Just a small cosmetic change.

Really all said in the ittle, I was wondering if orientating chambers to slopes would be possible or plausable.

if skulks can do it, why cant chambers


this is a bit of a thread hijack but -ive actually always wanted to be able to put chambers on walls and cielings FTW!

Getting back to the original idea. The problem I believe is that the chambers could end up looking worse after this change because of chambers being dumped on slopes that are right next to a wall. This would result in a chamber which is correctly aligned with the slope, but as a result goes through the wall.
Potentially these problems could be solved with a few checks and by limiting the number of degrees of orientation.

The dumping chambers on walls and ceilings idea would suffer from the same problem only worse, combined with other considerations like blocking, balance and access. Blocking might be less of a problem, since I could envision a way to solve that. In any case though such a change would require a lot of time to implement.

Eh, no. Spikes fire out of the top of the oc; this would force people to do trigonometry or something in order to figure out where to place ocs so they can hit marines at the top of the ramp.

err sky we sub coniously do trig in our heads, we do millions of math in our head just from a single action, you could take a kid keep him sheltered all his life never even teach him any math, and he could work out were to put that chamber with out even thinking, but he couldnt tell you how he knew

this seems like merely a cosmetic change, but in fact is will change ns gameplay, basically the placement of OCs will be drastically altered.

either way i don't really think this is a necessary change. it will probably bring about a lot of bugs. and somehow i just think it will look wierd. it would look better if the shape of the bottom of the oc simply "adapted" to the floor surface it is on. but that won't be feasible

it would be easyer with source pyhsics

There's an old plugin that allows gorges to put it on walls/ceiling (I think it was in NS 1.04/2.X). I had a lot of bugs, but the gorge could click once to see a ghost image of where the OC was going to be, then click again to place it. Never tried the plugin myself, so this is second-hand knowledge.

As for the original idea, like Talion said, it'll cause some problems such as going into walls (which could be fixed). There are others spikes firing from the air because the OC is tilted a little.

Still, it's a good idea, but I don't think it's worth the trouble to implement it since it could introduce a lot of other problems.

I would have to agree with keeping chambers 90 degrees to horizontal. Any "adjusting to slopes" would not only look bad, but be nearly impossible. Now, 90 degrees to horizontal is a lot of room. That means walls. And ceiling could work too, but again, only 90 degree angles. And, seeing as the current chamber build system 'drops' the chamber onto the ground, it would obviously need to be changed to support building on walls and ceilings.

Having chambers adjust to slopes will be built in naturally with NS:S because of the physics engine.

I'm just curious how the OC would shoot.. if it's on a 10 degree angle, does the OC shoot upward at 10 degrees?

no, dont make the oc shoot at angles, just make it tilted. from the gameplay perspective, the oc would be standing straight up, but the model would be aligned to the floor. that way we wouldn't have to do trig in our heads to make it work. the only problem is, what happens when you try to drop an oc on a slant of more than 45 degrees? cant drop it? slides off? sticks at the angle?

I don't see why the oc would shoot at a 10-degree angle. Turrets can fire in a full range of motion. If it is mounted sideways like that, what prevents it from doing so anyway?

I think it'd be cool to see the chamber twist and contort to aim at enemies, even if spores are on several sides. And perhaps muscle bulging as it fired.

I think what Zunni means is what's in my hastily-drawn pic (ph34r teh paint)

Adjusting chambers to each degree, or even 10 degree intervals, of possible orientation would just be too difficult. Which is why I would suggest adjusting it for 90 degree intervals, which is exactly what the skulk model does when it wallwalks. Although the skulk is oriented a bit more finely because it looks around. That wouldn't matter though, because chambers are stationary.

The problem with havoc physics, which I haven't experienced in the free libraries, is unless something is increadibly heavy, it likes to slide down slopes/fall over and even then they will slide at the slightest contact..

Making chambers heavy in a havoc based physics library would mean they have the potential to align to the edge, but will also cause physical damage to the poor guy on the other side. This particular physics library would cause this idea to fail based on that point.

(Although I have never used havoc, I am basing my points on all the games I have played incorporating the havoc library, whether or not these are bypassable is another thing, but surely these games developers would have tryed to not have this happen)

^^

You'd just put an *extremely* small flat surface under the object.

oc currently shoot on every angle now as it is except directly below them selfs but they get pritty close, the only thing i would be worried about is a spike apearing out of thin air and hurrdeling its self to the rine, if this was the case drop the fireing location down a smidgen

A better idea would be to simply make the base aligned with the floor but make the body vertical.

That would require some interesting modelling.

We may have to wait for NS:S. I believe that the way models adapt to their terrain in HL2 would be useful.