AgeLadders

From Alcugs

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1 Adding Climbable Regions To Your Age

Adding Climbable Regions To Your Age

Creating the visible ladder

In most cases you want to create a visible object to climb e.g. a ladder.
Make sure there is an area at the top of the object which you can climb onto. You would
When building a ladder:

Make the first rung 1.42 Blender units off of the ground
Make each rung after that 1 unit up from the previous unit.

Note: When mounting a ladder from the bottom, the avatar puts his right hand on the 5th rung from the bottom, and his foot on the first rung.

Figure 1: ladder rung spacing.

Making it climbable

There are currently two easy ways to make your ladder climbable:

Climbable regions

string prpregion value "climbable"

The first way is making a climbable region encompass your object.

In the Scripts window, do Scripts->Add->PyPRP->Add generic region
Now change the prpregion property to "climbable"

Now all you have to do is scale and rotate the region. See the following image:

Note that the Z axis points into the direction of upwards climbing - Usually this is straight up!
The Y axis must point in the direction of the ladder The avatar will climb on the most Y+ surface
Note how the bounding box just touches the outer edge of the climbable rungs. It you don't do this, the avatars hands won't grab the rungs correctly.
Also make sure that the regions bottom is exactly on the floor you start from, and that it's top must be exactly on the height of the top floor that you climb on to.

Climbable objects

bool climbable value true

The second way is to make an entire object climbable.
To do this you must add a new property to any visual object or collider object. This property is a boolean named "climbable". Set it to true to make the object climbable.

After you did this, the objects bounding box will be used as a climbable region.

Now since this can be very useful, yet also very tricky, keep the following in mind:

Make sure that the axis of you object is pointed exactly the same way as with the climbable regions. If you don't do that, weird things may happen
Make sure your climbable object is not just the rungs. It must have vertices on the floor level (but no lower than that!), and on the level of the top floor that you climb on to. (but no higher!)

Usually, this means that your latter must not only have rungs but also one or two vertical beams that they are attached to, and that these beams must extend from the bottom to the exact height that you should climb off at the top. Much like this:

Your object must not be too wide (on the objects X axis), and ther must be something to stand on at the top.

Tilted Climbables

If you want to do so, you can tilt the Z axis of your climbable region or object, so that the avatar will climb diagonally, instead of just straight up or straight down.

You'll have to be careful with this though, since the avatar will tilt when he enters the climbable, and will stay tilted after he exits the climbable.
You will have to make the avatar climb another - straight upwards! - ladder to remedy this!

In short: You can only use a tilted climbable if you have tow straight climbables on their top and bottom, and have the tilted one in the middle.

Making it climbable - The old yet very flexible way

If you need more flexibility with your regions, you can choose to manually position the bottom and top climb regions, instead of having the plugin calculate them for you according to our fine-tuned specifications.

To do this, follow the steps below (from the old tutorial)

1. Put the cursor at the bottom of the object to climb - we're going to insert a region there.

2. First, create the climbing bounds. This serves as a collider for the rungs of the ladder (so that your avatar or kickables do not penetrate the ladder geometry) and as a guide for placing the other climbing regions. In a Scripts window, choose Scripts->Add->PyPRP->Add a General Region. The region will appear in layer 2. Note: This step is not absolutely neccessary, but just there to assist you!

3. Resize the climbing bounds and reposition it so that it encompases your climbable object. You'll need to have both layers 1 and 2 visible at the same time.

Figure 2: positioning the climbing bounds.

4. Determine the height of your climbing bounds. We need to convert this into the units that URU uses for climbing height, which is equal to the number of times that the avatar moves both of his/her hands.

Take the height of the climbing bounds (in Blender units)
Subtract 5.42 (height of first 5 rungs)
Divide by two (since it reflects the number of pairs of rungs

climbed)

5. Put the cursor at the bottom of the object to climb.

6. Create the climbing bottom region. In the Scripts window, choose Scripts->Add->PyPRP->Add A Climbing Region. The region will appear in layer 2.

7. Click on the Logic button to edit its properties.

Set bottomFlag to 01
Set climbHeight to the converted height you determined in step 8.

8. Rotate the climbing bottom region so that its local Y axis is pointing away from the climbing bounds. Note: To view local orientation, use the Transform Orientation choice box and choose Local.

Figure 3: orienting the climbing bottom region.

9. Move the climbing bottom region so that it just overlaps the outer edge of the climbing bounds. This will help line up the avatar's hands to the climbable object. Suggestion: hit NumPad 7 to get a top-down view, and hit NumPad 5 to toggle the orthographic projection on; this will help align your climbing bottom region.