escape maps and LUA support

Hi everybody of the old guard who hasn't left!

In a few weeks I'm going to have some spare time and I was thinking of making an escape map for Empires, something I wanted to do for a long time.

To anyone who doesn't know what an escape map is, I found a good description on the Fortress Forever forum:

There are a lot of problems with the engine/Empires to make such a map work but I thought with the devlopments concerning LUA it might be possible to create the logic needed. I know my way around Java and PHP so I don't think the coding itself will be a problem. I am unsure however of how to interface the scripts with a source map and also if LUA is even supported or not. I once read it was going to be supported but later I was told that it wasn't implemented but could be done in a short timespan.

Can a dev comment on this?

 

hey blight, good times

 

isn't a blight bad times?

 

Just use I/O.

 

The hammer I/O is not very efficient in handling complex logic. It took me a long time and lots of entities to get the firing range in one of the tutorial maps working. While using code it could be done with a few functions and some logic.

Escape maps usually have all players on one team but I can see that's not really possible right now and adding the support just for one map is a bit retarded. I kind of fixed this in a short escape map I once made for Empires by having both teams face equal challanges with glass walls between them. This way there could be some kind of competition between both teams.

A bigger problem is that players can no longer stack with soft collisions (I think). This used to be a big element in escape maps.

What would be nice and not just for my map is the ability to restrict classes. This has no doubt been brought up before but I think this will make a lot of other mappers happy as well.

Fortress Forever fully integrated LUA so I can give you an example of how it works there.

Whenever you have a reference to a particular entity, you can use its functions to control its behavior.

Code:

-- find the flag and cast it to an info_ff_script
local flag = GetInfoScriptByName("redflag")
     -- Make sure flag isn't nil
     if flag then
          -- check if the player is carrying the flag
          if player:HasItem(flag:GetName()) then
		-- return the flag
          	flag:Return()
          end     
     end

Using this system the mapper can also create his/her own complex gamemodes.

 

I'm not saying lua won't eventually get implemented but if you want to do something like this you have to use I/O for now.

 

With close cooperation with coder (Brutos/me/dunno) it is possible to split the code so some parts can be overriden in Lua.

 

sounds interesting...