I'm still working to the animation of the arms and closisng the Z_TCE_players package.
The limit of the maximum number of frames for the md3 that I had previously discussed that is very serious and penalizing. The consequences are:
1) the animations need to be adaptable to more weapons, so are less precise and less realistic
2) the animations must be short as posssible to save memory (so for example no check of empty chamber before reload and so on ..)
3) the use of accessories via tags becomes very uncomfortable.
So I'm making animations that can be reused for multiple models of weapons and seems good in game but must be tuned for the number of frames per second (btw increasing the number of the fps mean more fast, but also mean less precision since miss some frame) and for the correct position of the sight respect to the point of impact. I can't really understand why the game only handle the last shot animation for pistol and not for rifle, this is inexplicable.
As I have already written, seems that TCE/CQB can not manage the third-person arms models with short sleeves (without touching the code), so I have modified the sniper class models (specops and terror) and I added long sleeves. The short sleeves player models are moved in a "tropical" directory for future use. I'm also using only arms models with long sleeves in the first-view for the same reasons.
Currently I have ported from CQB to TCE these weapons models: AK47, AK47 + M68, SG552, SG552 + Reddot, Beretta92fs, Desert Eagle, P226, Glock, Usp40, Wilson1911
In my opinion, all the weapons need to be optimized and made it next-gen compliant by redoing a UV map of the models without overlap. Many weapons meshes are out of scale, need to be improved or completely replaced. The texture skins are generally all excellent.
Keep in mind that UV map and SmoothGroups heavily affect the number of vertices of the md3 model. For example, this is the result of the same cube exported to md3 but with different UV maps / SmoothGroups:
Mesh <Box01>: 12 Triangles, 8 Vertexes (+16 verts for SmoothGroups, +0 verts for UV map)
Geometry Total: 12 Triangles, 24 Vertexes
Mesh <Box01>: 12 Triangles, 8 Vertexes (+0 verts for SmoothGroups, +24 verts for UV map)
Geometry Total: 12 Triangles, 32 Vertexes
An interesting feature could be the management of other tags in addition to flash and brass in the model of weapons (probably in the code cg_weapons.c). This could allow you to better manage all the accessories that can be considered fixed (such as sight, suppressor, foregrip, ...) and save the amount of specific animations of the arms.
Unfortunately I also encountered other problems...
1) the texture management for the arms of the knife model seems to ignore the settings provided in the .skin files for each player (which instead work for all other weapons).
This problem seems to be already present in the official version of TCE / CQB
2) A incomprehensible lack of functionality of the transparencies for the new shaders I added. For example, transparency for new flashes or new reddot wan't work.
Soon I will release the Z_TCE_players package and I will be grateful if some user give me a feedback. If someone find models of weapons royalty free and/or want to make some contribution by tuning/modelling/skin/adding weapons let me know.
Next in queue:
- fisrt-view arms animation for all weapons
- moving all CQB weapons to TCE
- 1024 * 1024 hands texture
- find / remake weapons more detailed
- clean old weapons UV overlapping verticies
- make old weapons next-gen compliant
- make new third-view players animations
