Airrocket-map transition

This is a new idea, with some similarities to my spacectf camera stuffs video, and probably was even inspired by it.

Basically, I will have someone shoot a rocket on map 1 and miss. The rocket will fly into space. That's the first demo.

The second demo is an airrocket that hits. They both have to be space maps, because the chances of getting an airrocket at the proper angle on a non-space map are VERY slim. If I did get one, it would be really nice, but I won't even try.

What I'm going to do should be fairly obvious by this point. I'm going to follow the rocket from map 1 into map 2. It will be very hard to do, for a number of reasons.

First challenge is getting the demos. The orientation of the maps can be whatever, because I can change the yaw, pitch, and roll of the cameras a full 360 degrees, so there's no problem there. A rocket that goes out the side of one map and comes in through the top/bottom of the other would look quite nice. But there's still a lot of problems. Demo 2 should have the rocket hit while the target is below the origin. This is because there are less obstructions on the top of the map than the bottom, which makes everything so much easier.

The second challenge is making the rocket actually go to the next map. Lining up the cameras is one thing (a huge thing, but still only one thing). If the second demo starts too far in the middle of the map, then the first rocket will hit the edge of the map long before the second rocket even starts moving. I'm fine with overlapping the maps a little bit, so long as there's no structural overlaps. If the second demo starts too far away from the edge of the map, I will have to somehow either extend the lifetime of the first rocket manually, so it leaves the map (manually, because that's how I roll), or just cut out the rocket and animate it on a different track or something. Both ways are fairly complicated, but the first would probably require a LOT more work. I'm not sure how much, because I've never played with entities other than players before.

The third challenge is just making everything work. Layering the tracks, keying the backgrounds, and putting the skies on. I honestly don't know what the most lengthy step of this will be, because this is all new to me. What I do know is that I can't do much until I get a demo. The first demo doesn't have to be a near miss; it can just be a rocket that goes into space. Because of that, I can record it myself in a couple seconds. And since this is the demo that requires modding, I'm able to start working on this first. The only reason I wouldn't start this immediately is that I don't know if I'm going to actually be doing this, or copying the animation in the video so it lasts longer. And I don't even know if modding the demo will be necessary, because I don't have the second demo yet.

My math is horrible, so I don't know how I'll be able to calculate the angles of the rocket. I'm tempted to send it straight at a 90 degree angle so there's no y/z motion, which would mean substantially easier math (instead of doing some kind of weird triangular division and highly complex stuff like that, I just add a couple units each frame. I think the QL servers run at 45fps, which means 22ms frame time. Something else I'm not 100% sure of is the current rocket speed. I'll have to look into that, but I don't think that will take long to figure out (it's probably 900 anyway).

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This might as well be an OP for some stupid thread on ESR or the QL forums... 3600 characters doesn't seem very characteristic of a simple blog post. I guess I'm just that awesome.

Anyone bored enough to be reading this should look forward to this video, because it feels almost revolutionary. I finally get to put my ideas into real pixels! It feels so good being able to DO things! The only hindrances I have is content, which is hardly necessary for a lot of the things I do. Just a demo of me jumping around CTF4 was enough for my last project.