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Pasted Wheel Attachment Question

PostPosted: Fri Jun 13, 2008 1:59 am
by gregtipps
The wheels I use for most of my levels are (mostly regular) 16-sided polygons, so it becomes pretty tedious to change out the wheel materials (rubber vs. metal outside; anchor point vs. freely-moving center) and attaching them to vehicles.

I usually paste the wheel in, delete the vehicle's structural struts that will connect it to the wheel, then re-make those links so that they are linked to the wheel. Has anyone come up with a more efficient way to do it?

I've read McSweeney's posts about his level decompilers; I'd have to learn about A-Run's file/memory representation format, but if I came up with a little algorithm to determine if a connected set of links composes a wheel, it seems like it would be somewhat straightforward to write a hotkey function into the game (of course, Stock would have to do this) that will look at the selected component just dumped from the buffer (right after you've pasted it, like the F and Shift+F reflections), determine if it's a wheel, and if it is, connect its center point to the the nearest point of another piece of material, then move the rest of the components by that offset (so you don't end up with a warped mutant wheel).

Suggestions?

--Greg