Equipment issues
| Submitted by ghastley on Fri, 2007-09-28 11:37 | ||
I found I was highjacking my own thread with a discussion on ornaments etc., so I'm splitting that off here. There are currently three types of equippable items, ones that replace parts of the character mesh (body armor, helms, boots, gloves), ones that attach to the mesh via "grips" (weapons and shields), and those that are invisible (rings and amulets). The grips provide for articulation between the hand and the weapon (especially needed for staves), and essentially allow the meshes attached to be independent ones (with their own animations - whips and rotating gun barrels). What's not clear to me (yet?) is what distinguishes these in the UI. Would there be a way to add a third grip to a character (or more)? Ornaments just add optional incremental mesh to the body armor. They are considered part of that submesh, and get replaced with it. That's why an ornament declared on the character template is removed when body armor is equipped, and armor_ornament is only an option for body armor. It complicates the first type of equipment, but doesn't really add another. Each equipment slot in the paperdoll UI can send a message to the item that is being equipped/removed, so skrit attached to the item can be used to do things like change textures, which is what I did for Lara's shorts, or start/stop effects, which is standard fare for enchantments on weapons. Witness used this to disallow armor combos that would overlap meshes. I have seen prototypes of mods that add equipment slots, but they never seemed to get past the UI part of the mod. I imagine there's no issues adding the invisible equipment - so a ring slot for each finger would be workable - but I haven't seen anyone add cloaks or anything extra like that. Does anyone know any I've missed? forums: |
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I have tried to find the mesh for Prince Valdis' flowing cape (scarf?) in the opening NIS but think it was used for the video capture and then removed from the templates.
There have been capes and other things on monsters (e.g. the Seck Mage) but I'm looking for mods that allow the player character to equip additional items. I remember seeing a thread somewhere with extra paperdoll slots, but that was never taken all the way to using them to equip the character; it was just a demo of how to change the interface.
I have made meshes with extras (e.g the Succubus Queen's wings) but not equippable items with inventory UI code to support it. It may be that all the pieces have been done, but nobody has brought them all together.
I'm sure we're all familiar with Xaa's work (eg. adding breast bones to his "little pony", using inventory ammo...) but I can't think of any "equippable" items in the manner you mean. The backpack has an effect just by being held in inventory, and that's the closest thing that comes to mind.
Gizmo the goblin sort of did this, in that he "equips" a ridable perforator, but that's a different story altogether, and based on the robosuit/Lactri/rats method of combining two or more articulate meshes with colocation constraints. The UI for that is not paperdoll drag/drop, of course.
Capes could be done the same way, but I don't think anyone ever went all the way to making a mod.
I'm still reconsidering the Shirt/shorts skrit method I'm using for Lara, as it currently limits me to an outfit with optional halves, rather than two independent pieces, and only really works because the shorts can be purely texture.
The backpack in LoA wasn't very satisfactory for me, as the character didn't wear it, and that's one of the problems I was trying to fix. But I'm still trying to get the "extra inventory when equipped" effect back - as extra pages like a pet, perhaps, except that all attempts to use those functions seem to fail for a non-pet!