Sorry if I sound a bit out of it. I need sleep...lol. But HW before sleep.
The vision I have for a HW Mod is to be able to link upto five maps into one multiplayer environment.
Each room would have its own resources to collect to feed the war machine of the players.
The only problem is linking all of the maps together so that a player can leave on map and find theirself on another one.
How I theoretically solved this problem is by using the same SlipGates that the JunkYard Dogs use in one of the HW 1 missions.
I was thinking that since the slipgates have two points where a ship enters and is then transported to the other point without using fuel or its own velocity but instead using the velocity of the slipgate itself it could be possible to create such a system too link to different maps together.
But the question is how do we build this slipgate so that when it is triggered by a ship passing through it to establish a link in a corresponding system to create the exit point?
Would the file have to be located in the .level file as a .dist file that is constantly read by the HW game all of the time to make the link?
Another question is are there files that HW constantly reads that could be used as a connecting pipeline between two different maps?
Basically how I see the slipgate file working is rather simple.
A base folder with all of the attributes for the insertion points of players, resources etc would be present. There would also be an individual folder for each corresponding map.
In each folder there would be a special file containing the link information to make the connection.
Once the slipgate was activated HW would read the file parameters from the .level file that would direct the signal to the slipgate program. From there the slipgate program would read through its list of available options which would then bring up a list of avaible exit points that would then be displayed to the player so they could choose which system they wanted to slipgate into.
Basically the routing parameters might look something like this.
*Gate Activation \mainfolder.level\slipgate function\(Available Destinations) --------|
(Map1 Folder) ----- Map1.level ----- (reads the Map1.level file and loads the map up)
(Map2 Folder) ----- Map2.level -----(reads the Map2.level file and loads the map up)
(Map3 Folder) ----- Map3.level -----(reads the Map3.level file and loads the map up)
Basically if the programming in HW that transfers the player to the next mission map can be incorporated into Slip Gates being the threshold where the player crosses over to the next map then it could be possible to create a multi - map environment that would present a new era in game play for HW.
