Forcer/Grabber idea

[andy1976uk]

I don't know if this is possible, but I was thinking it'd be good if you could apply the force *trying not to sound too much like Obi Wan*, be that positive or negative, to a rectangular area as opposed to a single point....this could be quite useful for things like tractor beams and allow you to lift large objects very easily. How difficult would this be?

[Syranide]

Not really possible, you cannot define blocks with special properties. Tracing single lines is possible however as it does now. So not really possible.

[Vitalremains]

Why couldn't it be done ? By adding 2 settable axis (y,z) to the beam dimension contraptions would be some much fun.

[Syranide]

I'm not talking problems imposed on how to do it, the problem is you cannot really trace anything but lines in realtime with reasonable performance.

[Galafk]

for the aligner i was thinking of something like a stacker... you see behind front ect. So you can get a side. And Smartsnap is able to get center. Now you just need a way to copy paste prop and maybe to make both used props non collide to each other... though i do not see a real problem there.

[-=Fox=-]

I'm not talking problems imposed on how to do it, the problem is you cannot really trace anything but lines in realtime with reasonable performance.[/b]

I think what Syranide is saying is that you cannot create a detection "Field", to do so would take at least 100 times the computing power for something say a 10x10 detection grid... imagine trying to run 100 rangers... it would have the same effect.

So performance wise, its not something that can be done without killing everyone with 2 FPS....

HOWEVER! (as always with me)

You CAN make a LAZY detection field where you use ONE ranger to look in each spot for a fraction of a second to see if something is there, and limit the range of the ranger, and you would effectively have a 1 Ranger Detection Field. The only variable that is a problem is configuring an E-Gate to control the ranger so it looks in a certain spot for a certain time before looking in another spot.

So if you wanted to simulate 10 rangers you would need to give the ranger 10 X/Y coords to look at, and a maximum of 10 coords per second could be looked at in about a second (going any faster just doesn't work ). If you wanted to simulate 100 rangers, it would take about 10 seconds to look in all the spots (if you used 4 rangers it would take about 2.5 seconds).

SO! although you can't effectively have a detection Field you CAN simulate one and it won't bake your video card in the process

And thats just for the actual detection to see if something is there.