What are you working on?

[ceriux]

updated the texture on this gewehr i think it turned our pretty well. it'll be in md2 format. (i know theres no trigger its not seen ingame)



finished and in game thanks to drm_wayne

[leileilol]

Here is a very terrible attempt at a PC-98ish picture.




Terrible because background and arms.

[mankrip]

The outlines could be improved. In some places they're 1 pixel thick, and in others they're 2 pixels thick.

The shading and coloring is great, though.

[Seven]

Hello,

I am trying to bring a *feeling of ragdoll* into Quake, without using replacement monster models.
This is my first atempt:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVQcwjUQXug

I used GYRO and Wazat´s semisolid corpses as base.
By giving health to corpses and switching randomly through the last 3 death animation frames in their pain function.

This way I could use the same code for all monsters and all death animations.
The original ID1 monsters all have nice detailed animation frames (with only small movement between each frame).
So the result looks quite fluent.

It is of course not comparable to "sagdoll" mod (with multi-parted models and physics), as i want to use original .mdl´s.
But I think the visual is quite good with this idea and small coding effort.
It needs some more tweaking though...


PS: At the end of the clip you can also see a twitching corpses effect (inspired by kleshik mod).
It uses random time functions in which it switches to next to last frame and after 0.2 .. 0.4 seconds back to last death frame.
For a more intense visual it can be changed to use third last frame.
(Or a mixture of both)

[Nahuel]

just a little demostration of an "electric_trigger" activable for the dead morning tech demo called "hideous". "Hideous" will not be a dead morning demo, will be a little game with some dead morning gameplay and stuff.

[mankrip]

Nice looking room, Nahuel. It reminds me of a tech demo I did for college.

Seven, you could make it work like a "rollback" feature. Make the hits alternate between the second and the third last frames, but let the animation flow again to the last frame when it's not being hit. Being able to make the model interpolation slower would help that, but I don't know if Darkplaces supports something like self.frame_interval.

[Seven]

Hello mankrip,

Your tip works very good
I now reset the corpse (when beeing shot) after 0.2 seconds into last death frame again.
That looks a LOT better now.
Now it doesnt randomly remain in the third last frame, which *can* look weird .

Your rollback idea is great!
Now the "ragdoll" movement of the corpses look really fluent.

It was a little bit tricky to implement it, due to the twitching effect (which has its own time dependencies).
But in the end, all went good

Thank you again,
Seven

[ajay]

Today I've been organising my map; making sure all elements e.g. buildings are grouped and saved separately to allow for easy tweaking and updating, plus I cleared up all the test maps and bit and pieces I'd made while working on the level. I've also played with making ghost monsters, nothing difficult or revolutionary, just a greyscale skin and .alpha 0.5, but the effect, especially when the torch catches it, is cool:

[scar3crow]

Looking nice and ghastly ajay.

Seven, I'd like to see a video of the improved version, mankrip's feedback was a much improved version of my thoughts, so I'm really interested in seeing how it turned out =)

[Seven]

Hello scar3crow,

here is a clip from the improved condition:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znsTslH0 ... a0YmLJuMdw

This time I left out all the replacement files for the clip, so that you can see the original Quake world.

I raised the corpses health value significantly higher for this clip (= 300), so you can better see the effect. Normaly the corpses gib much earlier/faster.
It will be included in the "small mod compilation" Ver. 4.40 for Quake.
If you want the QC source, I can send it to you upfront.

One point, that could maybe still be improved is the turning/spinning speed of the corpses when beeing shot/moved, but with normal corpse health (= 60) it doesnt matter that much as it gibs quite fast.

The other weapons (GL, RL and LG) also work with this effect, but due to the amount of explosion particles, I did not record them as you cannot see much.

Best wishes,
Seven

[scar3crow]

Very cool stuff, and this may be a moot issue with normal corpse health, but I noticed that the corpses always rotate counter-clockwise when shot, it might be nice to have the rotation be based upon the damaging angle, or at least set randomly to rotating clockwise or counter-clockwise when damage is first done. But yeah, might not matter with normal corpse health.

Thanks for the video and showing the different corpses, I was actually wondering this morning how it would look with a Vore =)

[frag.machine]

The beauty of this idea resides in its simplicity and how convincing the twitching bodies are. Great job, Seven.

[goldenboy]

Nice effect 7. Be aware that running gyro constantly on multiple objects is a performance drain - since it runs every single frame. We did this in RMQ and one day we checked what the most heavily used QC functions were. You might be surprised. Gyro is not "light" in any way.

[Seven]

Hello scar3crow,

Yes, while recording and watching the clip, I also found that it looks somehow *wrong* that the corpses only spin counter-clockwise.
It uses .avelocity = '0 130 0'.
Even though it is not much noticable with low corpse-health, I should make it random if it spins counter-clockwise or clockwise. That surely helps to raise the variation.


Hello frag.machine,

I think this has a big potential for new monsters. In Total conversions or mods with new monster types.
While modeling the monster and its animations, the author can now add special "ragdoll"-animations and use their frames for this feature in QC.
This way it will even look better than using the last 3 death animations.

But yes, I was also suprised that even the original death animation frames look quite good with this "dummy ragdoll" effect. That shows once again, that the modelers from ID did an excellent job.
In my opinion the animations from ID Quake monsters are really amazing.
Much better than their poly-count


Hello goldenboy,

Thank you for your post.
The "small mod compilation" uses Gyro for some time already and I always worry about performance impact when creating/experimenting new ideas/features for the "small mod compilation".
That is why I regularly start a map with and without the mod. To see the difference. I choose maps with around 100 monsters.
And until now the impact is not noticable. Thank god.
The extra particle effects are disabled during this test, as they are of course performance hungry.
We had a discussion about this topic some weeks ago at quakeone.com, you maybe have read it too.
I do not use GYRO on items. Only monsters and their gibs (and shell casings). But the last 2 mentioned vanish after a small amount of time.
Only the players weapons have GYRO forces so far. I plan on adding forces to monster projectiles as well, which will then interact with the player slightly (pushing).

Thank you all for your comments.
Best regards.

[ajay]

The church (now) on the hill