How to switch Laser Fence with control towers?

[Cyberdyne]

I`m working on a level that has the trunk port protected by a laser fence, I`m using them like this.

All Red Team
Control Tower -linked to- Laser Fence (ID1) -linked to - Laser Fence (ID2)

If I set fence ID1 to Enabling and ID2 to Disabled and ID2 linked to ID2, units and darwinians will pass through. And if I unlink LaserFence (ID2) to -1, then the barrier works and nothing passes through.

The trouble I`m having is that I need the fence to allow through its own team colour. The ControlTower changes the fence colour ok when its captured, but I need to somehow unlink LaserFence (ID2) at the same time as LaserFence (ID1) is captured, to allow my team through.

And once my team is inside I need to re-enable the fence with another control tower on the inside.

I also need the control towers to turn neutral once the fence has been activated/deactivated so they can be constantly used.

I`m sure its possible with a bit of fiddling with the level script but I`m not sure how to go about it. And if its not I want the ability to allow own team colour through the fence beam in the next patch!!!

Thanks

[Icepick]

None of this is possible unfortunately. Laserfences are very limited at the moment.
Heres some info on Laserfences:

1. They will only work properly if they are enabled at the start of the level. If they are set to enabling, disabling or disabled, they might not work properly.

2. You can turn laserfences on and off with the Powerstation building. Unfortunately, this is also a little buggy, and because of point 1, is of little use anyway

3. Laserfences have to be linked in ID order or they wont work. If you use a Powerstation, its ID number must be before the Laserfences its linked to.

4. An active laser fence (assuming its working) will kill all units that pass through it, regardless of the team of the fence or the units.

Hopefully at least some of this will be changed in a future patch.

[Cyberdyne]

Thanks for that, I now have it working with just one opening in a square barrier. The PowerStation works the single opening ok and the other fences are on all the time. All fences kill all units. I have all fences set to enabled too. But when I had 4 fences linked in ID order and the first fence turned on with the PowerStation, the LaserFence never killed units.
To get it working I had to add a fifth fence on top of another fence and unlink the second fence.

(ID22+24)===(ID21)
(.........................)
(.........................)
(.........................)
(ID19)======(ID20)
(
(ID11)

Fences ID22 and ID24 are occupying the same space!
PowerStation(ID11) - LaserFence(ID19) - LaserFence(ID20) /ID20 not linked to anything(ID-1)
LaserFence(ID22) - LaserFence(ID19)
LaserFence(ID24) - LaserFence(ID21)
LaserFence(ID21) - LaserFence(ID20)

Now I have a problem with the PowerStation and Engineers getting stuck trying to get souls that are underneath the Darwinians manning place. I want to try redesigning that PowerStation, maybe deleting eveything but the manning areas that the darwinians link to might help.
Hmmm, a quick look at the powerstation.shp file I see they`re called MarkerPorts 1 to 4.
Off to investigate..............


At least the Engineers don`t get stuck anymore.

[Darksun]

That looks impressive, fully working or not

[qFox]

When I first set up the fences, anything could pass thru (when activated). At some point I moved the fences around in the levelfiles and suddenly my units died from them. Red centipedes and virii have no problem passing thru them though. So something's up here...

The euh, corner pieces so to speak, kill all, and have been doing so the whole time

[Tortanick]

It dosn't need to work to be usefull.

Mission objective: the red army is attacking from this trunkport, seal it off by activateing the laserfence. Just stop the spawining and its done

[Icepick]

The problem is that, as I mentioned, the Powerstation doesn't work properly - you can't use it as a mission objective for one. The other issue is that, if Darwinians of the other team (ie, a team that the Powerstation ISNT set to) get to the building, they will keep manning the bays, even if another darwinian is in there, as the game doesnt register it as being active. You can lose all your darwinians (or all the enemies) this way.
Still, your level DOES look nice

[Cyberdyne]

I already tried a spawning red army from the trunk port, but it doesn`t quite fit with my level. So instead I have 2 enemy engineers and 50 spirits in the nearby enemy incubator at the start of the level. You have to knockout the red army and engineers, capture the incubator and get 50 greens in a safe area by the trunk port. This is quite difficult as quite a battle ensues between the engineers and the darwinians and darwinians on the manning ports of the power station, so forward planning and good strategy is going to be needed. The power station is not captureable, it doesn`t seem to use any team assignment, both reds and greens go for an empty bay. But that doesn`t matter here.

The only way to do that is to create officers on the darwinians manning the power station so it powers down. I`m going to have to reposition a few things to get the balance right.

This is only the very end of level 1, theres lots to do just to get there and if you take too long it can get over run on one of the islands(trifid).

Mission objectives have been a problem as I needed to put in new descriptions for all my levels, so I`ve had to edit the english.txt in the data directory as it doesn`t read it from the mods directory! Hopefully this will be fixed in a patch. (I could patch it myself so it looks in the mods folder instead of the data folder and release a loader for my mod that doesn`t permanently patch darwinia.exe)
EDIT: no I can`t, I`d have to put every single file that gets used in my level from main.dat to mods folder.

2nd EDIT:
Yess!!
Edit preferences.txt

TextLanguage = englishmod

Use englishmod.txt in data directory as your own language file.
No overwriting is then needed if you package your mod with with a data folder and englishmod.txt

It works!