You guys are gonna love this. YouTube - Halo:Reach Forge - Functional Stairs The Window, Coliseum has an invisible barrier. To create your own stairs, place a series of objects just below the invisible surface, but above the visible one. I recommend using cheap and unimportant items to create your steps.
It's certainly a creative use of that invisible surface, but I have a hard time imagining that being used in a competitive map. The quantity of objects in such a small area is just begging for framerate issues.
I plan on using several sets of stairs in one of my upcoming competitive maps. I don't think it will cause any framerate lag unless they are in an open part of your map. But you can always decrease the number of objects used by creating steps out of objects that already have a few steps in them. Brace Pieces for example.
That's true. I'm just worried that with forge world being as laggy as it is, making it popular to do things like this is just going to exacerbate the issue. I'd rather play on an efficiently forged utilitarian design than a beautiful but laggy one. I guess I've never really been all about the aesthetics. Even a passing glance at my map history should tell anyone that I don't have a clue when it comes to aesthetics.
That's beautiful, I don't think it will have such a horrible impact on lag (there's no z-fighting, and those are simple objects), but you're spending a lot of items and getting that much closer to the OLN (or Global Item Limit)
This looks good... however I feel that its a waste of the limited resources that we are given. I am half way through my second map and I spend alot of time on asthetics, something which takes up alot of my budget. I just cant see this helping
I think it's a cool trick that could be used in some interesting ways, given leftover budget and stuff. Either way, nice find!
On a small map one could very end up with a surplus of pieces and dollars to be used on something aesthetically cool like this. I'm finishing a pretty intense small-combat map (probably for 3 vs. 3 or smaller) and I have over 7000 in budget left, plus most of my pieces in many categories - still have weapons to do but that's hardly going to break the bank. If there were room I could easily put in a staircase just because it looks cool.
That's very cool, and very creative. Do you know of other objects that have invisible walls? I could have sworn I remember some more...
I know that the wall and double wall both have a slight invisible wall. Found out when I was looking for flat bridges for my Derelict map.
Well, I know that you can adjust the effective area of certain objects (I remember being able to do it with weapons and stuff, I don't remember about structures), but if you can edit the effective area of structures, couldn't anything have that invisible barrier to it?
Just this morning I was thinking "This map idea would be great if I could uses stairs". People keep coming up with clever tricks like this, I knew about the window's invisible barrier, there are barriers on a lot of things in Reach which would have just been part of the map geometry in previous games, like the plasma burn marks in the walls on Boardwalk are treated as flat walls. This will help break up some of the monotony I can see developing in one of my current maps, those coliseum walls are great for large areas but the map starts to look boring when you have them popping up round every corner.
I think he does, and I don't believe that sets an object's physical boundaries. It probably would be a really bad idea if it did. It would be useful to one map out of a thousand, and cause headaches for everybody else who accidentally messed with it without knowing what it did.
Yeah that's what I was thinking when I considered uses. Another thought would be to use the stairs as a central focal point on a small map. But I guess that depends on your small map. My 2nd map (still a work in progress) is relatively small and I have spent around 5500-6000 building a central bridge structure with 2 tiers although it is the focal point and centre piece of the map.
I hope to use this if I ever get into making smaller maps, but with invasion maps there isn't a great surplus budget. At least in the video, it looked like the player was actually floating above the stairs; it might be difficult to get the pieces set perfectly. I remember some pieces stick out slightly more than affects the player, so you can sink into it slightly. Using these objects could make the steps actually touch the player's feet.
The same trick can also be done using the grid, rather than Coliseum Windows. The grid itself has pretty much no thickness, but its invisible surrounding box lets objects placed on it float a little above it, more than the Coliseum Window I think. Perhaps the only downside is that you only get 2, but they are very large so it depends on how you design and use them on your map. Anyway, I did find them much easier to get in the right place than the Windows.
This is an amazing find. I'm probably going to put this to use in another 1v1 map I'm about to begin working on. Have anymore secret tricks you wanna share bro?