod. Not sure if that might shed some light into your situation or not.
I do have a backup plan, which is to have no bridge at all as the "broken" state, so my only action is enabling and fading in the "fixed" one.
I believe neither of the instances mentioned needs one node to replace another, as Finala's bridge does. In the Eirulan Falls case, there's a bridge section that's animated, which is not much different from the elevators and opening walls elsewhere in that there are before and after stitching for a single node that moves.
For the War Hound case, it appears to be node removal, rather than replacement, so it's not a problem in the Siege Editor to place the initial setup, and just fade out the extras. (My plan B situation in reverse)
My issue is that I want two (or more) nodes to exist in the same place at different times, not one node in multiple places. And if I can't find the node in the DS1 files, remaking the "broken" node(s), but that's another story. I specific want a rope bridge, and I know there's a broken off end of one in there somewhere - it will probably turn out to be an object, rather than a terrain node, as it doesn't need to have any walkable surface.
Cool that you remember but this just removes some rocks (game objects, not nodes) to let you through. Generally for modding purpose i use the SE2 only in some rare situations.
...well i really would appreciate to add or remove nodes as you can do it with common game objects - just imagine once a 'Summon new Land to Walk On' spell.
I'm not really familiar with the SE, but isn't there a work-feature to temporarily hide nodes in the window?
Like this you probably could set further nodes at the same place without selecting the previous ones.
SE considers a node's door occupied once it has another node stitched there, and blocks the second node even when the first is hidden.
It probably must be done outside SE by directly editing the gas file, so I'll be experimenting at the weekend to find out (with a lot of backup copies!) although I may find that the "nodes" I want to use are actually non-interactive props (the pieces of broken bridge) and the whole issue my be irrelevant. But I'd still like to know how!
Have you actually checked the raw stitch data to see if there are any doors used more than once?
You hit the nail on the head. They've only stitched one door on each overlapping node to the adjacent one, using a different door each time. I'd checked the farguid to confirm they were all stitched to the same node, and missed the fact that the fardoors were different, especially because the id was the same (id = 1) in each case.
Which also means that it will only work when there are multiple doors available to connect the nodes. A bridge has one each side, so I can do it if I make a broken bridge node with two doors instead of two broken ends with one door each. Gmax here I come. I may also have to remove the second door on each version of the bridge so that auto-stitching doesn't cause a problem.
Tutorial if it all works.
Bingo...? What do I win? :P
I'm glad what I originally thought was a lame question actually helped.
Second spot in the line to beta test the results. (Bare Elf gets first spot, because she's the star of the show).
I had to "make" a new pair of bridges with less doors, but it's working now. At least, once I get all the triggers wired up correctly it should. And the NIS built, and...
But at least I know how to do those, and just how much work they are!