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giovedì 30 agosto 2018

TCE - arms progress

I did not write any posts because I did not have good news to give.
I maded some animations for weapons (some completely new compared to those present) and with good results.
For example, for AK47 I had added another type of reload and a onother one in which the player can see the accessories mounted on the weapon.
Unfortunately I immediately fight with the error "ERROR: VirtualAlloc commit failed." when the map is changing. The Z_CQB_players and Z_CQB_Viewarms package wan't work together! (both in ET and in ET Legacy)
Until now I practically i'll go step by step and by elimination, to understand what generated it.
In the end I won my battle but the war will probably is a draw.

I avoid to tell the list of all the attempts I made and get to the point: there is a maximum amount of memory dedicated to all the player models and their animations (.md3 files).
This means that all the models of the heads + animations of the heads + the models of the arms + all the animations of the arms should not exceed a certain amount.
Originally, the game has one head for all the models of players with 400 frames + one model of arms with about 100 frames for each weapon. Realy a poor thing.
I made 5 heads with 400 frame animations and three arms models with 180 frame animations and I immediately had the problem "ERROR: VirtualAlloc commit failed.".

As you can see this limit is very, very, very penalizing for those who want to use the engine and make an inprovement with a good graphic level.

Since I can not touch the code I am forced to the following workaround:

- Reduction the number of heads from 5 to 4 and the duration of animations from 400 to 180 frames (for the moment I removed HD_IDLE4, HD_DAMAGED_IDLE2, HD_DAMAGED_IDLE3, SMILE)
- Elimination of any accessory for the heads (even the hair will be added via tag in .skin file)

- Reduction of polygons and vertices for models of hands and arms
- Reduction of variations of the arms models from 3 to 2 (sleeves + elbow pads will be unused)
- Reduction of the animations of the arms to have maximum 60 frames (since some are managed by the code such as drop/raise)

I have requested the of coroner's authorization to distribute the new version of CQB but without success so I will dedicate myself to TCE.
In any case, without a proper modification to the engine code, I'm afraid a 3D artist will never do a good job to improve the graphic content related to the players' models and the game's animations.