Game Development Community

Some advice on the best way to do this

by Chris Newman · in General Discussion · 09/25/2004 (8:13 pm) · 3 replies

I don't want to give away too much detail of the game in working on just yet...
but im having one problem....

I have a flying vehicle; let's just say a flying disc and I want to be able to mount a character on it. I also need to be able to have that character mount and use weapons and be able to animate. What would be the best way to do this?

Each character would have the same animations, just a different model or skin for each one. I also want the disc itself to have some minor animations.

1. Create the flying vehicle, and the player models separately and then mount the player on the vehicle, but if I do this how would I tell the character to animate or fire its weapons.


2. Just create the vehicle and player in the same model. But if I do this would I have to reanimate the animations for the disc itself every time? The disk model will the same one for every player.

Those are just 2 ideas off the top of my head, ill try to get #1 to work because I would really love to have the player get blown off his vehicle when he dies or even when he gets attacked really hard. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

#1
09/26/2004 (2:45 pm)
If your flying disc is anything like Aladdin's carpet you can mount the disc to the player instead of mounting the player to the disc. What I would do is put in player jets(like Tribes 2) and then when the disc is mounted to your feet you set the player "mJetting" variable to true so that it will auto jet to a certain extent that you dictate. Then have your controls do additional boosting to your direction and speed so that even while flying perpetually you will still have some overall control of your flight.

Doing the player animations and firing weapons should operate as normal while the disc is mounted to you. This would even negate the need for the Flying Vehicle class because the actual player would be doing all the flying while it only appears that the disc is doing it. When the player gets blown off his disc, you just unmount the disc from the player and cast both into some random direction that is weighted towards the explosion vector or projectile vector.
#2
09/26/2004 (5:33 pm)
Yay my hero, just the expert i was looking for...
thats an even better idea than i was thinking and even easier to implement
thanks
#3
09/26/2004 (6:33 pm)
General is the wrong forum. In the future, please don't clutter it up.