DM-OldManMountain

Name: DM-OldManMountain


This map is well-completed I am releasing a beta download so if you test it PLEASE COMMENT even if it's just an "all-okay - release it!" kind of comment. I've heard back from the U4E team and they're not going to include it in the next default U4E pack, so I'm going ahead with all three varieties of this board.

Those varieties being: Unreal4Ever, LawDogs, and standard UT2004. I created this originally with U4E in mind because I had the idea of massive boulders falling all around the players, and they players could pick them up with the Gravgun (IAM) and whip them at each other. On pen & paper, I designed it with CTF in mind, and went so far as to mirror the board, but it turned out the boulders didn't like the mirroring, so I just kept the original half before mirroring and turned it into a Deathmatch.

The theme is a rocky mountainside that pits the players against each other in the middle of an avalanche. This, to my knowledge, has never been done before in UT2004, and would not be possible without DaJMasta's "GoodKarma" (Kudos, DaJMasta!) It's great fun and can scare the willies out of you when the boulders land a little too close for comfort!

You've got to see it to believe it.

Download: HERE


By the way, how'd you do this?

In case you're curious, here's how this effect works. It's pretty simple, but a pain in the butt to set up. First of all, there are about 30 NetKarmaActors (NKAs) waiting "off-camera" in some tunnels that exit into the sky, behind a zoneportal so you can't see where they're coming from.

These NKAs fall into the board, and the ground has been planned from the beginning to allow for only a few rocks to collect here and there. Otherwise they all roll perfectly down the mountainside, back into the return tunnels where they begin the board. Below the clouds they fall into at the bottom of the board you'll find some very plain PhysicsVolumes that change the gravity so that the rocks "fall upward" to wind up at the top of the mountain again. Easy recycling!

Now comes the tedious bit. While the rocks constanty falling is certainly pretty, by themselves there are no effects that make it believeable. SO, approximately every "ten feet" on the ground, I've placed a collection of four actors: A class-based trigger (based on NKAs), a ScriptedTrigger, an Emitter, and a ViewShaker. The class-based trigger activates the ScriptedTrigger which then makes the booming sound of the boulder hitting the ground AND activates the emitter and viewshaker. The emitter sends baby rocks into the air which have impactsounds attached, and the ViewShaker, if you're close to the impact, rocks your world of course.

Then there's just the repetitive manner of duplicate this grouping across the ground, and changing the tags on each of them accordingly :P  Viola! You have your very convincing avalanche!