Breakthrough in Geomerging! Merge Movable Objects with the map geometry.

You my good sir, are full of win. I imagine many good maps in the near future... Excellent find. You deserve all the props you are getting.

 

OK, so I got it working fine as I said, just the curved bit of a dumpster sticking out of the ground all nice and straight, so I saved it. But when I loaded it up the next time it was sitting there fully out of the ground again. Am I still doing something wrong?

Oh and BTW, you can use doors to push the double wall under the ground in the first place, I did it this way and it was quicker as you don't have to start a new round etc, and easier as you have much more of the wall visible to grab on to.

 

Ok I finally got it to work. Thank you, it was exactly what you said about not grabbing it after its gone under the ground. I did notice that the dumpster had a tendency to move around a little when you walk on it, but nothing drastic.

With regard to the door method for lowering the wall, here are the steps:
-Place the wall (I used a double wall so I had more space to put the final object on) and surround it by guides, other walls work best.
-Place doors upright into the top surface of the wall, so that they are upright but resting on their longest side. Doors interlock with other objects when they are being placed, they interlock the most on the edge with the little round handle bit on the door, so use this side. I used 4 doors all along the wall so that I could grab the wall right in the middle.
-Grab the wall, it will sink underneath the ground, pushed by the doors, then you just save the game, quit, restart it and follow the next steps.

This is pretty much just the door method for geomerging, mentioned in the Forging 101 section on geomerging, but it saves alot of time here.
Unfortunately, you cant use doors to push the moveable object under the ground as doors don't interlock with moveable objects.

 

Thanks for the help and the crediting, glad I could help in a find as good as yours.
This really needs to be added to the forging 101 section, it could be a great advance in making more interesting ground surfaces.

Oh and BTW, do you know if the wall has to stay there permanently? Or can it be reused?

 

I tried removing the wall and the object stays there, but as soon as you touch it, it falls away and it lost. So the wall has to remain there.
This will mean that the technique could require alot of resources each time, but if you plan it well and try to place the walls so they can support as many items as possible it could be really useful.

 

I rode a mongoose over the dumpster and it was a really nice little ramp that worked perfectly (it didn't move when I did this either for some reason) so hopefully people who make race, mini game and puzzle maps will find this useful, as well as regular maps for interesting jumps and stuff, as you said Hoff

 

i thought of this i just thought it would spit out of the groung upwards....

 

The really important bit of this technique is going under the ground so you can grab the object once its been pushed under, changing its spawn point to below the ground, and also so that you can place the wall (just as I found out). I think that's the real find here and could be used more and more as people think about it.

I'm personally having ideas about using the wall-underground method to geomerge immoveable objects. It could really help in getting them flat and at the right height. If I find anything useful using this method I'll be sure to post back after my experiments, thanks again to Hoff for finding this.

 

have you made sure they can't be dislodged with rockets and nades?

this is actually very helpful to know as i've been having a problem trying to use double boxes to create slight ramps and they fall through the level entirely.

i imagine the reason your boxes kept popping out when you were trying to make the tut has to do with the problem i was having, the exact center of the structure seems to dictate on my boxes whether or not foundry tries to force the box up onto my anchors or down and out of the level. i guess in order to do what i wanted to do i just need to get a teleporter down there and anchor my double box underneath.

if you wanted it higher than the halfway mark you might be able to secure it with a tele but because it's trying to go up it'd probably be real easy to dislodge.

 

I've been experimenting with going under the floor for a while and have come up with a few interesting points, as well as alot of disappointing discoveries. If any of this is already known then I am not trying to claim anything as a new discovery if it isn't. First,

It does work well for this, what you do is you push the wall against the underside of the floor to get it flat then just place it in the right place. But you can't float the walls very far under the ground (more about this later) so if your pushing stuff really far into the ground then it won't work. Useful, but has its limits.

I've had a go pushing other objects through the floor, you can do quite a lot using doors. You can push spawn points/starting points underground and then place them on suspended walls underneath the map, unfortunately they don't work. You don't seem able to spawn outside of the map geometry.
The same is true of teles. Its a bit harder to push receiver nodes under the ground but is possible. But the same problem occurs that when you try to go through the sender it says "teleporter is blocked".

I think both of these problems occur because of the limits in placing walls underground. I've been able to move the walls around quite a bit before they disappear when you place them, but there seems to be a built in limit. When I float a wall any lower than a certain distance (just under the height of a spartan) and save it, when I load up the map again it is higher than I placed it, back at the limit of just less than a spartan's height.
I think that you can't actually fit in this space whilst in player mode, which may be why you don't spawn down there, and is almost definitely why you cant teleport down there (when you place a tele on top of a wall and activate it you can just see the top of the green bit poking out of the floor when you are above).

Maybe if people used thinner objects than walls then it would work, I'm currently in the process of trying some stuff out but will have to wait for tomorrow.

To Hoff, if you see anything you think is useful then could you stick it in the OP as well? I'll keep trying to find a way to get players outside and will post back soon.

 

I've seen this done before actually..a vid on youtube. But no explanation of how to do it. Good job man...+ rep

 

This is truly amazing, something many people have wanted to know, but I have one question. Can you drive the wraiths, warthogs, etc while they are beneath? And if you can, do they stay underneath or come up?

 

Nice work, i was thinking about dooing something like this i just never got around to or i didn't know if it would work,. But you figured that out for me .. Great job

 

I wanna try this but im still not really sure what to do. Please make a video tut!