Learning the ropes: literally

[R. Peters]

I have a bit of experience with ropes (see ~1:50 at the video).

What would you like to know how to do?

Well my main questions are as follows, some of them have already been answered by the previous posters but:

- is there a way to stop ropes going through the floor? (i.e, have some collision).

- is there a way to make ropes disappear or appear? (something like set entity active, 'active' for the rope areas doesn't seem to work.)

However, the main purpose of this thread is to help anyone who's trying to work with ropes, not just me I couldn't see any major threads about ropes, so I figured i'd start one. Any additional insight into 'tricks' with ropes would be appreciated by me, and hopefully more

1. Attach a small "invisible_box_mass" to the rope, that's what the EndBody should point to. If it's small, then when it collides with the floor, it should stop and the rope shouldn't go further down. However, the ropes themselves don't have collision, and that is an unavoidable problem. If you notice in base Amnesia (and in the custom story I'm working on that I posted), the ropes are built in a way so that it is impossible for them to actually hit something and go through them (minus those pulleys that hold the ropes together, but they're designed to accommodate that and look nice).

Note that the invisible_box_mass is an object and, even though it is invisible, can still be interacted with like it's an object. If you push into it, the rope will follow the object, it will fall and the rope will go with it. So the rope won't act like a real rope, it'll act like it's a rope attached to a bucket or something.

You can always adjust the parameters of the rope through the RopeAreas. I had to adjust Min and Max length, for example, to prevent the first two ropes (from the crank to the two pulleys) so that they wouldn't sink so deep from the floor. Good values would be like .5 -> 4, or .5 -> 3.5 or so. You have to experiment and test it out yourself.

2. Have you tried SetEntityActive? I myself haven't, and this is not used anywhere in the base game. Maybe that'll work, use it on the PosNode and RopeArea and see if the rope still exist afterwards. If not, then I do not think this is possible.

Cheers That's a great work-around, i've tried it in a basic way and it seems to work. Sadly setEntityActive doesn't seem to work though. I guess there are some things I will have to accept Amnesia isn't set up for doing, but this should help. Thanks