Texture-based Slippery Physics: worth pursuing?

[greaserpirate]

Boognish brought this up a while back in the 1.3 Wishlist, and I thought it was a great idea. We already have the "floorcurb" and "slidecurb" vars, but they make every surface in the map slippery. The idea I'd like to propose is a variable called "vcurb" or "vslide" that you can use just like "vrotate" and others. This variable would scale the slipperiness of a texture you walk on.

I've made a little bit of progress: I've located the mechanism for making the player slide(ln.1044-1074 in src/game/physics.cpp) and a mechanism that returns the material of a cube(ln.249-261 in src/engine/octa.cpp) that I might be able to get texture info from, since the struct "cube" has an attribute called "texture" that is an array of "ushort" variables for each face of the cube. (As you can tell, I'm kind of stumbling through the code.. my dad likens it to performing surgery on myself. But I've made a lot of progress with it so far.)

I just wanted to ask whether this would be a feature worth pursuing, since after I read Quin's article on Understanding Open Source I thought it would be good to see what the community thought of this. I guess I could add a server variable to turn slipperiness on or off, or maybe even create a new/add on to an existing fork of RE, but for all intents and purposes this is an all-or-nothing situation. Either we decide this is idea worth pursuing and I get the green light to work on this, or we decide to scrap it for now (or indefinitely). I am perfectly willing to work on this by myself if nobody else wants to help me.

[Iridium]

I know nothing about the dev work in RE and probably wouldn't know where to start, but I think this is a very good idea, could be used for icy maps, and preventing easy acess to rockets.
Perhaps if the vars were modified a bit could work a bit like conveyor belts?

[qreeves]

I already plan on doing this at some point in the future, and I think it requires a bit more in-depth knowledge of the engine to pull off correctly. Not that I'm discouraging you from having a play with it, I started learning how to do all this the exact same way you're going about it now, so I applaud your effort. Obviously, though, your code may lack the finesse required to do it properly, so you might want to put this up on the tracker to remind me to do it before v1.3 is released.

[greaserpirate]

Perhaps if the vars were modified a bit could work a bit like conveyor belts?

There's a conveyor belt used before on my favourite map of all time, Coop Race. (found here). The only problems with the conveyor are that it's a one-speed-only thing, it's insanely fast, and for some reason, you can't jump. I'd say the best way to get what you're after for now is to use pushers, but having some kind of "vconveyor" var would also be cool.

Also, thanks Quin for adding this to the list for 1.3. I thought at first that I wasn't going to get much support for it, so it's good to know it will be in more capable hands. (puts away scalpel and pliers)