Project Reality Forums

I'm sure some of you have already seen the Carrier Catobar that we have put into Combined Arms (YouTube - Combined Arms: CATOBAR (Catapult and Arrestor) + ILS WIP) but you may not actually know how it works in depth and what other applications the idea may have in PR. The idea operates under a fundamental property found in the coding we've done with something we've come to designate "the Implosion".



For those who don't do much bf2 coding experience, every explosion in PR has at its core three basic components, force
(ObjectTemplate.detonation.explosionForce), Damage (ObjectTemplate.detonation.explosionDamage), and radius (ObjectTemplate.detonation.explosionRadius). The damage should be self explanatory but the force is the force felt by all objects within the explosion that causes them to fly out from the explosion's center. Usually the force component isn't noticed as the objects always die in the process. Two interesting things that can be done though are 1. To set the damage to zero to cause the effects of explosions to be more practically applied, and 2. Reverse the sign on the force to be negative, causing a suction force rather than a repelling force and thus creating an "implosion".

These implosions are actually extremely practical and can be applied in both handheld weapons and on moving and stationary vehicles, allowing for a variety of different applications in PR. With the Catapult we lined up a series of genericfirearm barrels on the deck of a carrier and had them fire a round of bullets in burst mode. These bullets were all implosive and had mobile physics turned off so they floated in mid-air. The bullets are only activated by proximity when the object doing the activation is going above 6 m/s (a code borrowed from missiles in game) This allows for the shells to explode in front of the jet as it accelerates down the carrier strip providing a significant amount of extra force and allowing the jet to reach takeoff velocity quickly. The Arrestor is a similar mechanism where it is essentially a bunch of reverse claymores set up in series 20m back and 10 meters down from the deck. The explosion angle and radius are set up such that the pilot will have only a narrow window to hit so that the implosions will detonate behind him, slowing his jet to a stop. A video of this can be seen here.

Other possible applications in PR At a glance.

The reason I am sharing all of this with you is that this basic concept may have a place in many other applications in PR including but most certainly not limited to:

VTOL: Jets could have a single barrel on them that shoot implosive shells out with zero velocity. These shells would be given a negative gravity modifier so that upon being shot they rise up from the jet extremely rapidly and explode a split second after being fired, pulling the jet up.

Afterburner w/ fuel: A weapon where implosives are shot in front of the jet and pull the jet foreward at an even faster rate, these afterburner implosive shells would be limited in nature and could provide a fuel component.

Vehicle / Aircraft towing: Very weak implosive shells can be shot out of one vehicle to allow for the towing of another vehicle or aircraft.

Fastropes: Obviously very ify but there may be a way to give the grapplehook or zipline PCO mobile physics and have it essentially glued to a helicopter by a series of implosions.

Feel free to post any ideas you may have and I will try and comment and how feasible they may be from what I have seen so far.

Thanks

Well i remember a while ago where I think Fuzzhead was looking to see if this could be used to drag bodies around.

ye nice work as I said on xfire etc but really its about how its integrated and then after that if its really a piratical solution to w/e problem is what it's really about at the end of the day.

My advice would be to concentrate on getting it working practically on things in a POC (Proof Of Concept) state to prove this application can be piratical to solve w/e problem.

Im no coder, but I could see there being a viable use for a secondary function to the medic's resuscitate. Now to think of it, it probably uses a similar system as it is.

The secondary fire would have unlimited ammo and would -gently- pull the body towards the player. The force wouldn't be so strong as to allow the player to run full pace away, dragging the corpse.

...mongol...

[R-MOD]Mongolian_dude wrote:Im no coder, but I could see there being a viable use for a secondary function to the medic's resuscitate. Now to think of it, it probably uses a similar system as it is.

The secondary fire would have unlimited ammo and would -gently- pull the body towards the player. The force wouldn't be so strong as to allow the player to run full pace away, dragging the corpse.

...mongol...

Jaymz was the first to think of that

IIRC, the discussion on that kinda ended, and so I haven't seen any answer to it's practicality with networking and such, but dragging bodies zOMG!

A problem however with VTOL is that you wouldn't be able to control the rate of ascent/decent. Honestly, applying Solid Knight's principal for controlling the Hydra pod's elavation via the Shift Key to control the direction of the engines would probably be much more practical.

[R-MOD]Mongolian_dude wrote:Im no coder, but I could see there being a viable use for a secondary function to the medic's resuscitate. Now to think of it, it probably uses a similar system as it is.

The secondary fire would have unlimited ammo and would -gently- pull the body towards the player. The force wouldn't be so strong as to allow the player to run full pace away, dragging the corpse.

...mongol...

I just looked through the code and currently in PR the resuscitate works by firing an invisible projectile with a collision mesh at 6 m/s foreward that collides with the dead body's collision mesh to try and make it move and become removed from any nearby static models. I am 100% positive that implosions do not affect living bodies but i can not say the same about dead bodies as very rarely do i get the opportunity to test this with another person . Ill see what I can do to test it, thanks for the idea mongol .

Sniper_dog14 wrote:I just looked through the code and currently in PR the resuscitate works by firing an invisible projectile with a collision mesh at 6 m/s foreward that collides with the dead body's collision mesh to try and make it move and become removed from any nearby static models. I am 100% positive that implosions do not affect living bodies but i can not say the same about dead bodies as very rarely do i get the opportunity to test this with another person . Ill see what I can do to test it, thanks for the idea mongol .

Well, I assumed that as projectiles such as a 7.62 or a 120mm HEAT round can effect the physics of a soldier's corpse, causing him to fall or fly in a certain direction, the same could be said of the implosion feature, somehow.
However, this means that a medic could potentially drag all 5 of his felled squadmembers at once. Undesirable.

...mongol...

Dragging is being looked at currently.

But otherwise, the only reason that Fastropes wouldn't work is if the grappling hook doesn't stay sustained by an implosion over dedicated connections due to networking, or if simply giving it "ObjectTemplate.HasMobilePhysics 1" adds unknown and undesired effects to it.

Of course the entire thing would have to be looked at in order to give a final "hardcoded" or "not hardcoded" sign, but I'm pretty optimistic that something would come of it

i just did some testing and I actually revise my statement earlier, the implosions can affect living players but really only if very powerful. As far as the affecting other people nearby the radius and direction of the implosion can be created such that it is very small and only in one direction (using the code from the claymore) so that it doesn't affect the medic himself or nearby people. I will be doing some more testing this week.

Wow this vid was actually pritty funny. Next thing you know people will be running around playing tennis with tanks.

That was a very interesting reading. CA is a great mini-mod. Why dont you work together (CA and PR) ?

=Romagnolo= wrote:That was a very interesting reading. CA is a great mini-mod. Why dont you work together (CA and PR) ?

They're closer than you think. After all, Anything done in CA has the right of usage in PR, it's just alot more development freedom is there without sharing PR's exact goals.

Uhm, wouldn't the possibility of dragging wounded have the undesirable effect of being able to drag around cars to?

akatabrask wrote:Uhm, wouldn't the possibility of dragging wounded have the undesirable effect of being able to drag around cars to?

Short answer... no. As we are able to carefully calibrate the explosion to make it conical, compact, and just as powerful as necessary for it to do what we want it to.

Wonder if this could be used to make an airbrake

Great the Repairstation will be needless because with this implosion, towing would be possible. And you will definitely need an engineer squad to bring disabled vehicles back to main.

Interesting concept, might be useful in some cases...