Adding Ladders

[ScatterBox]

Basically my mapper needs ladders coded in for the map to work properly, and I don't even know where to start. :/ I know that it should be pretty straight forward, but I'm just stuck. Any help would be appreciated.

[Spike]

Engines with halflife support should support a func_wall entity with a .skin of -16 to mean 'this is a ladder', and give you physics that react accordingly, which is what I'd recommend for users of the FTE engine (this feature needs no qc changes, of course).
Sadly, this is not the same thing as halflife bsp support, as ladders tend to already have been hacked into various mods in vile horrendous and buggy ways - the pinnacle of which being extrasr4. Which will not work half the time, and leave you stuck in a wall for the rest.

If you want a generic solution that is 100% bug free, prepare for a lot of pain.
Essentually, you need to somehow disable gravity within the ladder area and to exagurate any up/down motion of the player, in order to allow the player free movement up and down the ladder by just looking+moving. Needing to use swimup+swimdown buttons just for a ladder is annoying, especially as people will expect +jump to move up instead, and will forget that swimup+down even exist.

If you want super-hacky-works-anywhere-but-super-lame ladders, then you can create a series of steps instead. 16qu up, 1qu in. at 1qu, the user is unlikely to notice that the ladder is actually steps. However, they will climb the ladder unreasonably fast and thus such 'ladders' should be kept small. These ladders are an easy hack, and do not require any qc or engine changes, can easily be attached to moving trains and platforms and doors and stuff, but they do suck so be aware of that.

[frag.machine]

[leileilol]

I still don't understand why Half-Life 2 decided to do a worse ladder system...

[Max_Salivan]

[ScatterBox]

[Cobalt]

Why not make one big custom sized trigger field that envelops the entire side of the ladder where the player would touch, as opposed to a touch field trigger for each bar? Seems to me movement would be the same as long as the player is within the bounds / touching of the trigger field.

You could also slow him down when he touches the bottom or top of the ladder by calculating the absmin/max of the field. When using DP, the .movement float might come in handy here too because its sensing the keys the client presses to move as I understand it.

Would also be neat if there were frames that represented the player climbing to give the full effect. self.fixangle = TRUE , also might be a good idea to turn on else yaw rotation might look strange when climbing a ladder if using a stock player mdl.

[Chip]

I had a ladder function somewhere in an old mod, let me dig it up and share it with you.

I also had a nice video, but I lost it.

[Nahuel]

better ladder are found in quoth (with multiple engine support, no bugs and perfect ), but the code is not released (i think the autors are using qc 1.06 , not really GPL code or they are using a misterious code from illuminati reptilian coders)

[goldenboy]

The best QC ladders are in RMQ.

My pet theory why Quoth is closed source is that they are simply embarrassed because the code is horrible or because they grabbed so much stuff from Scourge of Armagon and a bunch of other mods. Being closed source also creates a bit of a mystery among the less well informed.

[Spiney]

[leileilol]

Extras r4 ladders break in DP due to it being a dirty gravity hack... Quoth is allegedly a GPL violating closed source Extras r4 fork.

[goldenboy]

Spike fixed the RMQ ladders in July 2012 or something. I have no idea if that commit is in Schism.