So I had an idea for an activity in my m Created 15 years ago2009-03-23 15:45:22 UTC by Fonzie

...I came up with the idea to have a race track on my map. Now ive seen countless maps with racecar shaped solids tied to a fun tracktrain that go around in loops or what not, the thing I invision doing differently is adding a twist. That twist being buttons along the course which when shot at either Speed the train up (green buttons) or slow the train down (red buttons) the difference witht his method is that it allows users to "race" if you will. However after fooling around with the tracktrain and train entities im beginning to question the likelyhood of this being possible. It seems a track train cannot be sped up past what its speed in units is set to under its properties. And if the max track speed i want is lets say 500 I believe i have to set the tracktrains speed to 500 correct? the problem with this is that the user can reach max speed off the get go. If this is correct and you cannot have a track go faster than the trains speed in units I am left with 1 option. A train that is set to say 500 speed however the first track reduces it to 200, and then use future tracks to increase the speed back to 500. I have not tested this specific way of controlling the tracktrains speed ingame out of frustration stemming from the amount of time i tried testing other methods which did not turn out to be what im looking for.

Im posting this to see if A. The last method is what im looking at needing to do in order to achieve my goal. or worse B. If the engine isnt even possible of producing something like the racetrack idea.

Any help is much appreciated and if you have any other ideas that may work but you are not sure if it will i would love to hear them.

PS- Hopefully some one has thought of doing this/has and just hasnt posted to map vault / tutorials. I wouldnt be suprised if one of the creative mappers here on twhl has had similar ideas.

PPS- I tried going by Tetsu0's map where you grab the gun and shoot the button to get on the 2nd track however the speed changing aspect im looking to work with seems to make things more complicated

<3 The Fonz

Can't you change the speed of a func_tracktrain (or whatever) anyway? Like at the end of the hazard course in HL?

sounds like fun! = )

I really don't know if this is possible or not, but if you work up an example map, i'll help you test/improve it. Trains are fun but pretty buggy in HL, especially in a MP game, but it's worth a try.

Yes but the thing is if people were to race against eachother everyone could turn the speed to max and it would be the same thing as 2 func_trains with the same speed property going along a track together.

I had a breakthrough however if this isnt the only way to do it then its probably the hardest / most time consuming way to do it. I fooled around with a func_train more and had the buttons targeting a multimanager which manages 2 change targets. .1 sec ct1 activates switching track 5 to s1 (instead of track 6 which would be the default path if the button is not shot) 10 seconds ct2 activates switching track 5 to track 6.

Keep in mind i made this little test area in no more than 5 minutes and used numbers for the tracks to be as simple and fast as possible to see if this method worked out. If in the long run this pays off it will be more organized Yet to test the slow downs however if my thinker is working correctly id do the same thing with a different button and different pathcorner and just decrease the speed. Probably gonna have to end up making it so that the pause corner on the track at teh starting line fires a mm that changes all the tracks back to normal. Reason being is so that the change targets for the slowdown will only work if the speed ups have been activated on that car. Which i believe would have to do with some how adding a goal in along with the speed boosts and setting the trigger changetarget on the slowdowns to only activate if said speed boost was shot at by the driver.

Anyone see any problems along the way with this method or does it sound like its safe to spend some hefty time making this puppy run smoothly ^^

Edit: Also im planning for the final project if i use this approach to have buttons in the starting section of each car. Player 1 and 2 both push the button and the car moves from the wait for retrigger corner to the starting like. Waits at starting like for a set number of seconds while a message is being displayed counting down the time till the cars move : )

Im stoked about this idea lol. This is my second map and i cant recall seeing a concept like this where the cars actually change speed based off conditions.

You might have more success if you use Spirit of HL and use a minimod format to create your own HL game completely.

sadly that is 20000 leagues over my sea o.O

Lol, its not too hard to use. Most of it is straight forward and Spirits features do not have to be used at all but i know that spirit can use triggers that say what a new train speed means. The options are "Max Speed" "Increase by" and another one i can't remember. You can always ask here. Im quite good at using Spirit now because our mod Half-Life: Static Friction is based on Spirit

the thing about that though is it would keep me from being able to have it in a map right? Im not good at all with modding or anything close to it. Not even that great at mapping. My creativity creates something and my mind fries figuring out how to get it to work. If its not something that i could implement into a tfc .bsp map then I'm not in the state of mind to take the time and get it worked out : /