Visitor Center WIP Part 2 - The Cafe Continues

Doing some more work on the cafe. This is the place where we learned that the entire reason why Jurassic Park failed was because Ellie Sattler failed to respect the Electricity God. It's true, she admitted it:

But I made a mistake too, I didn't have enough respect for that power and it's out now.

Seriously, who wrote that bit of dialogue? haha

mmm, 10 FPS... Tastes like justice.

Seems I'm going to have to do some optimization on the mesh of the room in general. That doesn't surprise me any though, this mesh was from when I finally mastered accuracy but before I mastered proper polygon management. I'll probably take the dome light meshes down to six sides instead of the current 8 and the frames above where the fans will go I'll probably do as a texture instead of as a mesh. Plus, looking at the wireframe, the frames of the windows and above the Gift Shop stairs have some serious polygon issues.

Visitor Center WIP Part 1 - Take A Look At The Nook

So I'm working on getting that Visitor Center from JPO finished.  Mainly because I know it's the part of the park that everyone really wants to see.  Telltale didn't know this, or else we might have spent more time in the Visitor Center in the game.

Today I started by taking the Cafe, which I made for JPO a couple years ago, and finally give it physics and start modelling some furniture, starting with a neat little nook that most people probably never noticed:

And here's what work I've got on that area (And yes, the room itself has physics too, which took a majority of my time today):

I think I've paid too much attention to the movie, haha.  Anyway, I have no idea what the painting is so I just took a photo of Cocos and put it on there. The same painting also goes on the opposite side of the cafe in the same general area.

The lamp disappears between the shot when Grant drops off the kids and when Grant and Ellie find the kids after the kitchen sequence. I theorize one of the raptor's nicked it and that's what took the second raptor so long to enter the kitchen

My Models - Jurassic Park Breaker Box

And here's the model that hppavTest was created specifically for... The breaker box from Jurassic Park.

Originally I was going to make this for Jurassic Park Oblivion.  When you reach the Visitor Center Compound all the facilities would be shut down, you'd have to restart the generator, turn on the breakers, then return to the Control Room.

Then I started work on my recreation of Jurassic Park SNES (which is still in development).  The first thing you do in that game is turn on these breakers, so I thought - why not actually try to implement the original Jurassic Park Oblivion puzzle?

The model I had made for JPO was lost when my old computer's hard drive crashed so I had to recreate it.  Not too hard.  I also had to find where I wrote down the breaker list, which is as follows:

Herbivore Feeding Compound
Visitors Cntr. Compound
Visitors Cntr. Control Rm.
Visitors Cntr. Tour
Genetics / Fertilization / Hatchery
Grounds Tour
Grounds Surveilance System
Maintenance Shed / Bunker
Carnivore Feeding Compound
Raptor Pen Fence
T-Rex Paddock Fence
Perimeter Fence

After double checking to make sure that my list was correct, I set to work on recreating the box itself.  Modelling the box proved to be the easiest part of the whole process.

As I went to implement the box, I started putting each thing in one at a time.  Saving, testing, and backing up after each tiny change.  This is key in making such complex puzzles.

The first puzzle was the primer handle.  Knowing Anne's arm controls are pretty well... clunky, I decided to only have you pull up on the handle once.  As you pull up on the handle, it'll hit a trigger box.  This box changes the texture of the button panel to say "Charged" over the yellow button and it will activate the trigger over the green "Push to Close" button.

The green button was a pain to get working because of the fact that it had to change SO MANY textures.  I had to actually create TWO triggers, one to turn the breakers' center lights on and one to turn on all the green lights.  This is because of the limits on how many actions a trigger can take.  I looked at the triggers for the Cray Puzzle in the Lab level for inspiration (though I still haven't figured out how that puzzle actually works).

But once I got that figured out, I decided that as you turn on the red buttons, you should only be able to turn them on in order top to bottom... This makes it easier to script the "Generator Power On" text and the completion of the puzzle.

Turning on the red buttons took a long time to figure out because Anne's hand kept missing the button due to the physics of the box itself, so I ended up moving the physics and increasing the size of the triggers to be rather large.  It can still be a little quirky to try to activate.

And then came getting that big door to work.  I had never done doors before and I found out the hard way that you needed a Density value to go with the Mass value for the door to be able to move.  I spent way too much time figuring that out.  If I remember right, I found it was the reason why doors didn't work like they were supposed to in Pine Valley.

My Models - Jurassic Park Explorer

Probably one of my most famous models to date is the Jurassic Park Explorer.  Originally intended for Jurassic Park: Oblivion, the explorers were eventually released as a part of a small test level called "hppavTest" which featured a real working breaker box.  I will detail the process of making that breaker box in a later post.

This is actually the second or third time I have modeled the explorers.  Previous attempts were way too high poly for the engine to handle.  Ironically it was a 1130 polygon Explorer mesh I found on Turbo Squid that I used to defeat the 300 polygon limit myth that was prevalent in the early Diehard Forums days.

The explorer model includes 5 working doors, two screens on a separate mesh so you can put whatever you want on them, and are as movie accurate as anything else I have made.  However, only Explorer 05 currently has magnets.  I was going to make magnets for the others but I had computer troubles and only released this after quickly grabbing it before the computer crashed.  Of course those troubles have been solved and I could go back and fix not only the magnets, but the way too high poly bumpers in the near future.

When I was a kid I always wanted to own my own Jurassic Park Explorer.  I thought they were the coolest looking cars I have ever seen.  And yes, I do own the Jungle Explorer toy, haha.  In my opinion, they need a large scaled (like 1:18 or 1:24) diecast series of the cars from Jurassic Park.

Trespasser Characters - The Alpha Raptor

The Alpha Raptor is the game's final boss, located on the summit of Mt. Watson, and is a member of the Tribe C group of Raptors.

As the player plays through the game, they hear a few of the voice overs meant to tell the story of this raptor.

The Alpha Raptor is the first raptor bred by InGen and the first animal cloned on Isla Sorna.  The artificial ovum was fertilized in November 1983. (VH30, VH31)

The raptor was released from the Lab facilities into the open on April 22, 1985. (VH32)  It originally kept to the south, hunting herds there... And it grew very large.  In 1988 it started moving northward towards the mountain (VH40).  Along the way it managed to get into the town but no information on what occurred there is given in the game, just that they discovered that it had used the sewer pipes to enter (VH39).

What is known is that it did eventually make it to the summit of Mt. Watson and lived amongst the heartier Tribe C Raptors.

It appears at the very top of the mountain after Anne radios for help, forcing her to kill it before she can climb over a pile of crates to get to the helipad and wait for rescue.

Unimplemented Idea #1 - Sinking Boat

It was in the early days of Trespasser Modding. 2002.  No one knew about ASA animation in those days.

MikeTheRaptor, I believe, was helping me plan out Jurassic Park the Mod (which is what JPO was called in those days).  The original plot was going to start out with a ship called the Explorer sinking due to hitting some unseen thing underwater. lol, irony.

One question was how to show the sinking of the ship?  There could be an animation but since I only had gMax, which had no renderer, then in game would be the only working option for me.

So I thought about the possibility of using the same mechanism behind the bridge collapse in the demo, ActionType 10:

group TrigWWFall-00 = {
    string Class = "CLocationTrigger"
    bool PlayerEnterTrigger = true
    int FireCount = 1
    int ActionType = 10
    string Target = "S_AlumWw10x2-02"
    int Z = -1
}

The idea was to enclose the ship in a single large box, rest the stern on another large box, and drop a third box onto the ship.

However, since I never even got that far in the initial work on the project, the planned sequence was dropped..  Now, with the discovery of ASA animation, this could be handled much more simply and elegantly.  But this is the kind of thinking outside of the box that was required when we knew nothing about what we were doing.

Trespony

Anne from Trespasser ponified.. Why? Why not?

Link to it on my DeviantArt: MulletManSam