So, I guess there was a new Duke Nukem Forever trailer put up a couple hours ago. I saw it. It kinda sucks. It's just a shot of Duke lifting weights interspaced with a few clips of aliens going "BWARGH." Why no clips of actual gameplay? Did they just figure they might as well not even bother getting our hopes up? Frankly, I'd like to play the game they showed back in '01. That looked interesting. Makes me wonder if there's an incomplete version of it floating around somewhere in 3D Realms' offices.

Also, damnit, I keep getting sucked into Gmod. Damn thing's gonna be the death of me. I'm sick, I've got THINGS growing in my sinuses, and what do I do instead of sleep? I BUILD THINGS. I spent most of yesterday with Ailure and Blastgoggles in GM_Construct goofing around. I saw a video of a "perfect headshot" turret awhile back made using Wiremod, and I think I managed to reverse-engineer it. http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e.....struct0114.jpg I turned it into a kind of ghetto forcefield. It's operated entirely by thrusters. The plate on top is connected to the pole with a ballsocket joint. The yaw movement is controlled by a modified version of the delta turret gate setup, where the thruster power is controlled partly by the bearing from the target; the farther away the beacon sensor is from the target, the more power the thrusters get. This alone would cause it to be very wobbly though, so it's mostly controlled by a delta chip, so that the faster the bearing changes, the more powerful the thrusters become. In the original design shown on Tricky's Tutorials, the bearing is given a multiplier of 2, while the delta gets a multiplier of 10. I changed the delta multiplier to 25, kept the bearing multiplier at 2, and set the thruster multiplier to 1. This makes it EERILY stable, but it doesn't quite track as fast as I'd like, so I may increase the bearing multiplier later.
The pitch is controlled by same method, only using the elevation of the beacon sensor instead of the bearing. The problem with that, though, is that the target finder always locks onto a player's FEET. So I followed a tutorial on Tricky's involving trig functions. The perfect headshot turret works the same way, by assuming a player is around 60 units tall, and dividing that by the distance from the player to the beacon sensor, and inputing that into an ATan(deg) gate, then adding that to the elevation reading from the beacon sensor. I did the same thing, except using a value of about 30, so that it always aims at a player's midsection. This actually makes it a little more accurate, since a headshot turret can be avoided just by ducking. (I assume ...)
The roll (or lack thereof) is controlled by a gyroscope. Basically just another delta chip with a high multiplier added to the roll angle data itself and applied to thrusters to keep it level.
And finally, a forcer on the front which fires if any player comes within 400 units, keeping them at a distance. Could also work on props, I suppose, but you'd have to make sure the target finder doesn't target the owner's props, or it would target itself and all hell would break loose.
So yeah. Ghetto forcefield. It's an ungodly mess because I haven't learned to use the expression gate yet, and I didn't feel like making the wiring all nice and neat. It's also still quite buggy. The range on the target finder needs to be really high, and it needs to always have a target, because otherwise the trig function will divide by zero and bad things will happen. I'd need, like ... an If-Then gate to keep the distance output at a low, non-zero number ... or maybe a value range gate ... but it already has 17 gates. That's bordering on the absurd.


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