Alpha 0.1 Discussion

Heoga

New member
The purpose of this thread is to contain discussion on the progress of the coding towards the Alpha 0.1 release stage.  Before this release is ready, the following items have to be implemented.

HUD
Lever Switches
Alarm Lights
Alarm Boxes

Computer Terminals
Keypads


Below is a detailed description of each object:

Alarm Boxes
These boxes can be used to turn the level's alarms on and off.  The functionality here is quite simple.  When an individual alarm box is triggered (by either an I/O input or the player) then the box finds every other alarm box, and alarm light, in the level.  It cycles through these entities turning them all on.  Likewise, when a box is turned off it cycles through the alarms turning them all off.

When an alarm is switched on the skin switches from 0 (off) to 1 (on).  The On skin is an animated texture with an alpha layer that provides glowing functionality so that the box can be seen in the dark quite easily.

Alarm Lights
These entities have no I/O function of their own, but are slaved to Alarm Boxes.  When a box turns a light on, the light spawns two red spot lights near it's center.  These then rotate around the center point to create the beams of light seen in the original game.  When a light is turned off, these spots are likewise killed.

Lever Switches
These switches differ from regular switches in half life in that they require animation.  Models built to represent lever switches will need to have animations and coding to trigger these animations.

The animations required are:
idle:        Switch in down position
idleU:      Switch in up position
moveU:   Switch moving upwards
moveD:   Switch moving downwards

Computer Terminals
There are several different kinds of terminal in No Regret that need to be replicated.  However, it is possible to go above and beyond what was done in the original and provide a deeper level of immersion.  The programming of the computer terminals has so far been done in such a way that when they are used they load up a VGUI screen akin to the original game.  The difference is that the level designer has the option to either choose to display a random message, or to reference a specific text file within the game directory.  Either way the game will read the contents of the text file (random or specified) and place the contents on the screen.

The advantage of this is two fold.  By having the contents read randomly from the files present in a directory a much wider selection of messages can be displayed.  These will make each station appear that bit more unique.  Also, by having the text in files they can also be edited into different languages quite easily.

Keypads
Similar to he computer screens, when used the keypads launch a VGUI window in which a code can be entered.  Only when the correct code is entered is the unlock output triggered.
 
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