Snowball damage!

Hey all, I'm trying to make a quickie map that involves the gravity gun and people pummeling each other with various snow goodies.

What I'm stuck on right now is exactly how to get the snowballs to perform like, well, snowballs. Basically any amount of damage destroys them, and if you shoot one into an opponent with the gravity gun it does 25 damage. I was able to get the first part to work, but the second part I have no control over. It does 50 damage each time, and I think that's just because of their mass and because they're set to Rock (looks most realistic when they break). Is there any way I could make these deal only 25 damage? If not I guess it wouldn't really matter that much, just trying to keep the gameplay balanced, or at least let me try balancing it myself.

The other issue thus far is icicles. Yes, they're fun, and I have them set up so when you grab them off the roofs they orient themselves to be pointing directly away from you (though they spin when you shoot them, sadly). However, these are set up in the same way as the snowballs, except they're Glass instead of Rock. Now, I want them to be Glass because it has the closest sound and gib effects, but they don't do any damage! I try shooting them into another player and they just go poof and shatter. I think all the damage that anything in my map does so far is solely dependent on their material and mass...just occurred to me that I might try scaling the mass to alter the amount of damage, but is there another more direct way? Thanks.

sounds like a fun map, let me know when you plan on releasing it, have
you tried messing around with their mass or density values? What entity
are you using specifically?

It's just a func_physbox. And yeah, it should be interesting...might take a lot of tweaking to make the snow act more like snow, but I'm not sure how much of that I'll be able to do. I think I'll just go with scaling the mass for now.

You could possibly try making a trigger_hurt around the ball (setting
its parent) and changing the dammage (a negitive value for the trigger
hurt will add life to you BTW)

But then if you walk on top of the snowball when its on the ground it will hurt/heal you.

I said possibly :biggrin:

Well, I could make it so that you would have to pick up the snowball to make the trigger_hurt active, but if I could avoid creating a trigger_hurt + name it for each individual snowball that would be preferable :wink:

That method with the trigger_hurt would also mean if you miss then you wouldn't want to touch it afterwards...

but if I could avoid creating a trigger_hurt + name it for each individual snowball that would be preferable :wink:

"paste special" does this for you (renames and ties to gether after youve made a base set up)

Ooh, thanks, I didn't realize that tool didn't rename/preserve relationships like that. That could come in handy in the future...as for now...there's still the issue of disabling the trigger_hurt if you miss the guy, and I think the only way you could do that would be with some default delay, but I don't think that would be that effective.

What? Make them into a func_physbox and give them a high mass scale (and no prop data etc. so they have infinite health) if you want them to do more damage when thrown about. And remember the "don't take physics damage" flag.

yeah dont pay attention to the trigger hurt thing I was just brain stroming IF the mass scale didnt work

Ok, but the issue is that they're doing too much damage, not too little. And I DO want them to break on impact. Hmm, and it doesn't seem like the scaling will work either, for some reason. Snowballs with mass scale at 0.5, 0.75, 0.875, and 0.9 all cause 5 damage on impact, and 0.95 and 1.0 cause 50 damage on impact. Guess I'll just go with 50 damage snowballs rolls eyes

Maybe there is an entity that controls the physics impact dammage, like
world_something. And If you want them to break then set the health
ammount.

MAYBE (I just thought of it), in the input/output tabs, you could have
it when the snow ball hits someone, it triggers a negitive health to
the "client" (that is what the engine refers to you as), and this will
reduce it to a 25

I already tried the second thing there, but it's not !activator OR !player. Actually, I found a bit of a bug regarding that. If I set it to damage the activator by x amount when it's broken, and you shoot the object into another object with the same setting the game crashes. I believe this is because when object A hits object B, object A is destroyed, but then object B, because its destroyed also, tries dealing 25 damage to object A, which is dead. Or perhaps they're trying to apply damage to each other, when possibly neither of them exist anymore? shrug

Yeah sorry I cant be of anymore help, if you want my oppinion I wouldnt mind the snow balls causing 50 Hp, cause other wise while one person is trying to kill you with 5 snoballs, the other can kill you with the AR faster.

Yeah, I was thinking 50 would be fine, actually. And uh, in a map where you're supposed to be having a snowball fight...let's just say there'll be a few entities in there to strip the players of their conventional weapons :razz:

i love your idea, but i am making a snow map (not snowball, just a snowy dm map) and i cant find a snowy ground texture, any help? :razz:

Try exporting the snow texture from CS: S and using that...there's a tut on here for custom texs.