How do 3rd person weapon models work? (noob)

[mrmmaclean]

^^^ this.

Sooooo many cool animation options with a 3rd person cam, and the Tomb Raider example is quite apt.

[goldenboy]

I'd go so far as to say the difference between a shooter and an adventure is largely in the overall speed of movement, including the pace of combat, more so than just the amount of monsters.

The twitch factor is the difference pretty much... if there was an open source TR engine, you could easily turn it into a shooter with just a few little tweaks. Higher running speed, more/faster/more dangerous enemies, less autoaim. The rest is just fine.

The mechanics are pretty similar, down to the controls - modern 3rd person shooters are controlled by WASD+mouse just like Quake, and there's often an over-the-shoulder perspective with crosshair for manual aiming.

What 3rd person does better is really everything about the player character, mostly the animations, and things related to the camera movement which affect the overall immersion. You can see the player char in relation to the environment, and in relation to enemies.

The camera movement can go dreadfully wrong, though, and again early TR games are a good example of this.

[Boss429]

THE HALF-LIFE WAY:
Weapons have p_ models which usually contain base skeleton with the weapon verts assigned to them. You could just say 'why not just tag' but this way allows for the egon weapon to connect from the backpack for example essentially allowing you to put weapon parts on any damn bone you like. No Quake engines support this, though maybe Darkplaces through CSQC does by sharing an animmodelindex.

i wish an engine would support this....

you can set up in darkplaces with DPM's...

[gnounc]

What modeling programs export to dpm? I've been wondering that forever.

[leileilol]

Nothing. DPM is made by making SMDs (Half-Life)

Use IQM instead.

[Boss429]

just export to smd and compile with dpmodel:
http://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/files/dpmodel20080715.zip