Possible Resource Ideas

#1 * Mission filtering - there is a resource that does this, but it had a lot of needless duplication of script methods and it also needs heavy modification to work in Torque 3D. So yeah, would be useful -- if you're doing this for T3D ;)

* Starting loadout by mission - Torque3D can already do this, sort of. I set up the game type methods to configure loadout by mission type which is set per mission, but since additional gametypes were never used or included it's not really obvious how that works. So show 'em how.

* Objective HUD - I'm needing one of those... just haven't gotten around to it. So hurry up already :D

* Weapon ammo storage - absolutely needed in a modern FPS.

* Primary/secondary weapon system - I almost did that for the FPS Example. At the time there were going to be 5 weapons and only one ever materialized so it never got done. I've seen such a system asked for...

* Action system - another thing that got stripped from the T3D example projects, but then I only had a simple framework in place. Would be interested in how you are doing yours since mine had the potential of becoming quite complex.

So yeah, those would all be great Resources - looking forward to them.

About reloading: the tricky part is how you're showing the hands. If it's the gimmick of only showing the hands in first person as the highest lod of the weapon, then that's easy - each weapon would have it's own animation including the hands. But if you want the reload animations visible from 3rd person that gets complicated in my experience. Hopefully some helpful artist can offer better insight.

#2 I think these could be useful. I was just looking for a resource for your first item this past weekend but couldn't find it. Damn you search *shakes fist angrily in the air*

All of these would be extremely useful and I'd greatly appreciate it :)

#3 Alright, I'll start putting these together, I'll try to have them up by tomorrow -> Thursday.

If anyone has info on the reload thing, please post here, It's something I'd like to incorporate into my project, and if possible, a resource as well.

#4 Don't ask -> just do!

Regarding reloading, I think that there are a couple of old resources lying around somewhere for weapon "clips", probably for TGE.

Search is your friend ... well, www.dreambuildrepeat.com/GGSearch/index.html that search is! ;)

#5 The primary/secondary weapon thing would definitely be cool. Crimeforce had that where you could only have 1 primary and 1 secondary weapon. You had to drop your current weapon before you could pick up a different weapon. I really hate games where you can carry 10 main weapons. I have the Crimeforce script, but haven't gotten around to adding it.

Oh and btw, I'm still using TGEA.

#6 Almost done with a few. I'm thinking of combining it all into one nice and large FPS asset package kind of deal here. (obviously splitting it by pieces mentioned above).

@Steve: I already have a clip/ammo replenish system in place, It's just the animation of reloading the gun that I'm not entirely sure on the process to doing it. I did check into a few other examples, but since I'm looking into potential MP situations, the "hacked hands" method doesn't look too appealing.

#7 Hacked hands is unfortunately common in pretty much any game you play these days, as far as I'm aware - and understandably so, after the amount of time and effort I've sunk into a proper arm animation system that allows for real reload animations.

Problem 1: Torque's player doesn't fully animate by default. See this resource for details.

Problem 2: Torque's arm animations are blended by default, and you can't transition between blended animations. I suppose you could blend another reload animation on top of the existing arm animation, but that might get a bit dicey.

Problem 3: the assets themselves. Instead of a weapon defining its reload sequence, each character needs to have animations to reload the weapon in whatever unique way you like. IKing to a node on the weapon (which performs the reload motions) is an attractive solution, but not at all a trivial task.

RE odd reloads like shotguns, it shouldn't be too difficult with some unorthodox weapon state management. The trickiest bit (depending on how you store ammo) is dealing with the ammunition still carried on the player. Do you just have lots of clips of 1 round? (I'm not sure how I'll be dealing with this yet.)

#8 I'm not sure if I'm understanding what I read from the other topic, but my game is all in first person. So the third person problem with hacked hands is not an issue, the two main issues I do have are as follows:

1. Different player models. How would one handle that if the hacked hands are modeled for one player, and not all? (or am I wrong here as well, and this can be handled)

2. Multiplayer, wouldn't other players be seeing the oddity of the hacked hands with this setup?

I have seen that resource before, I'm taking it that the camera part of the resource has no effect on the animation of the player, so if I were to implement it without the camera modifications, I could handle the animation part?

#9 Sorry for the delay, I was away for the past few weeks (had an urgency to attend to). Unfortunately I lost my resource file before I saved it (I like to type them up before submitting them), so I'll need to re-do those.

I will try to get these up in a nice short FPS addition resource group within the next few days.

#10 About the reloading animation:

I had an idea (untested) that maybe a certain animation could be triggered depending on the armthread set for an individual weapon. Plan for weapon type groups that have unique armthreads and associated reload animations. When it comes time to play the animation just look to see what armthread the weapon is using and play the appropriate reload for the armthread/weapon type.

#11 Interesting idea... I'll have to pass this along to the modeler on my team to see if he thinks this would work.

#12

Quote:1. Different player models. How would one handle that if the hacked hands are modeled for one player, and not all? (or am I wrong here as well, and this can be handled)

You'd probably just have to model a hand mesh for each character body type. Not necessarily a great deal more work than modelling and animating all the individual characters themselves.

Quote:2. Multiplayer, wouldn't other players be seeing the oddity of the hacked hands with this setup?

Often weapons and their hands are considered 'view entities', which Torque doesn't really have a concept of - they've only visible to the client they belong to, and they don't exist in the game world (they're just superimposed over the top of it), so they don't clip with geometry. You can often see odd shadow penetrations if you point your gun into a wall - this is a result of the real (shadow-casting) geometry penetrating the wall, even if the view-entity of the gun mesh you can see doesn't appear to.

As far as I can tell.

Quote:I had an idea (untested) that maybe a certain animation could be triggered depending on the armthread set for an individual weapon.

That's how I do it. Basically, each weapon datablock defines a 'pose' like "shortrifle" or "pistol", and I name all my animations by combining the pose and the action (so, "shortrifle_aim_h", "pistol_reload", etc.). When an action is performed, I just look up the weapon's pose, append the action, and assume the character has the right animation defined :P.

It'd be possible to make it more fine grained, by adding datablock settings for each action (so, defining an aim animation and a reload animation by name, instead of one pose used for all animations), but that doesn't seem like it would be much of a benefit.

#13 Oh wow, so that route may possibly be the best way after all, Ill forward this info to my team's modeler to see what he thinks about it.

As for the resources, I'm almost done re-writing them... again :P. I'm going to ETA them as sometime Monday, I'll see if there's any other FPS systems I can add to the package.