LionsPhil

LionsPhil, or "81-86-106-14.dsl.pipex.com" as the wiki knows him because he can never remember his ID number, let alone his password, probably shouldn't be writing this in the third person.

*ahem*

I tinker, much like McNutcase, and tend to be more focused on finding new ways to make the Unreal Engine wibble than in making masterpieces (it should suprise nobody, then, that the first edit I made here was to WarpZoneInfo).

Anyway, I sometimes make things and put them somewhere on [my website]. Maps I've made public:

• Shonky (can be found if you dig about in the [junk folder])
  • DM-(LP)-WarpZoneTest, DM-(LP)-WarpZoneTest3 – builds of the standard WarpZone example; '3' makes it an infinite corridor. Not interesting; listed for completeness.
  • DM-(LP)-DropIn – a hideously minimalist (four-sided, two-zoned) inverse ringworld (you run on the inside, not outside, surface; demonstrates the WarpZone aiming problem quite nicely, and what happens if you slant the ends of something like WarpZoneTest3.
  • DM-(LP)-QuantumNightmare – a pleasingly simple way to break the minds of people who haven't yet seen WarpZones. Four tall rooms in a square, apart from the fact that they're all the same room. Demonstrates rotation of warpzones.
  • DM-(LP)-Infinifall – the "good practices" WarpZone demo map I added to the discussion of WarpZoneInfo.
  • DM-1on1-LP-CursedWell – an attempt at 'negative width walls' inspired by some crazy people over on [UserFriendly]. The well to which the title alludes works and is very subtle (too subtle to really notice); the doorways suffer horrible graphical glitches where polygons from the player's zone get rendered even though they should be occluded by the warpzone plane (and there's one with a floor-level strip in the YZ plane that I have no idea as to the origins of).
  • DM-1on1-LP-CursedWellEx – as above, but the brick motif side of the well has its 'negative wall' room positioned up a ramp so that four different bits of physical space aren't trying to exist in the same one bit of virtual space. Still glitches. (Yes, the texturing is all misaligned. This was a quick hack.)
• Less shonky
  • [DM-1on1-LP-Shafted] – a "narrow beams" map I made to experiment with i) emitters ii) chaining movers and iii) how fiddly a map can become for the AI says "sod this, I'm off to play Minesweeper".
  • [DM-LP-Gravometric] – an attempt at a "real" map with plentiful warp zones; also a little Escher-esque meta-cube, where "down" isn't a particularly consistent concept (using rotated warpzones, rather than PhysicsVolumes, means that the players' feet are always pointing the same way as gravity).

Basically, although Shafted's the only one with any kind of formal license, feel free to crack any of them open in UnrealEd and have a peek/poke – just share any interesting (read: NNGH. MA BRAIN!) results.

Discussion

McNutcase: The odd bit in the doorway on CursedWell is where you have a bit of space that's been folded so much it's used by FOUR zones ingame. I figured this out by seeing a bot's feet in said area (also, the UDamage glow leaks through there...) after forgetting to zero bot count for testing...

LionsPhil: If you mean the sub-'water'-level sections of the crevicies either side of the doorway, then, yeah, in virtual space they are. In physical space, of course, they're distinct, and each is a seperate zone. May well be the cause, though, especially for that mystery strip. Hmm. I may modify it to put some normal-space 'padding' to prevent such overlap, seeing as it seems that the engine Really Can't Cope. (A formalised version of this probably belongs on WarpZoneInfo's ever-growing list of Things Which Don't Work.)

McNutcase: Really, though, that list ought to be Things Which No Sane Coder Could Possibly Have Expected Anyone To Even Think Of Trying. We, my friend, are an infinite source of sanity checks and Can't Happen situations...

LionsPhil: Bah—puts on CompSci student hat—that just means that they didn't define the behaviour generically/elegantly enough for it to handle complicated combinations of the simple tools they provided. Anyway, an -Ex version of the map now exists with the aformentioned 'padding'; it's fixed the mystery strip, but not the failed occlusion. Bizzarelly, I tried taking a screenshot from the ramp, looking upwards through the door, showing the parts of the surrounding wall from my zone rendering inside the doorframe, but when pasted into El Gimp the doorframe was missing. Now that's weird.