Universal Forum Archive

Hi,
I'm going to post this now, before this idea leaves my brain and goes into someone elses so they get all the glory.

I was playing Grand Theft Auto with my 2 sons, the San Andreas one. And I have this idea for a world, pretty much based on GTA but without the missions.
But the problem is, 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?

It would be easy to have the gangsta groups seperated by teams and areas on the map, the world would have this, one team in green, the other in purple or red, or any other colour, such as GTA.

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.
Drive-by's and such, scrap it, just have the cars with weapons.

As for the teams, seperated, each team has to work on destroying the others, a weapon-based world, with a small economy, to supply the houses, food, drink, and weapons. I suppose having different skill names, such as "Pimp" or "Gangsta" could eb used, and from there, other players could become in that family of the team, team 1 does not fight itself, yet it has families. Same as team 2.

A big project, I know. But it's just an idea I have, if these ideas (like the gun holding characters and such) could be made, I'd be happy to make this world and maintain it. And I'm sure many players would love to go into it.

It's all a beta idea but yes, if you need any more information, just ask, I'm sure I've missed bits out.

Vaulenteers who want to help with the world, simply email me, - alner@internode.on.net and include your forum and game name, so I can know the stuff so I can go from there.

Thanks,
Alner.
(The idea much came from my sons as it did from me)
Cole, and Dylan.

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..

f

Fooli wrote:mostly unable to concentrate on anything for more than 20 seconds cos I've just quit smoking

Go you!

Bah! 14 days and counting. Occasionally I can go five or ten minutes without wanting to jump off the balcony ;)

Mit's quit too. It may be the right thing to do but I suspect we've reduced game development productivity by 99% in the process. Ah well :]
f

i had a thoguht for the colour change of cars......as long as ppl were told what vejicle number was what car and colour............. U could have a building where u could swap one car for another....if ppl had the time i guess they could develop a way so the building can tell what type of car uve got and only show ur type of car in dif colours....

Feel free to ignore thois just an idea

Fooli wrote:Bah! 14 days and counting. Occasionally I can go five or ten minutes without wanting to jump off the balcony

Mit's quit too. It may be the right thing to do but I suspect we've reduced game development productivity by 99% in the process. Ah well :]
f

and ive put down the pipe....for now

I want this topic to be purely on my idea, I didn't spend 1 hour thinking this over just to make it die because ppl want to get their post count up by saying they've quit smoking as well and such.

Fooli, I'd love to work with you on this idea as long as we can both come to an agreement, all those plans for the future I can definatley help in, like NooB's idea, we could do this.
Or we could just beef the character spots up to 100 or something, I'm sure you'd be repayed with the players of TU having a ball on this world. I just like the whole concept of GTA, turning it into a world here would be just as good.

We'd both need help, I have no time myself really, basically when schools back on I got them out of my hair and can get on with work, and probably this.

But I don't like the idea of a staff world, it'd probably be neglected, how many staff is there anyway?
How about having it for veterans of the game?
Or we could just copy that world, (I'd help with your one) and make my edits to it, and have the same idea one, with a few changes, for the whole of TU?

I have no clue, but it's just such a good idea to go to waste.
It'd be nice for people to post here if they have some kind of contribution - like NooB's post.

Get back to me.

i would be glad to help... samthetrue is the name... the universal is my game...
samthetrue@yahoo.com is my email

send me some info about where the world is and that sorta stuff...
would perfer in game comunications because i dont check my email that much

I said to email me, you should really read the posts before giving out info like that.

alner wrote:Fooli, I'd love to work with you on this idea as long as we can both come to an agreement, all those plans for the future I can definatley help in, like NooB's idea, we could do this.

Think more in terms of, I'll help you out with models and such if I have time. It's more likely you'll get yours done than mine ;)

alner wrote:Or we could just beef the character spots up to 100 or something

Unlikely, which is why I posted all that stuff!

alner wrote: I'm sure you'd be repayed with the players of TU having a ball on this world. I just like the whole concept of GTA, turning it into a world here would be just as good.

But of course. One other thought was doing something more like GTA 1 than GTA 3... ie, top-down, or mostly top-down. Advantage is you don't need half the detail in the graphics, which could potentially speed up development (imagine the characters more like lil' stick people or something).

alner wrote:But I don't like the idea of a staff world, it'd probably be neglected, how many staff is there anyway?

You misunderstand, perhaps. Staff world = a world run by staff; ie, permanent and (usually) stable and successful, but otherwise for anyone to play on. There's no reason why there couldn't be copies of it, as you suggest... but for now, perhaps continue with your GTA idea, and see what happens.


f

Ok then, firstly I'd need to get my world registered, last time I tried it didn't work. So perhaps you could enlighten me..

I'll need to get the bdat done, and such, which may be hard, and I'd need to explore graphics for cars and buildings, as well as people, I'd need 2 druid models, 1 person wearing green, 1 with purple. If you could do this, it'd be cool, make em negroid (black) please.

I mean it's no use starting unless I have the models, for now I could just beta-erise it until all the models are done and then officially open it, I aint much of a settings person probably, so I'd like help, I'll make all staff sysops of course.

I hope you can get this done, I wont get started right away as I gotta finish GTA and stuff, but within a few days I will.

Thanks,
Alner
(no one knows my real name HAHA)

You want two black druids? Hehe ;) That might be possible.

What about, though, something a bit more like the surfboard guy on The Republic (also one of the main game avatars these days) - it'd be pretty easy to turn him into a black dude, if that's what you're looking for; remove the surfboard, obviously... maybe change the hair, do a couple versions with different coloured clothing... whatever... wouldn't take too long cos the main character's already built. If you don't mind him being white (for now) it'd be even quicker.

f

should try looking on turbo squid... theyve gfot some free models some of pretty damn good.... and most of them are happy for the to be used anywhere

and none of them will be animated in the game here unless you edit the models and change em around alot (game doesen't support pre-animated models). or they are textureless and need a texture made and/or need mapping and a texture. and some just plain suck even though they look good in the picture. you can open them up in a modelling program and the faces will all be 1 inch apart like the model got exploded or something.

fooli wrote:the moment we don't have the facility to have different skins for the same model

fooli, whatever happened to the color changing v1 that was around a few years ago?
v1 was a tractor model, and you could type .settex blahblahblah.bmp to change its color.

i'm sure it'd be pretty easy to do that again but for every vehicle
have a default texture assigned, and players could type .settex (texture name) to change the texture of the vehicle they were in.

and...shame on you for quitting smoking, should just slow down instead of stopping completly
the worlds oldest lady smoked until she was 90, and smoking helps you concentrate and reduces stress. plus its something to do when your standing around outside

alner wrote:I said to email me, you should really read the posts before giving out info like that.

this is a forum, accept that people don't always do that and will post other stuff

Surfer dude? Not sure, should make him look gangsta, like CJ wearing a green hoodie, that kind of gangsta apparell if you know what I mean?

Zar, accepted, and true, but still, lol.

Hmm, I've never played San Andreas, I'm too old to know what a "hoodie" is, and round here I wouldn't risk lookin too closely at any gangsta wannabes in case they're not just pretending. So I'd have to guess :)

J/k. Well mostly. Well, partly :)
f

Hah, I'm nearly there, I learn from the game Hoodie = hooded jumper/sweater whatever you wanna call it.
For the record, green = a colour/color
Hahhahah