Alpha Powerups. The Police/Military Ordnance Update! 0.5.2

Vehicle combat in BeamNG.drive

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There are a pletora of Powerups!
Here are some recent ones!

Force Field
Which is also a superb ramplow!


Cannon


Machinegun


Sniper


Missile



Barrier


Tire spikes


Banana

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More Media

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ALL POWERUPS​

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AS OF VERSION 0.5

Banana (2 Levels)
Simply spins anyone around!

Boost (3 Levels)
Ever felt like your engine just doesnt do it on the straights? Look no further, this powerup gives you short bursts of NO2. Level 2 will also through its magic wonders increase your grip! And should any pesky cops ever follow you around.. go for the last level and you gonna teleport right into freedom.

Cannon (2 Levels)
Fires Cannon balls towards vehicles in front of you!

Countermeasure (3 Levels)
EMP your enemies, ghost right through them or become completly invinsible!

Defenses (3 Levels)
Play as a cop and setup tire spikes, place a barrier that no one can pass or go full military and place up to 3 mines.

Forcefield (3 Levels)
The higher the level the larger the radius and the stronger! Doesnt only shield you from projectiles, but also from a missile! Higher levels also turn your car into ramplows.

Machinegun (2 Levels)
Its time to ratatata. These pretty imprecise but effective guns will imbalance all your targets leading them right on their way into the next barrier.

Missile (1 Level)
You.. dont.. want.. to.. be.. its.. target...
This highly maneuverable missile flies up like a javelin and then strikes right into the first target it sees.

Repair (2 Levels)
Simple but effective repairs. The first level repairs you in place and ghosts you for a few seconds.
The second also reinstates your velocity. Use it right and you can fool your chasers.

Roundshot (2 Levels)
I know you good, youre the kind thats often chased by cops. How often have you been in the situation where you are surrounded by multiple cops, almost ready to be catched? Fear no more. Activate this and your way to freedom is open!

Shockwave (3 Levels)
Shockwave 1 feels like a warm faint fart on a sunny day, its bassically only good enough to remove someone from pinning you against a wall. Level 2 punches them straight into the next barrier while Level 3 sends them across the river.

Sniper (3 Levels)
This versatile and very long range powerup is made to handicap your targets. With the first level youre deflating their tires. Level 2 will heavily damage their engines. And Level 3.. well.. ever seen a tank hit its target? Yeah that.

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You can level a powerup up by picking up the same powerup or with a charge! But be aware under them are also bad powerups. Powerups that have become ill and that wont do good to you!

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How to use Powerups!
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Supported Maps
West Coast USA
Small grid
Utah
Industrial
River Highway
Moonview Highway (by joobles)
The Crash Hard 2.0​

Credits

1. Olrosse for the very cool explosion lua that rips your car completly apart
2. JulianStap for the original idea of deploying various effects on player vehicles in their cool StreamerVsChat mod. I recreated and reimagined alot of their effects in this mod as negative effects
3. Jessbob for helping me with choosing assets and even creating some!
4. BeamNG.drive for the free cam lua file that i copied to /lua/ge/extensions/core/cameraModes/missile.lua
5. To all the people at BeamNG.drive that worked on the world editor. It contains so many answers to so many questions and essentially is the coded documentation for what is otherwise undocumented.
6. To all the creators that publish to the BlenderKit!

I dont take donations, i never do for any of my efforts. But you can do me a great favor by joining my test servers and reporting bugs to me! These servers always run development versions. And thats where the newest stuff is!
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MULTIPLAYER
Please read the Powerups in Multiplayer documentation to see how
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Known Bugs
- When i disable the mod in the mod menu i can still see the powerups!?

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Game bug! https://www.beamng.com/threads/bug-...-onextensionunloaded-event-in-the-mod.103404/

- When i press the powerup activation hotkey nothing happens.

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This happens when the key you defined is used by multiple things! Such as another mod or by a vehicle as a custom key. To fix this, simply assign a different key. The background of this bug is a game issue only letting one key listener know about the key being pressed.

- I see stuck missiles or projectiles in the air!?

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INTENTIONAL! This usually happens when you have the game own "Traffic pooling" option activated. The background is a game limitation. When you are far enough away from a traffic vehicle it gets disabled and i had to intentionally stop rendering powerup effects for such disabled vehicles because on the technical side you can no longer send them information. So if a traffic vehicle for example activated Ghost, then got disabled and then got unghosted then that information never reaches that vehicle. Currently i dont have a way around this (Game devs you should really note somewhere that :queueVehicleLua() doesnt execute and doesnt buffer on disabled vehicles)

- Sounds play very stutterly when i have alot of traffic vehicles spawned.

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Ive seen this bug in youtube videos and could replicate it myself and have since then played alot around with the sound engine of the game to figure out its cause. Im loading and playing sounds almost exactly like the game itself does, in all cases i have prepared all sounds for quick loading times and high quality playback. Even when the game only runs with 5Fps the sounds play perfect, but always stuttery when you have alot of traffic spawned and are close to them. The only difference between what i do and the game does is that the game uses FMOD bank files. FMOD is a very pricey software and as a private person you just dont get access to it (someone please prove me wrong https://www.fmod.com/studio). Additionally the game has zero documentation on its sound system and as far as i know there is also simply no way for the game devs to legally open up the sound system to us modders duo to FMOD's licensing. I dont have a solution for this issue at the moment.

- Traffic vehicles cannot use some powerups (eg the sniper)

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This is because some powerups like the sniper are manual powerups, that require the user to select a target and fire at it manually. Traffic cannot do this. A traffic logic controller will come in the future!

- Projectiles dont damage any car

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Intentional. Unlike in other mods this mods projectiles arent jbeams, but either just updated statics or just flying debug spheres (both very performant over jbeams)! So they are just visuals! They cannot hit a vehicle in the common sense of this game engine. All the physics in this mod are self made. The reasons behind this are multiple. First of all, im not knowledged about jbeams and simply dont know if i could make jbeam projectiles work the way i want. Second, the custom physics allow this mod to be very versatile. Everything is made in a way where it doesnt care for what kind of a car you have, which means that eg a cannon ball will effect a bus just as much as it does a pigeon. So it adds a competitive layer. And if you havent read the Roadmap yet, this will allow the hitpoint based idea!

- Powerups keep running when i pause my game

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Intentional. This was a decision i made early on in the mods development. The idea is simple, if you are in a multiplayer scenario the projectiles someone else fires at you shouldnt stop moving just because you as the receiver paused your game. So the background of this decision is simply for synchronization reasons

- (Multiplayer) Sometimes i activate a powerup but my friend sees me activating another. (i activate X, but my friend sees Y)

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This bug is so rare that i couldnt determine its cause yet!

- (Multiplayer) Sometimes when i drive through a powerup it stays, i dont get it either and even when i drive through it again nothing happens.

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This is a rare bug, i sat there for hours trying to replicate it, but whenever i try to debug it it just doesnt happen. Server console will say 'Location has no powerup that PlayerX wants to take from'

- (Multiplayer) Sometimes when i join a server with this mod i cannot see any powerups?

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I only heard about this issue so far, but couldnt replicate it so far. If it happens just restart your game. If it still happens please send me your beamng.log!

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Roadmap

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0.6
- The powerup mod as it is right now doesnt allow for much tactical gameplay. You essentially pick up a powerup and directly use it. There is not much room to wait to use it. I want to change this problem by creating a larger vehicle inventory for powerups. Where you can have one powerup per type (Offensive, Defensive, Utility..). Each inventory slot would have its own charge level and you can pick which to activate when. But never more then one at a time. Youd then have atleast 2 hotkeys mapped, one to cycle through your inventory and one to activate what you have selected.

That way, lets say you have seen your opponent pickup a missile and you know that they are going to activate it, you could already save a Force Field in your inventory.

Leveling would work a little different after this change. Picking up a Charge will increase the level of all the powerups that you currently have in your inventory. While picking up the same powerup as you already have in your inventory would only level that one up.

1.0 or earlier
- Once the different components of this mod have been stabilized the mod shall be open sourced! Ive put extra effort into modularizing this mod into many in itself contained libraries and documenting the code as much as possible. I know that some of these libraries will going to be very usefull to other modders since they add features this game doesnt have and that are most often a pain to add by oneself.

Unordered
- The powerups as they are right know can easily destroy your opponent. It doesnt make much sense to for example play a gamemode that doesnt allow you to reset your car because of how easily you can end up in a wall.

To combat this the idea is to implement a hitpoint system, where each vehicle has its own "health" per say. The lower it is the stronger the effects get that a powerup does. So imagine someone fires the machinegun at you, you are at 100% health. Your car will stay unaffected, but as your health decreases the projectiles start affecting your vehicle.

Same time there could be powerups that restore your hit points again. Even further thought there could be powerups that make you resistant to certain damage kinds.

- This mod needs a UI!
- The entire server side will be rewritten, ontop of that rewrite a chat command handler will then be added
- Each set will get their own set controller (_setctl.lua) which is going to define set wide controls. Such as which sound to play when this type or that type of a powerup has been picked up and also spawn chances etc. All that that is common to the set.
- Placeables! A Synchronization library that allows the placing of interactive but dynamic objects around the map with the option of a physics actor (for eg turrets) that are not attached to a powerup actively running, while also being compatible with the powerups Trait system.
- Sets2. A rewrite of the Sets library that wrapps around the mod own job system. It allows you to create condition based timelines (think of flowgraphs but in lua only). All the negative powerup effects use this

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Github