Doom/Quake Like Weapon Perspective Thread - 3079

I'm digging the old school vibe of this game, but I can't say I'm enjoying the weapons too much. Part of its the mechanics and part of its the aesthetics. Let's talk aesthetics.

If the creator is intent on keeping the weapons sprites, why not give the option of having them desplayed in a Doom like fashion? Basically center of screen. It would really bring a nice Marathon feeling to the game (which was way better than Doom in my opinion). I like the idea of weapons sprites, but I don't like the static sprites and I really hate the perspective. Perhaps a comprimise would be more of a Duke 3D perspective?

I'm just throwing this out there. I think the easiest way to implement the weapon animations would be to start out with 3D models and then convert them to sprites (like the old days), then you could easily incorporate different perspectives to suite all players.

I'm not necessarily intent on keeping the weapon sprites -- I'm using them now because they look decent and it is relatively easy to make another 1 or 2 as needed. I really would like to get 3D models for my weapons, so it would give them some depth (especially when held by other characters). So, when I find time to work on the weapon graphics, that is what I'm likely going to work on. I don't really want to spend time re-creating all of the 2D weapon sprites just to give them a different perspective. If I had the 3D models (which isn't a simple task alone), I'd rather not make them back into sprites.

Thanks for the suggestion, and I do understand the weapon graphics could use some work -- I'm hoping they will just look better as 3D objects, when I get to it

Thanks for the response.
I think 3D is the way to go then. I'd still like a "nostalgia" setting for the weapons, I'd make me feel better about not having "iron sights", unless you plan to add those. Either way I'm glad you plan on moving to 3D guns. It will definitely give the game more of its own identity.

I use to make 3D gun graphics when I was younger (in the UT2004 era), so I know exactly what goes into it. Since I had to keep the poly count low I just placed the vertices and drew the faces by hand, majorly time consuming, but very fun and satisfying. I never did well with texture work, but I believe I did ok with the texture maps and animations.

Those look pretty damn cool!

Yeah, making the models is a huge step, but you can't use them until they have textures made and properly applied :-/

What I really want to do, and I think is possible, is to auto-generate 3D models (and textures) from the 2D images. This would make it very easy to add and modify the models as needed. There is a library that almost already does this, but is a bit buggy at the moment for my needs:

Jmonkeyengine.org

Hey thanks! My 15 year old self would be proud.

My suggestion would be to do what Borderlands did, create weapon "platforms" and have each randomly generated weapon have different component configuration, i.e. different stocks, barrels, optics, receivers... So instead of creating thousands of lookalike weapons, you create a handful that have a few thousand configurations! What would cool would be to combine this with the engineering skill, so you could dismantle one gun and rebuild with parts of another gun, if you have the knowledge. Borderlands was originally going to have that mechanic, but it get scrapped for reasons I don't know.

This would add a level of realism too as mechanically inclined gun owners can take an AR-15 or AK platform and mix and match parts of different rifles or rifle manufacturers.

Edited by: FoxFav

You are not the first to suggestion such a thing, and it certainly is possible. I had someone email me, saying he would make me some models to do something like this -- but I haven't heard back from him. All these great 3D gun model ideas are awesome, but I feel like I won't be able to actually implement them until I figure out how to make the models myself :-/ I do plan on figuring it out, but I have lots of other things on my plate, like dedicated servers.

I'm curious, what are your poly count and texture size restraints?

The borderlands idea is fantastic in my opinion.

I don't really have any restraints, other than I'd like the poly-count to be as low as possible (without looking like total crap, hehe) -- I like to keep 3079 as lean as possible!

I've been looking for an excuse to mess with Blender. PM me if you have any art direction ideas to go on for the weapons.
No offense, but I don't think making low poly weapons is hard, my 2D skills have much improved since I made those weapons and quite frankly I love doing low rez stuff.

Hey FoxFav,

I do like the look of the current 2D weapons, so if you could make some low-poly weapons with the same "theme", that'd be pretty sweet. I need someone who finds making low-poly weapons easy

After Wednesday I have the rest of the week off and I'll see if I can whip something up in Wings 3D. I prefer Wings for low poly stuff.

The current sprites barrow a lot from other games so I'll try to add my own flavor to them. They key here is "modular" weapons. So I'll start with the basic platform and then start making custom foregrips, stocks, barrels, etc...

I should note that I'm a gun guy, i.e. I know these things inside and out, so They'll look functional (and futuristic of course, the H&K G11 is one of my favorite designs!).

aieet, cool :-) I look forward to what you come up with!

So I read this thread the other day, and I have an interesting idea. What if you kept the guns on the right like you have them now but implement an iron sight system for most, if not all the guns and when you press the right MB you would get the doom type view of the weapon in the middle of the screen or a top downish type view. Not sure if that makes sense, it makes sense in my head anyway.haha

I also like the idea of proceduraly generated guns with different stocks, barrels etc, similar to Borderlands.

Also I was thinking it would be nice to get a No Friendly fire option with a button you can press to override it if you choose to shoot your allies. I accidently shot some humanoids and got a merchant mad at me, it was rather annoying.heh

i second the iron sights idea, and the marathon idea. i'm not exactly sure why, maybe it's the accuracy mechanic, but even at point blank range the bullets will go off at an angle. they're a little too far to the side to get a feel for the aim and with projectile speeds being a factor that can hurt the game alot.

You mean like the Resistance games where you got this weird center zoom view? I never cared for it, but then again I HATE the fake iron sights in BF3 and COD (e.g. over-sized aperture sights, overly narrow front post sights and mega wide back sights, etc..). I like what ARMA did where they just zoomed in on the sights to get a more realistic sight picture.

For the whole off angle thing the Serious Sam games did a real easy fix where the cross hair would reposition itself at close range. If iron sights where implemented I'd like the option to turn off the cross hair, makes it more immersive for me without making things much harder at close range.

Hate to resurrect the most-dead thread on the forums, but I found this interesting. I'd love to see weapon movement and head bobbing when you move with a weapon in your hand, which I think would be really cool with the psudo-3d weapons built into the game by now.

There is weapon bobbing already... do you want more bobbing...?

Phr00t wrote: do you want more bobbing...?

So are we going to get bouncy castles?

I always liked how Killing Floor handled looking down the sights of your guns - but I can't say that I need it in this game.

I thought that the weapons were not moving actually. I was talking more.... Well, you run, the weapons move side to side (from right side to halfway mark or 1/3rd mark in screen from left) in an arc (up and down movement). Similar to doom.

Phr00t wrote: I don't really have any restraints, other than I'd like the poly-count to be as low as possible (without looking like total crap, hehe) -- I like to keep 3079 as lean as possible!

I can make you anything with a poly count of 3.