[Submission] Ceiling Drills

Name: Ceiling Drills
Connection: None
Palette: PNG
Summon: Props: CeilingDrillHolding/Empty/Broken1-6, CDrillBuried/Dud | Hazards: CeilingDrillDriller/Exploder, PrimedDrill | Activatables: CeilingDrillDrillerActive, CeilingDrillExploderActive, CeilingDrillDrillerSwitch
Ambient Sound: None
De-/Activatable: Yes
Destroyable: No
Special Effects: None

Submitted: TheDoomedArchvile
ZScript: TheDoomedArchvile, Jekyll Grim Payne, Gothic
Sprites: Zrrion the Insect
Sprite Edits: TheDoomedArchvile
Sounds: Freesounds (xxqmanxx), Capcom, Bulletstorm
GLEDFS: TheDoomedArchvile
Idea Base: Environmental tech hazards

Description: Ceiling Drills that can drop down on the player or enemies. This pack comes with eight ceiling props, two ground props, two hazard drills that will drop automatically when walking under them, three activatable drills that will drop when used with Activate/Deactivate Thing, and one ground drill already primed. There are two types of drills. One that falls and deals minor damage on its way down only, and one that will also prime itself to explode when an actor gets too close after landing.

Download Here

The drills only explode on players, right? The zombieman on the test map doesn't trigger the explosion.
Do you think you could make a perpetual drill spawner similar to pic above? Just a suggestion, not mandatory.

I couldn't figure out how to make them explode when an enemy walked over them. I tried to look up how to make it so that a prop could change targets regardless if it was a player or enemy, but couldn't find anything for Decorate uses. Might have overlooked something but idk. If there is a way I would like to implement it because it would give it more use.

I think I could make it continually spawn drills, yes. I'll make some edits to the sprites where the drill will continue to drill into the earth all the way, and the claw going into the ceiling and coming back out with a new drill to release. Would that be good?

doomedarchviledemon wrote:

I tried to look up how to make it so that a prop could change targets regardless if it was a player or enemy, but couldn't find anything for Decorate uses.

It may be possible, if the drill acted like a stationary monster in its targeting, with a meleerange instead, and it swapped between friendly/unfriendly flag and A_ClearTarget every alternate tic, it could then in theory be triggered by both players and enemies. It's a bit of a Rube-Goldberg solution though! :huh:

Alternatively, there might be a Jump function that lets you check a targets flags or properties that could be nested with the range check but I'm not sure.

There's also the touchy flag but I don't think that can be ranged.


Anyway cool obstacle - quite an unusual idea for a FPS game
A similar idea could be icicles that fall on the player from above

The ZDoom wiki article for BlockThingsIterator contains an example of a proximity mine. I tried to adapt it for the PrimedDrill actor and it worked:
MAPINFO Credit goes to Jekyll Grim Payne.
If there's no way to make this work on Decorate, then you should use Zscript instead.

Thank you!
I haven't tried this yet, but I will get around to updating this eventually. Life stuff happening now but wanted to ping in and say I haven't abandoned this.

Updated!

Changes:

• Converted code from Decorate to ZScript
• Updated the sprites to include a top base for the drills
• Included 6 more ceiling props in the form of broken drills to give some more variety
• Included the proximity mine function for the primed drills (Thank you Gothic!)
• Included one more activating drill that will constantly drop drills from the ceiling

I did have one question on the new activating drill that constantly drops drills. Is there a way to have this actor go through its animation of grabbing a new drill before it becomes deactivated again when pressing a deactivating switch?
I tried to make the Activate Thing function a repeatable action, but that just makes it go to its Activate state over and over. I also tried to have a Deactivate Thing switch next to the Activate Thing switch, but when I press that the actor will immediately go to its Deactivated state without letting the Activate animation fully play.

1

Updated!

Thank you again, Gothic!
Along with this, I have also updated the stopping sounds for a little more polish. When the drill hits the ground it now has a crunchy digging into the earth sound. For the drill the digs all the way through it has a digging sound that fades out.

Before publishing this, could you specify which user from FreeSounds made the sounds?