Gingerbread Man on 20/3/2006 at 04:21
What, like sticking a ladder volume in a chimney, for instance?
Komag on 20/3/2006 at 04:52
I think they mean something more like the game engine knowing when surfaces are near enough to crawl up between them, with animations to properly match, instead of looking like you're climbing straight up the flat surface of one side.
ZylonBane on 20/3/2006 at 04:53
Quote Posted by Gingerbread Man
What, like sticking a ladder volume in a chimney, for instance?
Well... no. That approach would place a huge burden on FM authors to manually place ladder volumes everywhere that the player could physically use the ability. Far better to, like mantling, just let the engine automatically figure out where it's possible.
EDIT: What Komag said.
Ishtvan on 20/3/2006 at 05:39
The control scheme could get tricky for that chimney climbing. If it used the same "press and hold jump" control setup as mantling, you could get in situations where it's ambiguous if you want to mantle something in front of you or chimney-climb on walls to either side of you.
Now that I think about it though, don't people in real life usually face one of the sides and put their back to the other side, like this?: (
http://www.ehow.com/how_6972_climb-chimney-rock.html)
If that's the case, we could keep it initiated by press and hold jump, which would first check in front of the player for mantling, and if no mantle ledge is found, check the distance between the surface in front of the player and behind the player and if it's sufficiently small, initiate "chimney climbing" mode?
Something else I want to see (but can make no gaurantees about) is hanging from ledges and moving sideways along the ledge. Hanging from things is sort've a logical extension of mantling if you make the "pull up" part of the mantle controlled manually instead of automatic.
I.e., you would press and hold jump to initiate a mantle as usual, but instead of pulling yourself up automatically, you hang beneath the ledge (hanging by your imaginary arms) until you press "forward" to climb the rest of the way up. If you release "forward" before you're all the way up, you'd drop back down to a hang, useful if you just want to take a quick peek over the ledge to see if the area is clear before climbing all the way up. Once you're in that hanging mode, pressing left/right could move you horizontally until the ledge stops being a ledge or something clips your body.
You could also conceivably "reverse mantle" things by walking backwards off an edge and holding jump to catch on and hang as you're falling past it. That could be useful for reducing the distance of a drop for health/sound reasons, or just hiding from someone at the level you were at.
Gingerbread Man on 20/3/2006 at 09:24
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
Far better to, like mantling, just let the engine automatically figure out where it's possible.
Aha, I see what you mean.
And yeah, reverse mantling would rock.
OrbWeaver on 20/3/2006 at 10:32
Quote Posted by Ishtvan
You could also conceivably "reverse mantle" things by walking backwards off an edge and holding jump to catch on and hang as you're falling past it. That could be useful for reducing the distance of a drop for health/sound reasons, or just hiding from someone at the level you were at.
That sounds like a good idea, as long as the controls were not too difficult. Having to fall off and press JUMP at the right time would be quite difficult I suspect - it might be preferable to make it so that you automatically reverse mantle when walking backwards off a ledge while crouching, for instance.
sparhawk on 20/3/2006 at 12:04
Quote Posted by Komag
I think they mean something more like the game engine knowing when surfaces are near enough to crawl up between them, with animations to properly match, instead of looking like you're climbing straight up the flat surface of one side.
This should be perfectly feasable because the mantling code works pretty similar. There is no 'mantling brush'. The code just tests wether mantling is possible, under a defined set of rules, and then you can do it. Allowing to climb the player in such a way is exactly the same thing as mantling.
