Advanced Prop Spawner (Wired) - Spawn Entities and Contraptions!

[Mr. Accident]

If you're like me, chances are at some point you've wished there was an easy way to spawn objects with simple constraints or other doo-dads attached -- for example, a missile prop with an attached thruster. Or just a way to spawn thrusters at all.

Well, I decided I'd have a shot at doing something about it, and spent the last couple of weeks cooking up the Advanced Prop Spawner:

Basically, it's a wired prop spawner with some important new capabilities:

• Can spawn any duplicable entity, not just prop_physics.
• Spawners connected by constraints form a network that will automatically be spawned in its entirety (with constraints intact!) when any one spawner in the network is spawned.
• Right-clicking an entity with the Advanced Spawner STOOL converts it and all attached entities into spawners.
• The spawners are duplicable, unlike the Advanced Dupe Paster.

Together, these capabilities mean you can create "contraption spawners," not just individual entity spawners. Observe this informative illustration:



I also added a couple of options that I felt were lacking in the original prop spawner:

• Ability to apply spawner's material to spawned prop
• Ability to transmit spawner's velocity to spawned prop

Spawning a network of spawners also correctly applies duplication information to all the spawned entities, so you can make a spawner for a contraption containing wire circuits, and each contraption you spawn from it will have a perfectly working copy of those circuits!

(With one limitation: currently it isn't able to duplicate wired physics constraints -- Wired Winch, Wired Hydraulic, and so on. I should be able to fix these up soon for a future release though.)

This is still sort of a beta release, so let me know if you encounter any problems. I had one issue with creating a lot of nocollides resulting in hl2.exe crashing, which I believe I have fixed, but if anything like that happens be sure to post about it. Also let me know if you have any ideas, feature requests, or just general feedback.

[TomyLobo]

nice picture
but we already have it. it's called paster

you can create a paster by copying a contraption with the advanced duplicator and pressing reload where you want the paster.

[Lyinginbedmon]

Pasters don't dupe last time I checked, or at least not with any of their wires intact.

[TomyLobo]

they work fine on my missile

[Mr. Accident]

nice picture
but we already have it. it's called paster

you can create a paster by copying a contraption with the advanced duplicator and pressing reload where you want the paster.

Yeah, I'm aware of the paster, and I was aware of it when I started on this project. I mentioned some of the problems with the paster in my first post. :P

Here are some of the key differences:

• The advanced dupe paster makes it very hard to control exactly where your contraption appears, and at what orientation. (I never even managed to figure out how to control the orientation of the spawned contraption; it doesn't seem possible.) With the advanced prop spawner, you just maneuver the spawner into the exact position you want.
• Related to above, the paster gives you no visual feedback about what the contraption will look like and where it will appear.
• The paster has something like a three-second delay between spawns. The advanced spawners will spawn as quickly as they get inputs.
• The paster is limited to working with saved advanced dupes, and if you want to do a slight modification of the contraption, you have to spawn it, change it, and then re-save in the advanced duplicator and create a new paster. With advanced prop spawners, you can simply add and remove constraints dynamically. You can also easily move the individual spawner entities around, if you want to experiment with things spawning in different positions.
• The paster cannot be duped with the advanced duplicator: as soon as you do, it stops functioning. A contraption spawner made with the advanced prop spawner STOOL can be duped and saved for later use.

Basically, using the advanced dupe paster when all you want to do is spawn a simple contraption with a couple of simple constraints in a predictable, controllable fashion is a frustrating nightmare, especially since you can't save your paster contraption for later use. The Advanced Prop Spawner makes it all very easy and responsive, not to mention persistable.

[malum]

You left the ??? stage out in your graphic.

[pl0x]

You left the ??? stage out in your graphic.

i knew there was something missing.

[Beer]

Just throwing this out there... if a paster or an advanced prop spawner were duplicatable, you could theoretically create a self-replicating device. Never a good thing in the hands of a mingebag.

i.e. A paster that creates pasters which create pasters, etc.

[Mr. Accident]

Just throwing this out there... if a paster or an advanced prop spawner were duplicatable, you could theoretically create a self-replicating device. Never a good thing in the hands of a mingebag.

Yeah, TomyLobo brought that up in the [ame="http://www.facepunch.com/showthread.php?p=15953054#post15953054"]Facepunch thread[/ame] as well. So, no Von Neumann machines, eh? I suppose it makes sense to limit mingebags to linear growth instead of exponential, but in reality I think a server's prop/spawner limits would make the difference between the two somewhat academic.

In any case, you can't make self-replicating machines with the Advanced Prop Spawner either, but its ability to make a simple contraption spawner that is a part of another contraption (say, a missile launcher that spawns its own missiles to reload) fills a niche that until now had been sorely empty, IMHO. I know that I've seen a fair bit of demand for such a thing on the requests boards, anyway. :3

[jayg20769]

Nice work, I was hoping for something like this for my Missile Launcher. Waiting for that damned paster to load was a nightmare.