Player/Weapons

#1 Note: This may not all be completely correct, feel free to correct me if I am wrong, and I very well could be, since I havent messed with this stuff alot.

If you want the arms on the screen, there are two things you can do:

1. Undo all the changes that GG made. They recently changed from an actual 1st person perspective to a "fake" perspective. Before, you would see the weapon and hands that were actually part of the player model. If you switched back to the old way, it would simply be a matter of making the correct animations for the player to reload or whatever. There may even be a simple bool somewhere that will allow you to change back to the old way...

2. There were some problems with the old way though(like the animations being very hard to make look right in first person perspective, and while looking at someone else), and so they switched to the "fake" perspective. That way, the gun model you see on your screen is completely seperate from the one that other people see on your player model. So, you could make some "hand-arm" models, and include them in each weapon model. These would only be seen by the person in 1st person perspective, and could be used to reload the weapon, etc. This is how Half Life does it.

#2 ahhhhhhh
Josh, now i know what "renderFirstPerson = true;" is for :)
Actually the only change i saw was that i had the legs drawn.... mmm.... and using the fake mode how do i load the models on the player's view?

#3 is the model you see on the player model completely different from the model in first person view? In my game they aren't... but i would like to know if it can... where do I set this in the code (i'm not a programmer, but our programer took some weeks off and now i'm doing his work for a while...so i'd like to see this one answered)

#4 Actually, I was informed in mIRC that they are not. But that is GG's goal I think, to have two seperate models.

You could use LOD on the weapon model to accomplish the same thing though, couldnt you?

#5 hmm.. no...
what i want is to have 2 seperate models...; so i can attach hands to the 1 in first person view so i can animate them properly. This would look a whole lot better and more detailed. Like it is now this is impossible however. How would I go for achieving this?

#6 Sort of, but having 2 models would allow one really nice model to only show up to the holder.

Hmmm... that's an interesting idea.

Have the closest LOD have high-polycount. Make it as close as possible (so only holder can see it or someoen who is super close to it) and at a distance make LOD drop poly count significantly


Wow... that is a much better idea than HL's system, mainly since in HL you get close to another player and you see a fugly gun with low polys.

That's a great idea. I'll go discuss using it with my team :)

#7 Matt, of course its a nice idea... but HL's way of doing things is good too... imagine the pain in the ass it will be to you and your team to animate the player AND the weapon to reload for example, you would have to make 2 different animations and sync them together, also fitting the gun nicely on the players hands wont be an easy task :\
It has its benefits.. but also its problems...
It would be nice if GG finished implementing the 1st person view using a different model ... as for now it uses the same model but without the players hands

#8 Am I the only person that likes how it is now? I think it's a very cool system. It seems pointless to me to have two different animations and such, like the Half-Life system. Computers are getting more powerful every day, and video cards can handle more and more polys per screen. Half-Life came out in 98. What was the top card back then? TNT? TNT2? Torque is a little graphically intense, but I don't think that having a crap lowpoly weapon in everyone elses' view is all that much better than having a high poly one. Everything seems more real and natural with a single model anyway.

#9 True, animations will be a problem... hmmm.

Back to the drawing board! hehe.

#10 is there a way to not show anything in the players veiw? if not there should be, i dont like either way (current or old) guess ill have to see about doing a toggle for showgun/dont show gun, and somekind of icon system along side of the health or somthing

(just my 2cents)

#11 @jim... it isnt that great... think about making animations look realistic! you have to animate the player hands in the air! and then the weapon, and play both animations at the same time!!! its not really a nice job! :\
It surely will look much better when done since everyone will see your player reloading from outside.. but its much easier to animate the weapon model with the included hands in it ala HL style

#12 Also the hands would be much more detailed... becuase most player models dont even have fingers (well, ours have, but that's one of the reasons their pretty high poly).
Doesn't anyone has a clue on how to do this?

#13 I have a question regarding this. I have been playing
around with the mount points and the first & third
person offsets and found where I would like everything for a sniper rifle.

I'm currently using the default player model and was wondering. In order to have the model hold the rifle correctly as seen by everyone else; Am I going to need another animation for the player to do when that weapon is picked up or selected? My guess is yes but i'm a noob.

#14 Not quite sure how I missed this post originally but I am glad it is been bumped back up. My question on this topic is regarding the way that T2 handled this. In first person they allowed you to render the arms and the legs of the model (and offered you the chance to do neither) How was this done? Seems like the easiest thing to do to work around this issue. I don't mind the way HL did it but wouldnt have any problem with the current system if I could just get it to show the hands/arms of the current model.

Anyone know how they did that in T2?

#15 I prefer the _REAL_ first person perspective rather than the FAKE crappy Half-Life / Quake Derived way of doing things.

I can reload any of the guns I shoot on a regular basis without looking, hell I can field strip them without looking also, and I am pretty sure I would be more worried about scanning for hostiles while reloading than looking at my hands anyway.

More practical issues are, I don't want to have to manage two sets of models and animations.

Having separate "FPS" models means people can just delete them or hack them and get that part of the screen back easily, also known as cheating.

They way it is now, they hack the model ALL the instances of that model are screwed and the game will suck.

Also HL / Quake derived games have the First Person Point of view approx at a REAL persons CHEST level :(

That is why in HL / Quake derived games characters crouch or walk behind a short wall and can't see over something but almost their entire head sticks up in 3rd person view.

Extremely cheesy in my opinion.

When you fire a shotgun "from the hip" HL / Quake style in real life you only "see" the tip of the barrel in your periperial vision anyway. Yo see the as much weapon as you do in these games you would have to hold the weapon at an extremely un-natural and un-stable position about 18 inches in front of you, that is unless your eyes were where you nipples are.

Right now OFP is one of the few games that gets the "first person view" just about right, and the iron sights mode is a perfect solution to this.

That is unless you want a Quake like bunnyhopping deathmap game, just put the "head" mount in the chest area, an voila, crappy HL point of view.

#16 @Jarrod: yes you are very right about the quake/hl first person view.. it does suck and it's too low. Also the torque way is much better since it gives more flexibilty, tho synching the player animations with the weapon will be a pain in the arse when animating reload animations

@Jason: to render the player in 1st person view open the script file fps/server/scripts/player.cs and look for this line:

renderFirstPerson = false;

change it to true and you are good to go.

#17

Quote:tho synching the player animations with the weapon will be a pain in the arse when animating reload animations

I have not had time to try this ( too busy with the C++ side of the house ) but here is my plan.

Make the ARMS part of the WEAPON :)

Cheeky, but it should work, then have a set of arms with NO weapon for when they don't have a weapon.

Then when you switch weapons you switch out the entire component on the model. That way arms and hands and any objects will be in sync.

The only GOTCHA(S) I can see is, dropping weapons will mean creating a new game object of the weapon model on the fly and tossing just it on the ground when switching out "dropping" a weapon.

But this should not be such a big deal if the weapons can be "picked up" you will have to have that object around anyway.

It just moves the work around, reduces it some, but it does remove duplicate animation effort at the expense of more data to track during development and during run time.

Nothing is a ZERO sum proposition :(

#18

Quote:
The only GOTCHA(S) I can see is, dropping weapons will mean creating a new game object of the weapon model on the fly and tossing just it on the ground when switching out "dropping" a weapon.

This is how torque currently works.


Each weapon has 2 model definitions.

The Image Model that is seen when carried and doesn't exist as a seperate entity in the game.

And the Object Model, this is the model used when the object is on the ground and can be picked up.

Generally you use the same model for both, but you don't have to.

#19 I thought including the arms with the gun was the proper way for 1st person view. It sounds easier than trying to synk two seperate animations.

#20 You can't include the arms with the weapon! You would have to sync all the player animations with the weapons animations! for example waving! you will see half the arm moving and half the arm staying.. lol... kinda like a zombie removing his hands :D