WiseBoards: HL2 wooden obstacles
This tutorial was originally created by wisemx. It was originally posted on SDKnuts.net.
They’re a fairly common sight in HL2, boards that block your indented route but can be broken to get past. This will be a short tutorial because these are really easy to create. This is what the example I’ve created looks like in HL2:
The pallets you see are used in this example so you can know how to create the same effect but where the wood can not be moved or broken. The boards blocking the door can be blown to bits. You should experiment with the flags for the effect you desire but for this tutorial I’m going to show the settings that I used for a standard need, just block the passage but allow the player to break their way past.
The only flags checked are Start Asleep and Break on Pressure. I have also disabled Shadows for these boards, clumped like that the shadows would probably just be a waste of system resources.
The only other setting I’ve changed, and it is not the same for each of these boards is: Health Level to Override Motion. Experiment with these numbers. The prop_physics objects you use can have their motion disabled until their health reaches a certain about of health. So for example these boards could start to fall just before they fall apart.
The pallets in this example are all prop_physics_override and in this example I don’t want them to take damage or move so these are the flags I set: Start Asleep, Don’t take physics damage, Motion Disabled, Not affected by rotor wash, Prevent Pickup.
The model I used is: models/props_junk/wood_pallet001a.mdl And the only setting that you need to pay attention to is Health.
You can do some pretty amazing things with these two entity types in HL2. Our pallets for example could all have the same name and be triggered to go away in the event of an input as the result of an explosion. If that didn’t make sense just imagine pallets in a room that blows up, when the dust clears the pallets are gone but they didn’t take damage up until that point. Just a thought.
