[SUGGESTION] Shrink/enlarge warpzones (scalable warpzones)

One really cool idea I've been thinking about is implementation of portals/warpzones of different size. I found Prey has a faked example of this (with the tiny planet), but I didn't know anyone had made this work for real yet, until today. I discovered Molyneux's "The Room" demo, which had these kinds of portals. Unfortunately it was never released. However, I found the open-source Pseudoform, previously called Portalized, which does all of this and much, much more (including light traveling through portals), from what I can see really well. I heard it's really buggy (or used to be), but it's probably a good place to start if we want to see this feature in Xonotic (I do! ). I'm aware this would probably require a lot of work in making objects/players resize fluidly, on the bright side though the resize feature would come in handy for lots of other things, among them rescaling gameplay related objects (players, pickups etc) when trying to play maps from different Quake games, since all the Quakes use a different player size, for example

P.S. Pseudoform runs on Ogre with Newton physics, so it's probably only useful to see how they did it, not for porting the code or anything

From what I can tell warpzones run pretty well in xonotic. I haven't encountered any bugs yet.

Did I phrase myself wrong? Look at the videos I linked to and you'll understand.

They are called portals, not warpzones.

Wow, cool idea. I don't know how useful that would be for the actual game tho, but I'm sure people would find a use for it. In any case, for messing around that would be a lot of fun

They are called portals, not warpzones.

Call them whatever you want to. They have always been called warpzones until Nexuiz forked into Xonotic, and even then. Yes, the mainstream word would be portals. Whatever. I refered to them as both in my post, anyway.

Wow, cool idea. I don't know how useful that would be for the actual game tho, but I'm sure people would find a use for it. In any case, for messing around that would be a lot of fun

Yeah!

Imagine for example, a map with a really tight space that you can go through to get 200 armor. Except, that armor is really tiny, so even if you did squeeze into the space in normal size to get it, it would only give armor relative to it's size. Like, if scale=1, then armor=200x1, but if scale is 0.5, it would be 200x0.5=100 armor.

How do you solve this? You downsize yourself through a map specified portal, then get the armor when you and the armor are the same proportions, which would get you the true 200 armor.

However, you will take more damage proportional to your size, you will run slower (actually at the same speed in your pov, except the world is now bigger) and deal less damage as well, so you have to upscale yourself through the portal again to not get killed, and get actual use for your 200 armor!

that would be too adventure-puzzling-like, as in e.g. zelda... maybe for a puzzle-mod but not for regular maps

The important thing is getting the feature into the engine, then mappers/other Xonotic devs will decide for themselves if they want to use the scale-portals, or the scaling feature in general (see my previous post), or not. Just having the feature there would be awesome

Gawd I sound demanding If I knew how to program these things myself, I would help out. If this feature isn't in by the time I've learned enough programming skills, I will do it myself when I'm educated enough (all I know is PHP right now)

Personally, I know I am unable to implement that into the engine, as it simply would require too many changes. The variable player bbox alone will be a huge problem, but rescaling "any object" is not even possible in the protocol yet (the "scale" of an object is networked as a single byte and is limited to 16x).

Note that this can easily cause big bugs once using such a zone repeatedly, and would also probably not be good in a FPS (just use the shrink-portal 5 times, and nobody can see you - sure, you're slow, but if nobody can see or aim at you, you win).

Personally, I know I am unable to implement that into the engine, as it simply would require too many changes. The variable player bbox alone will be a huge problem, but rescaling "any object" is not even possible in the protocol yet (the "scale" of an object is networked as a single byte and is limited to 16x).

Note that this can easily cause big bugs once using such a zone repeatedly, and would also probably not be good in a FPS (just use the shrink-portal 5 times, and nobody can see you - sure, you're slow, but if nobody can see or aim at you, you win).

I have no objections except the last part. Everything, in my idea, would be scaled properly when you shrink, including damage that you take, and damage you deal out.

So if your scale becomes 0.5, you deal 0.5x*weapon damage*, and your enemies, if scale=1, would deal twice the damage to you since they are twice as big as you are.

My theoretical solution for the infinite ability to shrink self, since there is a computer imposed limit, would be to stop the big portal from working when the threshold has been reached, so you can only upscale yourself when you reached that limit (or perhaps the big portal will kill you, as you become too small to handle the air pressure )

Even then, your advantage from being small can be quite good, e.g. if you are camping on an already hard enough to see spot.

But camping as a toy soldier means doing about as much damage as a toy soldier, and being destroyed just as fast. Like, if the player was ant size, it would be about as irritating as an ant with an ant-size gun Perhaps one could implement stomp damage, which also scales with player size, thus you could squish the ant-size players instead of having to aim at them which would become difficult after a while?

And what if you are playing LMS? Nobody would see the ant-sized player...

Lol, good point, but if the ant hides out of sight of the big players, the match will just stalemate (unless the other players downsize as well), and if the ant attacks a big player, his cover is blown and he is screwed, especially if the big guys have explosives.