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[V!NCENT]

Games make for great school projects, for various reasons. Right now I'm making an actual strat game for a real company, together with two other programmers, and I've run into a problem I needed to solve. It sounds realy simple; you place some object somewhere (can't go into even what this game is or who it's for, except it's on a tablet with a touch interface). After placement, the player needs to be able to rotate it by draging his finger around a circle, which is around the object. Well blah blah blah... it requires all kinds of math. And then I thought about GE:S.


So I was thinking... Why are the weapon animations in first person, in GES, fully animated? I understand that the triggerfinger needs animation, but why the rest? Why aren't various objects attached to each other and rotated/moved relative to each other?


Why am I asking? Well some player movement sequences don't seem to match and things start to stutter. Also dual weapon animation problems could easily be solved. I noticed that in GE64 the animation is much more fluent and complex than GES and I don't think that Rare was into creating and anticipating NP-problem animation sequences.


Just my $0,02

[Jonathon [SSL]]

I'm honestly not sure exactly what you're trying to tell us.

[kraid]

^^same here.

As far as i understand, you're suggesting to do weapon animations via code, but i don't know why.

[V!NCENT]

What I'm trying to say is yes; non deformations in code.


Imagine you've got the player's position object, which the player changes with keyboard. Relative to that you change the direction of the camera with the mouse. This is all done.


But then relative to which direction the player is looking at, you wobble the camera position slowly, like in GE64. While moving you move the camera head bobbing style relative to the wobbleing. While turning you also move the camera with a slight delay along the player model position so the guns seem to move around like in the N64. Relative to the player position, while moving, you wobble the guns around. Relative to that you might reload the weapon by moving the weapon down, etc.


This way you'll get very fluent and complex animation, while not having to animate all movement scenario's independantly as a whole.

[killermonkey]

WTF are you talking about??

Walking wobble is done in code, its a sin wave (squished) relative to your walking gait.

The animations only consist of stupid flex movements of the gun to give you a sense that you are actually holding it and its not just sitting there on the screen.

[V!NCENT]

Aha... I thought that the twitching was due to switching animations rapidly

[Mangley]

The view model and camera both pivot around a point 64 units above the player's origin. It's not known why the view model twitches when you have latency, but it has nothing to do with animation.