Dynamic Geometry

Creators: Alexander Bruce
Engine: Unreal Tournament 2004
Modification: UT2K4 Level Component

Last Update: 17th June 2007
Current Status: Working. Mostly hardcoded.
Further Development: Including further configurability to remove hardcoded components.
Download: Not yet available

Description: Reconstructing the world you play in...

Page 7 - Further Development - Where do we go from here?

There are a lot of ways that this system can go, though I'm not in the biggest rush to get it all completed, as it's purely a personal project left for when I have time to work on it or when I'm working on a game that requires it. I've got plans for a new game which will combine Particle Characters and Dynamic Geometry, though neither system will be handled as strictly as they were within Metamorphosis or Hazard, where they were the only components to the gameplay.

To make this system most useful, I'll need to go through and remove all of the hardcoded aspects, making them available from the UnrealEditor. This includes rewriting how the Key Positions are calculated by the level designer, as the ones that were originally available for normal movers aren't anywhere near powerful enough when dealing with geometry such as cylinders and squares. I've rewritten how these are used so that they move the tiles along its own local axes, rather than according to world co-ordinates.

The compound recursion shown here is proof that getting the tiles to work together in any number of ways is fairly limitless, provided you can sit down and really think about what's happening on a tile by tile basis. I've got some randomization algorithms so that destroying one tile could make the algorithm run around and destroy the entire level by chance, or curl back upon itself and die off instantly. I've also got systems in place for other types of support mechanics, such as rope bridges. I would like to take the current support system where one tile can support anything even further, associating weight limits so that parts of the level will collapse if there aren't enough tiles holding everything together. I've not yet started on that though.

I had plans at one stage to work with tile creation/modification/destruction weapons during gameplay to allow people to create their own levels at runtime, though that hit a wall because of the bStatic and bNoDelete variables, and altering them wasn't doing me any favours. This would have allowed mechanics such as building your own bridges or creating barricades during the game, but will have to be put off for another day. Even if I did get it working at one stage, it wouldn't have been friendly for multiplayer anyway, as we're already dealing with limits of 250 - 500 tiles in a networked game before it becomes too much for the network to constantly keep track of. It could still have some interesting outcomes in a single player game though.

I was also considering at one stage creating other kinds of tile classes, so that triangles or abstract shapes could be used as tiles, but this also fell under for the time being due to the same network limitations, as I was already dealing with more than enough tiles when using simple squares or cubes.