First of all I'm going to say that I love this game. It is awesome!



BUT, I have a slight problem: ladders don't seem to work.


I'll start climbing a ladder and the actor will seem to get caught, fall backwards then fall off the ladder. The only way I can seem to get around this is to jetpack up a bit, get stuck on the ladder then jetpack some more.

I'm not sure if this is a problem in the game or whether I'm missing something and doing it wrong so I was wondering if some of you guys could help me out

Actor movement is still somewhat of an issue in Cortex, and it's not likely to get all that much better. You'd have more luck using your jetpack.

Couldn't we create an invisible sort of lift, that activates once you start "climbing" the ladder? It might not look exactly like you're climbing a ladder, but it could have the same effect.

Why don't we make a Lua'd up ladder that recognizes if an actor's near it, then kinda propel said actor up/down depending on which direction the player pressed?
We've got grav-lifts already, we can incorporate that to these ladders.

Bit of a tangent/rant here but yeah, I've always wondered why grav lifts are as simple as they are. They don't even allow the actor to go sideways without contorting his body horribly to jetpack out.
The ideal (and it wouldn't be too difficult) would be a grav lift that accepts input from direction movements when player controlled and from waypoints when not. The purpose and mechanism of the direction one is obvious, the waypoint one would pick the actor's closest waypoint (I think there's a function for that) and check its x and y pos. Then if the actor's pos is < or > that it would move him in the necessary direction. It'd get a bit more complex with multiple exits though since you'd have to see which exit is closest to the waypoint and even then there'd still probably be a lot of screwups if the waypoint is placed somewhere that confuses the script.

Anyway, if you simply have more advanced lifts then ladders are pretty unnecessary. There'd be no point in having a floaty lua ladder that looks bad when you could just have a floaty lua lift that doesn't.


Edit: So I've been working on this for a bit. The player controlled movement is done and works well. Now for the waypoints.
Edit2: For anyone who cares waypoints have been mostly dealt with but are not quite perfect. The elevators will move an actor up or down when its waypoint is above or below its position and they'll also move the actor sideways in the direction of the waypoint when their y positions are roughly equal. I plan to make it so they can also act as tunnels to move actors sideways so you can effectively use them to navigate a base and I also have a few problems to work through but I'll deal with all that tomorrow since it's late here.
Edit3: Look here if you'd like to help me out with tables.

I've found that ladders work pretty well as long as your actor is relatively light and not burdened with heavy weaponry. Unfortunately, it's the heavy actors that need the ladders the most; the light ones can fly wherever they need to go.

THIS IS THE REASON WHY ALL ACTORS NEED JETPACKS.


I'm talking to you warhammer 40k space marines dude.


i'm not giving everyone a ♥♥♥♥ grappling hook when simply giving them a weak jetpack does the trick oh so much better.