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Black Hole Launcher [BHL-X42]

Launch tiny Black Holes, and watch them grow!


CLASSIFIED
This prototype combines the latest antimatter synthesizer technology to open a black hole in the antigravity containment unit and uses a miniaturised graviton accelerator to induce a forward momentum and eject the black hole at high velocity. Usage strictly restricted to testing facility under the supervision of a mandated technician.

Demo video by DestTD

TOOLS
- BHL-X42: You can launch Black Holes.

KEYBOARD CONTROLS
- [LeftClick]: Launch a Black Hole.
- [RightClick]: Open launched Black Hole.
- [MiddleClick]: Move closest Black Hole to cursor.
- [L]: Close the closest Black Hole.
- [K]: Close all Black Holes.
- [O]: Open options menu.

CHARACTERISTICS
- Black Holes will slowly attract any loose object in their gravity well radius.
- Black Holes will progressively destroy buildings in their gravity well radius if enabled.
- Black Holes will destroy any matter inside them (including vehicles).
- Black Holes have no effect on player (unless you activate an option).
- Black Holes will slowly grow in size.

KNOWN BUGS
- Some lights (including the sun) may be visible through Black Holes.
- Black Holes may fail to destroy vehicles at first try.
- Very large Black Holes have a lumpy shape.
- Activating both XXL mode and constant grow speed will probably kill your game...

DEV NOTES

Originally posted by About this mod:

You cannot play a game about destruction without having the ultimate entity of destruction that is a black hole :p Hopefully the modding community agrees on that point and I found several black holes mods when I looked for them on the workshop :) Still none of them combined the visual quality I expected from a black hole with the massive destrution it should have... So I decided to make my own!
I thought the black hole visuals would not be that hard, and they were not in the beginning... Before I noticed that the game engine have a hard cap for particle size, which means I could not make my black sphere particle as big as the map :/ To accomodate that limitation, I had to use the fibonacci sphere method used in some other mods to make a larger sphere out of small spheres (this is why large black holes looks lumpy).
Same goes for the handy MakeHole() function provided by the game API, sadly it appears to cap out at a certain hole radius, meaning I had to make several holes all around the black hole surface for really large black holes. Obviously the game started to lag as soon as I implemented this method, so I had to slow it down a bit: I decided to prevent the black hole from growing unless all points around the current sphere have been destroyed. This slows down the grow speed a lot when the black hole reaches a critical size, but at least framerate remain decent ^^
Last but not least, I wanted to make a cool grenade-launcher-like gun for this mod, and I took some time to build one in MagicVoxel. Then came the hard part of animating it: I wanted to make a single voxel (representing the loaded black hole) rotate on its center inside the gun, but that didn't quite work as planned... By default the position of a voxel is it's "bottom left" corner, meaning the rotation would happen around that corner instead of around the center. I had to come up with some annoying offset calculations to be able to move the rotation center to the center of the voxel, but it seems to be working okay in the end :)