Pagers, Paths and Vehicle-mounted gunning/

[angrymule]

Okay, I've come across a few things that i'd like to code and it would be nice if some people could tell me how and if they are (still) possible.

 

In GTA3 you get the nifty pager in the corner of the screen popping in and telling you snippets of news. Is this feature available in Vice City/San An? As in, did they leave it in?

 

In some missions you end up chasing or protecting a ped-driven vehicle which moves along a pre-specified route. I've tried doing this but my game always crashes and I haven't found any tutorials that deal with this.

 

Once i've found out how to follow a route with AI i'd like to mount the player to a vehicle to allow him to fire out the back (like in the heli mission pp 86') with a BF injection. Is this possible?

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[dertyjerzian]

maybe if you are friends with Nubbel, he can help with the paths part because he did some really cool things to make a ped drive a path in SA.

 

[Opius]

The pager was a function only available in GTA3 and simply consisted of feeding it a text string.

 

You could replicate something similar in SA using the 2D interface opcodes, but I suspect it would be more trouble than it's worth.

 

As for the missions: /DATA/PATHS/CARREC.IMG contains all the paths used, but I'm unsure how they're actually applied through the mission script. This is only really relevant for SA, although a similar function exists in VC. I'm unsure whether the topic survived the recent pruning, but you could try searching for 'wanderer'.

[dertyjerzian]

Opius, do you suspect that maybe those paths in that img are maybe called by an external script and so the main seemssss to not call them maybe? Maybe's make stuff sound pathetic

 

If not, I wonder:

 

Steve's map cleaner removes the interiors img... I guess it auto loads because adding it to my stripped installation crashes it. Perhaps same is such with the paths img you talk of? Because there are LOTS of traffic lines that drive around my new map when I'm cruising around. Not in an orderly way for my roads, of course.

[Opius]

Sort of a derail, but ALL the paths in-game are stored compiled in the NODE files in /DATA/PATHS/. Any paths in the IPL files seem to be ignored.

 

This may have something to do with the 'dontbuildpaths' line in stream.ini. Perhaps during development, the paths would be collected from the IPLs and compiled into the currently-used NODE files.

[angrymule]

Is there an opcode in vice city for displaying a load screen for a certain amount of time? If so could I bring up the normal top-right text then overlay an image over it to make it look like some sort of phone/text device? It'd probably look awful but i'd be willing to give it a trial.

 

By load screens I mean the TXD files which contain black bitmaps with text on them such as "Marco's bistro, Liberty City" and "Vice Beach, outside Ken's office."

 

I've not tried adding alpha to these TXDs, but it does look like they are just pasted over the screen.

 

Ye?

[Opius]

You can, but since they're used like the fade() opcodes, you're just going to have the image blended against a black (or a custom colour of your choice) background.

 

In short, alphas won't work how you want them to with splash screens.

[angrymule]

Poop. Is there no printxy - ish opcode for VC? (what i mean by this is print in position x,y on screen).

[Opius]

There's a series of opcodes all containing the work 'text_draw' which can be used to place text in a specific 2D location on screen. It may look like it only accepts 640x480, but it's scaled to the actual resolution.

 

So regardless of resolution 640x0 will always be the top-right corner, 640x480 the bottom-right, 0x480 the bottom-left, etc.

 

The other opcodes apart from the one that actually draws the text allows you to set things like the colour, size, etc. of the text. These need to be executed before the real text_draw command is issued though.

[angrymule]

Okay thank you. You've been very helpful.