10-28-2017, 09:30 PM
I'm working on some Pointshop 2 shit with Dink's approval, and we agreed I should post about this on the forum to get some feedback from you all. I've figured out how to port models from World of Warcraft, animations included, without animation errors (more often than not, at least). As far as I can tell, this isn't something someone has uploaded to the Workshop before, so this would be ubiquitous to this server (and another non-TTT server I work on, but that's besides the point). As it stands, I can port mostly everything from the game in terms of models, so this opens up a lot of potential for pets, misc items, hats, and all that. For example, I could make it so that this cool-looking sword is set at your side. Going even further, PAC3, the backend of Pointshop 2, lets you do a lot of cool shit, including hiding the model of a weapon and replacing it with another. For example, I could replace the knife's world model and viewmodel with this (only when someone who owns the skin is holding it, of course). The point is, a lot of cool stuff is possible with this, but there are some restrictions. I'll get into that later.
Here's a video of a pet I've ported from World of Warcraft in-game right now, with a functional idle and moving animation. For other models, a lot more can be done, such as varying idle animations, animations when you attack or take damage, shit like that.
As you can see, the pet responds to movement and switches to the appropriate animation, and trails behind you very similarly to the existing Antlion and Magic Gman pets. Towards the end, I also demonstrated that the model has multiple skins included with it, meaning that this model alone can account for six different pets. It's space-efficient, too; altogether, the model and materials are around 500KB, not factoring in Workshop compression.
So why am I bringing this up to you all, instead of just letting it be deployed on the server? I'm curious as to what you guys want in terms of pets. I can port mostly anything from World of Warcraft to serve as a pet, but we're going to limit it to models that actually act as pets in the game. Take a look here and find a nice looking one that you want, and link it here. There are, however, a few issues with this entire process, as I stated above, that will directly impact your suggestions;
Thanks for taking the time to look through this all. I'm looking forward to your opinions and ideas.
Here's a video of a pet I've ported from World of Warcraft in-game right now, with a functional idle and moving animation. For other models, a lot more can be done, such as varying idle animations, animations when you attack or take damage, shit like that.
As you can see, the pet responds to movement and switches to the appropriate animation, and trails behind you very similarly to the existing Antlion and Magic Gman pets. Towards the end, I also demonstrated that the model has multiple skins included with it, meaning that this model alone can account for six different pets. It's space-efficient, too; altogether, the model and materials are around 500KB, not factoring in Workshop compression.
So why am I bringing this up to you all, instead of just letting it be deployed on the server? I'm curious as to what you guys want in terms of pets. I can port mostly anything from World of Warcraft to serve as a pet, but we're going to limit it to models that actually act as pets in the game. Take a look here and find a nice looking one that you want, and link it here. There are, however, a few issues with this entire process, as I stated above, that will directly impact your suggestions;
- The model exporter doesn't currently support transparency. Models that have glows on them (example) aren't usable since the transparent part of the glow will simply be a black box. I'm working on figuring out how to remove those vertices without decoupling the mesh from the skeleton, but for the moment it's not feasible to use these. Note that this does not refer to particles; this pet emits snow-like particles, but particles aren't included with the export, so it would work fine.
- Models with transparency fall victim to the same issue as above (example and example), and would be much harder to fix. I'm not touching ones like these until the exporter properly supports transparency.
- Some models have certain animations that just don't work properly in 3ds Max. The dragon model I showed above actually had four other idle animations that could be used at random, but none of them survived the import without a glaringly obvious bug. This is an issue with the axis conversion 3ds Max does, and I've sent in a bug report to Autodesk. It'll hopefully be fixed, but until then there's no way to tell what model will have this issue before the fact. Practically speaking, if a model's idle and walk/run animations work, then I can use it; everything else would be extra.
Thanks for taking the time to look through this all. I'm looking forward to your opinions and ideas.