I had this idea I'd like to share. I'm a bit of a beginner, and after reading about I figure this must be pretty straightforward to you. But I'm proud of my little achievement and I'd like to tell someone hehe.
I started to make a HL multiplayer map in Hammer. It's intended to be a tricky map, where not everything is what it seems to be. Don't be afraid, though, I'm not that experienced in mapping .
My favourite part is this room, of which there are two ways to leave: either walking or dying and then respawning . Anyway, it's a rather boring cubic room with two doors and two buttons. One of them opens the doors so you can leave, the other one makes the floor open and you fall into a pit of radio slugde.
I did this a long time ago in a test map, but I quickly realised that in a multiplayer environment, by the second time you wound up in there you would know which button not to press... which gets kinda boring after the first surprise. So here I was, making a new map, when I thought of putting this room, but with a twist: the buttons would reverse their roles each time pressed. Therefore, you'd never really know which button to press, with either there is a 50% chance of leaving or dying - depending of how many others were there before. After unsuccessfully trying plain old trigger_changetargets, I realised what I needed was a combination of 4 multi_managers and 4 trigger_changetargets, effectively making a two-state machine. I suppose it could be done to cycle between many more states, but the amount of logical entities would grow exponentially.
It took me a full day to envision the complete setup, but in retrospect it wasn't really all that complicated. But I wanted to vent my frustrations and tell someone about this, someone who could understand what I was talking about (my other HL-playing friend don't know shizzle about mapping so I'd just get blank stares back).
If you haven't fallen asleep already, I thank you for taking a minute to read my little rant. Maybe I can post the finished map soon, if anyone happens to show interest. It's just a small map for a couple of n00bs on a home LAN