[PoC] Elevators

[Abion47]

This seems to be turning into a trend. Here I am extending what I learned about Sequences from the making of the last PoC into making a working elevator.

As usual, you can grab the map and associated files on the Steam Workshop. EDIT: This and my other PoC mods are now available on MoDDB as well.

An interesting thing I found out about doing elevators is, when I looked at the examples that are in SOMA itself, the few that I could find fell into one of two categories:

1. The elevator unit itself was stationary while things moved around it, simulating the experience of riding an elevator. When the sequence was complete, the player is teleported to an identical position further along. (Theta)
   
2. While the elevator moved, the player had a story-reason to be fixed in place during the entire elevator ride. (Omicron)
   

The programming behind the second one revealed why all the elevators in SOMA weren't the proper "elevator-unit-moves-with-the-player-inside" option, as in order to get the player to move with the elevator, you have to move them along with the elevator relative to their position in relation to the elevator itself. This has the nasty side-effect of leaving the player unable to move at all during the sequence. What's more, if you simply has the elevator move independently of the player, the player's camera has that weird "fall-then-bob-continuously" quirk that games have where the physics doesn't directly support this kind of action.

So yeah, it will take quite a bit more tinkering as well as some clever physics workarounds to enable that kind of elevator action, so until someone comes up with it (there are games that do it, so the how-to's gotta be out there somewhere), we're stuck with using one of these two categories.