Power Grid, Light, and Props

McGlaspie

After picking up mapping for Spark, it got me thinking about the Power Grid and how it interacts with lights. It seems to me an additional layer of ambiance and pseudo cinematic aspects could be folded into the PG by adding a little more control to how it manipulates lights. As I understand the PG, it just looks for all lights in a room (or radius?) and sets them to a new color and brightness level (excluding the lights marked to ignore the PG effect).

So, if a mapper could dictate how or more importantly when a light was affected by the PG some much more interesting lighting effects could be achieved. In order to do this, some additional flag(s) would need to be added to lights. Something along the lines of "Power Grid affects when", and the values for this flag/field could be: Powered On, Power Off, In Transition, and Ignore.

This would let us do things like have emergency lighting kick in when the power is off (think emergency lighting in a real-life building that cuts on when the power is out), or some primary overhead lights only work when the PG is on. All of the existing effects of the PG on lights could stay in place without any changes. This would just serve as a much more granular control over the PG and how it affects lighting.


Along the same lines of thought, you could easily apply the same concept to the Prop_Dynamic entity. This way, fans would shutdown when the PG is off. Pumps and other kinds of static prop (animated) would also shutdown without power. Not that this would be easy or a quick change, but the final result would increase the dramatic affect of the PG on the environment and increase the "Wow!" factor of NS2, thus selling more copies of the game (hopefully).

Eventually, once DI is folded into the game this same concept could be applied to it as well. Imagine a light flickering and then going out as it is being surrounded by DI, or a fans seizing as DI grows over it. Granted, I have no idea how or what UWE is going to use to "guide" DI through a map but the base concept would still work.


Ideas, thoughts, or am I just blowing smoke out my ass? ;)

SN.Wolf

Lets not forget sounds as a major part of that concept. A generator shuts down and a light faint alarm sounds in the background. I know the power node alarm sounds but only when damaged, not when down. (unless my game is broken).

Fan sounds stop and creaking pipes start giving the effect of pressure building because material flow in pipes stopped.

So many possibilities for these flags.

"+1"

Kouji_San

Oh you got me thinking here. Picture this: A king of the Hill map where the aliens have to take down 4 power_points in the center of the map, while the marines have to prevent this.

There are two timers:

One for the aliens which counts down if the power_points are active, slower countdown if points get destroyed and stops when all points are destroyed.

The timer for the marines starts to count down when their power_points start to go down, they can fix them to stop countdown.


The above scenario all takes place around a central techpoint. There is a machine of some sorts that runs on these power_points, which will have to charge and in the end destroy the alien hive area. The charge time is the alien countdown timer. But once the aliens have control of this area and have taken down all the power_points, the central Doomsday machine will start to malfunction and in the end explode, taking out the marine's base (marine countdown timer). Awesome cinematics included at both ends...

Both the marine start and the alien start hive are unaccesible by the other teams (Dynamic infestation vs Nanogridlock?), bu tyou can't build here, they are merely a spawn room (IP+CS and eggspawning hive) . You can of course take the other techpoints as well in orde to tech up


Has potential?

McGlaspie

@Kouji_San: I'm glad I induced some thinkage. To do something along the lines you're describing would require a new Game Type to be created. Although, you've got me thinking too. Why stop with King-of-the-Hill game type? If you follow the same basic principle (i.e. adding in non-typical NS game types), you could add Assault, Control Points (granted CP is very similar to vanilla NS1/2), and several others. It doesn't seem like it at first, but if you roll the ideas around almost all of the typical Team-based game type ideas can be folded into NS2 and still work within the NS concept. I think this game type idea deserves its own thread.

It just dawned on me that we've overlooked a potential problem: Portable Generators.

I'm working under the assumption that portable genies won't bring an entire room back to life. If they do, then why bother keeping the normal Power Nodes up and running at all? Too many questions. If the assumption that Portable Generators are not equal to Power Nodes, then my original idea would need to take them into account.