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P-152: Virtual World Concept Update 6

by on Oct.12, 2014, under News, Software and Games

The next step in this project is to enable the player to control machines and vehicles that they have made using the world creator. I want this to be as emergent as possible, so I wanted to have the controls themselves by placeable with the world editor, and not just use a predefined gui or preset buttons or controls.

I have decided to add levers to the game, which will be used to control each of the directions of moving platforms (One lever each for forward and backward, up and down, and left and right). These levers are bidirectional, they can be turned in either direction to control two directions at once, and they can be moved by different amounts to set the speed of the move.

This was actually quite complex. I could not simply allow the player to “use” the lever, since that would not give me directional control, or control over the distance that the lever is pushed. I also couldn’t simply animate the lever moving, since I needed to allow the player to move the lever by different amounts to choose different speeds. I have more or less finished a system that does exactly what I want it to do. I don’t have the ability to set different speeds quite done yet, and I have some tweaking to do, but it basically works. It’s actually a reasonably complex solution involving vector maths.

The next step would be to allow the player to connect these levers to objects, and use them to apply physics forces. In this way, complex machines could be relatively easily built and controlled.

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