This summer's hot new television event is here! Ride along on wild adventures and crazy cases with Detective Lamar Hawkins as he fights crime, one car chase at a time. Airing now, only on Lens Flare Network! I've always wanted to create a narrative campaign for BeamNG, so this has been one hell of a passion project. So, here she is: a 60s/70s/80s-styled police serial in BeamNG! This mod consists only of a single 'episode', the pilot for what may or may not be a running series (time will tell, I guess) of narrative-driven challenges. This episode is a scenario, and shows up under the scenarios tab. But it acts functionally like a campaign, with multiple distinct chapters and a custom save-load system. Bear in mind I'm wearing a lot of hats for this project, many of them for the first time; I will almost certainly have made mistakes, but I welcome any opportunity to learn. Keep all feedback constructive, and I'll do with it what I can. Due to current issues with the repo, to allow for a precise and predetermined release time, and to gather some valuable feedback before hitting the repository, this mod will need to be downloaded and installed the old-fashioned way: manually. Place the attached .zip file into [your user directory]\[current version]\mods. The user directory is usually located in Documents by default. DO NOT unzip the file, unless you know what you're doing. Spoiler: Important Notes The custom save/load system saves progress files under [your user directory]\[current version]\settings\cloud\saves\theHawk as a .json file. Note that this directory will be created automatically during saving; you will not need to create it. In the event of any issues that prevent progressing through or resetting the story, deleting this file should restart your progress cleanly. Additionally, this system may potentially conflict with antivirus programs. Should this happen, please let me know in this thread. This scenario includes a large amount of art content for West Coast USA. None of this content is saved into the level itself, and despawns when the scenario is stopped. However, there is quite a wealth of content to this mod, so there might be some slight impact on the freeroam performance of WCA. This scenario includes music in most of its chapters. All of this music is set to the Music audio channel, so changing your audio settings *should* mute the soundtrack if you'd prefer to play without it. And for those of you who are Let's Play-ers or streamers, all music is 100% scratch-made by yours truly, so it should not invoke a copyright strike (but might suck lol). This scenario does depict some mild language, but nothing unheard of in daytime television. Programmatically, this scenario is a collossal mess that even I have trouble trying to fully comprehend sometimes. It will almost certainly break from future updates, and may have terrible game-breaking bugs as-is that I have yet to discover myself (I didn't manage to get a beta group together). So don't expect everything to work perfectly, just keep me posted about any issues you had and how you triggered them. If worse comes to worst, we'll say this isn't a premiere, it's a test screening And lastly, rights: I grant permission for anyone to use my (admittedly shoddy) code for save/load in any of their BeamNG projects. You also have full permission to use the soundtrack in any BeamNG projects uploaded to this site so long as you provide credit in your mod's description. Projects done outside of BeamNG should not use this content. I'd also far prefer to be asked permission before you use any of my illustrations or named characters in your own projects. Spoiler: Known Issues Some elements, such as text and music objects, will not load properly when playing a chapter a second time in the same session. This is unfortunately a limitation with Flowgraph. Investigation Markers have some strange issue with culling. I'm looking into the problem now. Spoiler: Changelog: V0.3 Fixed tailing challenge The tailing challenge was pretty badly broken in BeamNG v 0.33. The solution has been less-than grand, but it seems to work okay. Added music to tailing challenge Added whiteboard text to Police HQ Adjusted some dialogue Revised version numbering in anticipation of the repo version The attached version posted below is now supplementary, as the mod now exists on the repository. Feel free to use this thread to discuss the mod at length, however.
Holy hell this is impressive! I was jaw dropped when I saw the Int scenes and actually had me walk to the office. Great work, I just finished the van chase but will play more later. Some issues and feedback I have. The initial load is really rough, I think having the cameras dart all around WCUSA before its fully loaded is causing issues. I think maybe you could force a black screen for a bit while WCUSA loads + maybe not have the camera go SO far since your forcing the user to load chunks when the camera TPs The intro song stops very abruptly when you park, could use the fade node I think. After seeing the chief of police, I got into my car, drove and honestly only dinged my car on a bike rack and was told I wrecked the car, also had to redo the int walking scene which I think could of been skipped. "Importing texture" in the PD, never goes away for me. The Pawnshop car tracking, I like it but the target veh will hit into AI, I would honestly script all of it at that point and have some more cars to act as redherrings. The Pawnshop car has to do a U-turn to get in the canal and triggers a countdown even though I'm not in sight, I know its probs just using radius to the car for this. The chase scene was great, my only issue is, sometimes my driveshaft just snaps and I am a sitting duck waiting for the van to drive out of range, (I have this issue too, maybe we can work together to find a solution on how to detect if your driveshaft is gone, maybe just (if player car not move for x seconds = fail mission?) )
Okay, I couldn't easily tell TBH, my computer is practically on its last legs so it struggles almost all the time anyway. I feel like I enjoy the idea of the camera zooming around the city too much to nix it, but I'll try having the game pause on a black screen when the level initially loads, just to give the computer a chance to breath and catch up. Yeah, the audio channel fade node is clunky. I can't seem to make it fade as smoothly as I'd like, but I can at least make it fade out slower on completing the first chapter. I'd rather not rewire the state graph for chapter 2 to allow for restarting just the driving stage, but I'll dramatically increase the damage tolerance for the player in the next patch. Okay, I ran into that one once. I think I know what I'll need to do for that and I'll try to get a fix soon, but it should, theoretically, only happen once. When you start BeamNG up again later the importing label should go away. I've had the AI car collide with traffic once or twice before, but it's pretty rare in my experience. I don't really know how to handle it other than completely clearing all traffic, as I'd rather not need to spawn in 2-3 more cars to drive scripted paths (that chapter already has a lot of vehicles in it). Honestly, this isn't a super-serious story, so my headcannon is that Falk is just a truly awful driver The distance detection is using the radius of the distance between the cars, but there's also a line-of-sight detector that should prevent the near proximity countdown when the line of sight is broken. How close are you when the countdown triggers (rough guess)? Under those circumstances, I'd just reset with the 'R' key. Just like in official scenarios, you always have the option to reset during an event. That drop in particular is a pretty gnarly one, but I've found it almost does more damage to your driveshaft or tie rods if you try to be gentle with it. There are ways to drop off the ledge that won't break your car, I'm just not too sure how to communicate them to the player. Thanks for the feedback! I'll work on a patch tomorrow!
Okay, day one patch is now live! Tweaked a few things based on the above feedback, hopefully the experience is now a little more streamlined.
This is fun! Innovative and imaginative, makes me feel like I'm in a 70's era cop show, even if the setting is a little more modern than that. Look forward to seeing more "episodes" in the future!
Oooh, that's interesting. What does it do? Nothing, probably. Why does it exist? Because the save file for the Hawk is kept in the same file directory as career saves. I had thought it was logical to save progress in the same place as the game's default ones for consistency reasons, but I hadn't thought about how that would interact with career mode. I'll play around with an alternate save location, and try to get a new version on the repo in a few days/weeks.
I see, thanks for your reply! Will that version just change the save location or also add a new chapter? I very much liked the first one and am hoping for more interesting content in the future.
No, adding a new episode would probably be a 3-5 month process. One that I'd be delighted to do at some point of course, but Episode 2 isn't exactly priority #1 among my projects. I do have a short list of things I'd like to improve on for the current Pilot episode, mostly interior detail tweaking and improving player communication/directional cues.
That's okay, I get that one a lot I'm currently working on another round of improvements for Episode 1. Included alongside your regular batch of bugfixes and reworked coding are a few new visual details, better player communication, and quality-of-life improvements. Episode 2 is much further down the road, though; I'm still caught up in writing the script/storyboard.
