[otc6-devs] weapon-design

[R.Fries <te...@rf...>]

hey, 
its still not clear to me, but maybe someone knows more about it.
What is this?
one md3-file done with blender. The cubes are put a bit below the grid-surface 
and a bit to the right (in opposite to the green-axis). I did this because i 
still have no clue how the different files of a weapon act together. I put 
the md3-file over:
models/weapons2/colt/v_colt.mdc
models/weapons2/m16/v_m16.MD3

at my first tests i never saw anything (and tried it with a real 
weaponmodel...) but when playing around with the weapon-onscreen-positions it 
suddenly was drawn. I have to set /cg_gunX 15 (it seems to disappear totally 
below 10 - ..why?). Like you can see, there are still other parts of the 
weapon drawn - from the other files. They look like the anim-parts for 
weapon-reload. Normaly you dont see them, because the main-weapon is drawn 
over this - maybe the designers left it in to have a clue how to anim the 
hand-movement with the changing of the weapon-magazine.

the pictures are:
the blender weapon-model (.... 5 cubes ..)
next as the m16, un-aimed and aimed(raised)
next as the colt, un-aimed and aimed

i first thought, the tags are crucial to put the weapon on the right place and 
tried different "tag_weapon" positions, nothing happened .... This is done 
with no "tag"s in the md3-file, only the cubes.

@name: problem of resizing, did not finde anything - seems you have to scale 
it first in blender -- to milkshape - to md3 there.... for your export-way.

last, i modified the python-plugins to read/write md3-files for blender - they 
are working better, but still it could happen, blender crashes in the export. 
Thats my 3rd day of python coding .... and i dont know anything about the 
blender api.

Limitations: the et-engine can only process model-surfaces with up to 1024 
vertices(points), and up to 2050 triangles (?not quite shure, but got this 
error msg. when loading such a thing in otc6). Thats for the designer, you 
have to use more smaller surfaces. The limit of surfaces for one model 
(something around ?256.. 512?..- a lot for weapon-design!). Next !urgent! if 
you export to md3, it might happen a surface gets a lot more vertices. Reason 
could be bad-exporter-code and for shure one part is the scaling of the 
md3-format. The points are saved as whole numbers (no fraction) and are 
multiplied by 64 to not lose details too much. But this can introduce new 
points for triangles, who normaly share the same( i dont speak about the 
pentium calc.bug...:-)).

thats enough for now.. happy .. fraggin... - test-dr
-- 
Ruediger Fries, te...@rf...