Contuinous Tower

John Crean

I have an idea for a game for an app but not sure how to achieve it.

Basically I want to make a tower with stairs going around it but I want the tower to be endless, how would I achieve this effect?

Visceral

1: Make a tower in preferred 3d application
2: Make stairs that match
3: Make it endless
4: ??????
5: Profit

Seriously how would anyone be able to answer your question dude? Are you working in Unity? Are you working in UDK? What methods have you tried so far? Any programming experience? Are you going to achive this effect using kismet nodes? You need to supply some information beacuse there is no such thing as "how to make every game out there tutorial"

EDIT 1:Sorry to come across like a totall asshole but seriously what do you expect when you ask a question like that in a game art forum.

EDIT 2: Seriously though i just came to think about it, have you heard about that achimedes screw thing? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes'_screw

What if you just modelled a small section of the tower, and have the player basicly stationary and just rotate the enviorment?

John Crean

arrrr... sorry thought I posted under udk section :P. Well I was planning to use udk because I know how to use it as well as basic kismet. I don't have any programming experience so I hope there is a way with kismet. Yh Archimedes' screw is the desired effect I am going for but with a tower, I remember playing a genesis game which did something similar and I thought of an idea to improve on it. Sorry I should of given more information in my first post.

Edit: [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bs96gvDFes4"]Mickey Mania 08 - Pete's Tower (low volume) - YouTube[/ame], found a clip of desired effect

Visceral

So you want the platforms to spawn in during the rise? I think this has simmilar issue to making a train level in UDK where you would ride the train around a track....not sure what it was called though.

Here is a video that might help....not sure [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROkHmMEWHU8"]Streaming Levels in the Unreal Development Kit Basics - UDK Tutorial - YouTube[/ame]

JonathanLambert

Assuming Y up coordinates, your players Xpos would be stationary but the input would drive the rotation of the tower model and your Ypos would be constrained to a base constant += your jump - gravity over time. You could also script modular meshes to swap out giving the variety.

John Crean

Thanks for the help guys. Guess I better start with the modelling, not sure if I wanna do a ramp some steps or stairs hmmmm....

John Crean

I decided to do steps on my tower to make the game challenging. Does anyone know if there is a way to randomize a path? say I make 5 routes up the towers is there a way to tell the game to randomly pick one route and change per restart?

sande

The late finnish computer magazine, C=lehti, featured this extensively in it's issue #2, april 1989 article "Nebulus - pyörivän tornin salaisuus" (Nebulus - secret of the revolving tower.)
Most probably this is not what you after, though...

blankslatejoe

You'll find that randomizing almost anything in Unreal, geometry-wise, is tricky, mostly due to lighting efficiency and lightbakes. I think that'll be less an issue in UE4, due to the shift to a fully deferred renderer.

Now, if you kept geometry and number of meshes simple and the materials/lights/postFX simple then you might be able to do something entirely dynamically lit, but it's the kind of thing you'd probably want some scripting under your belt to handle...and wouldn't look super pretty, that's for sure.

I suspect the best you can do while still using the most UDK has to offer is pick a random level out of a subset of levels to stream in (there's a random node in kismet, and just point the different outputs to different stream level nodes). Even then, you can't offset those levels in height dynamically...so an infinite tower is essentially impossible (you'd run into the worldbounds in UE eventually anyway--and with it floatingpoint precision errors).

The better idea is to have the player go up a certain distance and then TELEPORT back down to a seemingly similar section of the stairs. You could mask the teleport with a cutscene or an effect or something. Then you'd essentially have an endless tower over the same space. It's kind of gamey, but then again, we make games.

John Crean

Thanks for the advice guys.

Sande: I don't read Finnish

Blankslatejoe: Thanks for the help I was considering the steaming at first as Visceral mentioned but as you mentioned there is limitations to how far I can go with streaming. The teleporter idea is nice however I think it will ruin the pacing of the game, but I will give it a go to see how it comes out. My mate has some C++ coding experience and said he think he might have an idea on how I could get it to work, so here hoping

Have not had a lot of time recently to begin the project proper-ally. So far I have used udk to test streaming with a basic cylinder, to figure out how I am going to do the game mechanics. I have start work on a high-poly tower, still do not know what to do about the footing will have to give it more thought.

I will keep you guys posted ^^.