[WIP][Trailer] Sphere cannon
Hey guys!
I was a little bit bored yesterday and I decided to create an 'sphere cannon' for Portal 2.
You can use it in SP and COOP and it does not use any scripts.
Features:
- movement synchron to portalgun
- sounds and reload animations
- left mouse button to fire
- right mouse button for a transparent red crosshair
- you can pick it up and drop it whenever you want to
Trailer:
http://youtu.be/ygFEfYPHGQo
COOP testing and fun:
http://youtu.be/0mMtnTpVGrc
how does the crosshair work?
since nobody seemed to understand it on their own...
The yellow markers on the left and on the right are the markers for the distance.
You can estimate the distance when you use a tile of the wall-texture.
The yellow dot in the middle is the spot where the sphere will hit the wall.
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First line (on top) is for everything that is right in front of you.
As long as the target wall-tile is bigger than the distance between the lines, you will hit it.
A few more steps away from the wall, and you have to use one of the next lines.
... and this time we are really far away and have to use the last line:
And this is how it looks for a wall-mounted button:
As you can see, it works pretty well and there are no glitches or bugs that I would know of.
I already tested it with 3 different people in my coop test map, and it works just fine.
I am not pretty sure if I will use it for any puzzle related maps in the future, but it is
good fun to play with it... so I guess it doesn't matter if it will be usefull or not,
because its already great fun...
Edit: 4 singleplayer showcase maps with medium difficulty puzzles ready.
Information for Mappers:
- the gun modell itself are just some textured brushes tied to 'func_brush' (non-solid)
- around that modell there is one invisible rectangle 'func_physbox' to pick it up
- there is a 'trigger_push' inside of the modell to fire the sphere
- the indicator lights for the reload timeout are 'func_brush' and toggled with 'env_texturetoggle'
- sounds and lights are controlled by 2 'logic_relay' via 'game_ui' (mouse input)
- the sphere itself is a template, which is spawned on mouse-click
Feel free to post comments, feedback, suggestions or questions. 
Thanks. 
I guess I could edit it some more and could make it to an instance with
different fire rate, sounds, lights, fire distance... whatever.
So you could set up the settings for it yourself, as you like it.
Also, I don't think you need the trigger_push. You can use an env_entity_maker with Inherit Angles set to True, Move Direction set to 0 0 0, and Move Speed set sufficiently high.
Thanks for the info... I will look into that and see how it works. =)
Edit:
Tested the env_entity_maker, but it does not seem to use the up/down angles.
So I parented it to my cannon (like the trigger_push before) but it only rotates on one axis...
It seems to ignore the up/down movement of my cannon... 
(Inherit angles is set to 'true' already!)
Any ideas? (Its a good idea, and works much easier than my way, but with one problem... 
Direction variance, maybe? That should be zero. (Look in Skotty's rocket turret, that uses an env_entity_maker that can aim in any direction.)
I tested all of the given settings, but it does not seem to work.
Direction variance was set to 0 15 by default and I already changed it to 0.
I really tried that all, but it does not seem to work that way.
But I can still use the env_entity_maker with speed set to 0 and use the trigger_push.
Thats way easier than my first method and just works fine.
Thanks for your help and info.
interesting
The cake is a PI
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Add me on STEAM: iamafractal
I'm up for coop games & beta testing your maps...
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That could be maybe an option for shooting cubes off buttons and stuff like that.
Well, we will see what people might come up with for this cannon.
I guess it's pretty usefull against turrets and ofcourse for long distance
moving of any dynamic objects, too. I will release this one as soon as I
finished working on it and then we will see.