More musical son-names you couldn't hope for - cool :)
Right: as this is sorta a bit like the world idea I'm kinda sorta nearly working on I thought I'd chip in with some thoughts. My place is more Car Wars/Mad Max but other than the look 'n' feel the basic idea is the same.... I was intending it to be (ultimately) a staff world, and that may well happen... I'm just a bit busy at the moment and mostly unable to concentrate on anything for more than 20 seconds cos I've just quit smoking :)
Anyway, said thoughts follow:
Alner wrote:how are we going to make a character be able to change what it is wearing, and be able to hold a gun, and cycle through weapons, much like GTA?
Simple answer: you can't. The way GTA (and Quake, Half Life, etc etc etc - proper games ) do it is by having a skeletal animation system - ie, the characters can "hold" different weapon items and the game knows how to make a gun move with an arm, and all that. We don't have a skeletal animation system - there's a long-term plan to do this but don't hold your breath. We have a vertex animation system. What that means is we have to build weapons into each character model, and basically they're never going to change - if you want Bob The Builder holding a pistol, and a crossbow, that means two separate character models, each with their own animations etc, and two vehicles in-game.
Same for what the character's wearing - each outfit would have to be assigned to a separate vehicle in game. So if you want Bob to have three different outfits and two weapons, that's 6 models you need to make & texture. Bummer huh?
However, we can fudge it in a couple of ways. The first way I've just described: literally build separate models for each type of weapon. Hardly ideal but it'd work: you'd have to have players owning different "vehicles", one with each weapon, and then you'd simply change vehicle to switch from pistol to shotgun, etc. Obviously the problem is, even a small number of weapons would take up a lot of vehicle slots, of which there are only 23. If you want male and female characters, for instance, and say 6 weapons each, that's half your slots gone before you'd even started on cars, bikes etc. And it'd take bleedin' ages to model and texture.
I used this approach on a world called Phong, which has so far failed to see the light of day... it's a sci-fi world and basically I have one "character" model, available in two colours, and 6 weapons... ie, two teams with 6 weapon choices available to each. It took months to model and animate the characters, even though they're all the same (making a guy walk with a chaingun is different to walking with a pistol, etc etc).
The second way is less realistic but much faster and more flexible. It's the way I've chosen for my Car Wars type world... haven't quite got around to finishing the character model but this is the way it'd work. Basically each character will hold a "generic gun" of some kind - something that looks like it could fire lots of different things. The weapon differences are then done with different types of ammo instead of different weapon models. Much like you've seen on other worlds, where a car can fire MGs or cruise missiles or whatever - there are settings that let you fire anything you have in your inventory.
The result is you only need one character model. The downside is, firing a pistol or shotgun would basically look the same except for the bullets themselves. My place will have more of a sci-fi theme going on cos it makes it easier to get away with this.
Alner wrote:As for cars, it'd be the same, scrap the idea of hydrolics and colour changing (like at the pay n spray) this would be too hard, but maybe a good idea.
Maybe choosing the colour when buying a car would be easier.
There's a long-term plan to beef up the vehicle physics with independent suspension etc. Again, no breath-holding though :) Choosing the colour of your car raises similar problems to the weapon issue above. At the moment we don't have the facility to have different skins for the same model, other than assigning different coloured versions of a vehicle to different vehicle slots. Ie, you have a red ferrari as vehicle 2, a black one as vehicle 3, yellow as vehicle 4, and so on. Obviously a bit of a rubbish solution and a good way to run out of vehicle slots pretty quick. Especially if you want vehicles with transparent windows so you can see your character inside - multiply number of vehicles by number of characters and despair at the amount of modelling work it'd require ;)
Alner wrote:Drive-by's and such, scrap it, just have the cars with weapons.
Yup. However... there's already a feature (currently broken but Mit tells me it's sort of there) to let cars fire weapons sideways. So you could sort of do drive-bys, yes. I theory you could even have a car model with a character inside it who had a special "fire magnum out of window" animation and link it to a suitable weapon type... while "normal" firing would just trigger MGs on your car, or something.
All the rest of it - economy etc - ought to be fairly easy. The only other things that have so far let me down are:
- the fact that our vehicle physics aren't working properly. The less you care about realism the better they are, but there are still issues with things like bounce that make it difficult to set up cars that always react as you'd expect them to. Mit knows about this stuff - it's just finding time to fix it that's the problem at the moment.
- hills. Hills? Yes, hills. Most worlds rely on "silly" weapons for cars, like evil eyes and cruise missiles and trajectory weapons (mortars etc). If you want cars that can fire simple weapons like MGs, in a straight line, I find it's tricky to use them on lumpy landscapes. You usually end up shooting the ground just in front of you. If it's all flat, fair enough... depends how realistic you want it. Turrets are another option. If you're aiming for "pure" GTA I guess vehicle weapons aren't so important..
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but yes, if you need any more information, just ask, I'm sure I've missed bits out.
Hoodie = hooded jumper/sweater whatever you wanna call it.