Split a sector in 2? like if it was Ice breaking?

Simple. player will enter a room that looks like a normal room.
Once they cross the trigger, the room will split in 2. Each half will go backwards and keep doing that, leaving a huge hole in the middle. after 10 seconds it will stop moving. How is this done?

Im using skulltag(doom in hexen format)

Your only option is to have the crack open by lowering the floor, it's impossible in the Doom engine to get sectors to move sideways.

Polyobjects can't move 2 sectors at once? Even in UDMF format?

zZaRDoZz said:

Polyobjects can't move 2 sectors at once? Even in UDMF format?

Polyobjects aren't sectors and won't do what Buu342 wants. Polyobjects mimic infinitely tall walls so you could get the edges of the room to move, but it's impossible in the idtech1 engine to get the floor to split into two and pull apart which is what Buu342 wants.

Would it be possible with 3D floors?

Marnetmar said:

Would it be possible with 3D floors?

No.

If it helps people understand the issue, the key part of the Doom engine that prevents moving sectors is the pre-compiled BSP tree. This is created when the level is made (compiled) and is basically a list that lets the game engine know which sectors can potentially be in line-of-sight from another sector. This allows the engine to very quickly eliminate most parts of the level from needing to be drawn, instead of having to perform a check against every sector in the level to see what to draw.

Because this is created at compile time and can't be updated efficiently on the fly (you'd use some other engine if you wanted that), having moving sectors is impossible without causing some huge rendering issues. Even ZDoom's polyobjects had some strict limitations until fairly recently on where they can be moved to due to this.

The Build engine (Duke Nukem 3D's engine) can do moving sectors, but if you tried to make a level in Build that has as many sectors visible at once as something like KDIZD the engine would grind to a halt very quickly. It sacrifices some efficiency to have those features.

All right. How about 3D models?

How about an engine actually suited to this kind of thing?

All right. The ZDoom polyobjects do use dynamic BSP lines. Why can't that be extended to sectors with floors and ceilings?

Dragonsbrethren said:

How about an engine actually suited to this kind of thing?

no fun allowed

I did this in Hacx by having a bunch of lines trigger a series of instant-floor-lower actions to progressively widen the crack. It's not perfect, since it depends on player movement, but it gets the point across.

Xaser: that's probably the best method, and you can put a voodoo doll on a conveyor to remove the dependency on player movement.

See also the blue key / spiderdemon hatch in 1994tu map15 for something similar.

Xaser said:

I did this in Hacx by having a bunch of lines trigger a series of instant-floor-lower actions to progressively widen the crack. It's not perfect, since it depends on player movement, but it gets the point across.

Voodoo guns uses a simpler version of this method to simulate doors opening on a hinge I believe. I've often wondered why the technique wasn't automated in map editors the way steps are.

Sorry, if this is for Skulltag, why can't you map out the edges for each step and then instantly lower each sector progressively? I've seen a similar effect done with water flats turning into blood, and it looks pretty decent. A simple script and a few spare minutes for mapping out the cracks is all that is needed here. The more sectors you have, the smoother it appears. I think even Hexen does something like this.

Yeah, everyone kept saying it wasn't possible, so that was the first thing that came to my mind. im gonna try that and see what i can do.

I think a few sectors lowering smooothly in sequence would probably look better than a bunch of them instantly dropping one by one as a crude frame animation. Maybe add a Radius_Quake for good measure.

@Xaser: What, no voodooscript?