How did I get up here?

[NKF]

I was going through some of the ancient stuff that's been collecting in my harddrive, and came across this really old screenshot. It's not the screenshot I was really looking for, but then I looked at this one and remembered something about it. It was quite an interesting find at the time, so thought I'd like to share it with everyone - for the purpose of general knowledge.

 

Have a look at it closely:

 

 

It's one of the sheer rock formations in the mountain maps that cannot be scaled by foot. As you can see ol' Clarence Kemp R. asterisk here is wearing personal armour.

 

The question you might be wondering is: How did this happen?

 

First of all, there's no trickery involving image manipulation software. This happened during an actual game. Also Clarence was never stunned and thrown up there. He physically walked his way up the cliff.

 

There is some trickery involved though, and is mainly an abuse of the messed up collision detection.

 

The answer lies in that little hint of a hill that's in the lower right corner of the image. Right next to the rocky outcropping is a small hill. Clarance started the turn at the top of this hill. I had him walk directly towards the outcropping - while on the same level as he was. What happened was that he walked towards it, dropped an elevation, then walked right up the side of the outcropping. The game's not good with collision detection combined with sudden changes in elevation, so this resulted.

 

Clarence is not truly standing on the tile that you can see. Instead, he's standing on the level underneath him, but offset slightly with the height change. Sort of like when you're on the Skyranger ramp.

 

When I got Clarence to the top and did a bit of meditation on the Way of the Pistol and Grenade, I had him head back down. When he dropped down a level, he landed on the proper flat plane and could no longer climb back up the stone outcropping.

 

It's just the wacky way the game handles slopes. Anyhow, if this can be of use to anyone visiting the mountains - good luck.

 

- NKF