Alien Trampoline Model
Posted: Mon Sep 13, 2021 15:59
Seeing as how I was messing around with the Xen trampoline texture thingy, I thought "why not make a model".
Again, feel free to use or discard as you see fit.
The ones in the starting room are just placed so that you can see what they look like. The ones outside have been placed on lines that run a script so that they actually appear to do something.
I apologise for the sound effect (and the music). I couldn't remember what these things actually sounded like in game - but I bet is wasn't like this.
I tried to get them to be a size that I thought felt about right. If, however, you like them but feel a need to alter their scaling, this will affect how well the wall and ceiling versions align with the wall and ceiling respectively. I can, of course, modify things if you need.
At present, the ceiling one sits pretty well in line with the ceiling simply by placing it in a map. Altering the scaling will lower it below the ceiling or push it above it slightly. It's just the way that ceiling decorations work.
The wall one is setup so that placing it 8 units in front of a wall works pretty well but, again, changing the scale would alter that.
Both of these things can be addressed if you do want to change the scale.
The only disappointment is that model translucency in a skin is either fully transparent, or fully opaque. So the edges of the skin look a bit abrupt. If you look at the skin PNG itself, you can see that the edges are smoother than they appear in game. Of course, if you didn't want a 3D model, then the skin could just be used as a texture I guess.
[edit]the edges can be fixed by making the renderstyle of the actor Translucent with an Alpha of 1.0, but that introduces some other minor visual anomalies (due to back face culling I think) so I went back to the hard edges which, IMO, look better than the anomalies caused by making the model translucent. [/edit]
[edit2]Oh, and, just to mention it, the model skin is slightly hi-res. If you want it to look a bit more consistent with Doom pixel-sizes, resizing the skin to 128x128 gets it pretty close. (Using a smart sampling/blending method works better than pixel resizing.)[/edit2]
[edit3]OK, I just improved these things. I forgot to give them an animation - they have one now. It's nothing fancy: just a three-frame flexing animation. The trampolines can be activated/deactivated with a script. They actually spawn and go into in their dormant (lowered) position when placed in a map. Activating them makes the middle part rise up a bit (quite quickly). Deactivating them returns them to their lowered position (which happens a bit more slowly).
A looping script randomly activates and deactivates the ones in the start room of the test map.
This movement currently doesn't make a noise, but it would be trivial to add some kind of squelchy sound for the activation/deactivation.
Anyway, I think these are done to beta standard at least now.
Just load with Doom2.
[/edit3]
[edit4]Just a note that the DECORATE is a bit copy/pastey simply because I wanted each one to be stand alone. It would, of course, be possible to define just one of them and then inherit to make the others, changing only the relevant items. It's only a few bytes of text anyway. [/edit4]
Again, feel free to use or discard as you see fit.
The ones in the starting room are just placed so that you can see what they look like. The ones outside have been placed on lines that run a script so that they actually appear to do something.
I apologise for the sound effect (and the music). I couldn't remember what these things actually sounded like in game - but I bet is wasn't like this.
I tried to get them to be a size that I thought felt about right. If, however, you like them but feel a need to alter their scaling, this will affect how well the wall and ceiling versions align with the wall and ceiling respectively. I can, of course, modify things if you need.
At present, the ceiling one sits pretty well in line with the ceiling simply by placing it in a map. Altering the scaling will lower it below the ceiling or push it above it slightly. It's just the way that ceiling decorations work.
The wall one is setup so that placing it 8 units in front of a wall works pretty well but, again, changing the scale would alter that.
Both of these things can be addressed if you do want to change the scale.
The only disappointment is that model translucency in a skin is either fully transparent, or fully opaque. So the edges of the skin look a bit abrupt. If you look at the skin PNG itself, you can see that the edges are smoother than they appear in game. Of course, if you didn't want a 3D model, then the skin could just be used as a texture I guess.
[edit]the edges can be fixed by making the renderstyle of the actor Translucent with an Alpha of 1.0, but that introduces some other minor visual anomalies (due to back face culling I think) so I went back to the hard edges which, IMO, look better than the anomalies caused by making the model translucent. [/edit]
[edit2]Oh, and, just to mention it, the model skin is slightly hi-res. If you want it to look a bit more consistent with Doom pixel-sizes, resizing the skin to 128x128 gets it pretty close. (Using a smart sampling/blending method works better than pixel resizing.)[/edit2]
[edit3]OK, I just improved these things. I forgot to give them an animation - they have one now. It's nothing fancy: just a three-frame flexing animation. The trampolines can be activated/deactivated with a script. They actually spawn and go into in their dormant (lowered) position when placed in a map. Activating them makes the middle part rise up a bit (quite quickly). Deactivating them returns them to their lowered position (which happens a bit more slowly).
A looping script randomly activates and deactivates the ones in the start room of the test map.
This movement currently doesn't make a noise, but it would be trivial to add some kind of squelchy sound for the activation/deactivation.
Anyway, I think these are done to beta standard at least now.
Just load with Doom2.
[/edit3]
[edit4]Just a note that the DECORATE is a bit copy/pastey simply because I wanted each one to be stand alone. It would, of course, be possible to define just one of them and then inherit to make the others, changing only the relevant items. It's only a few bytes of text anyway. [/edit4]