[mod] MadMan's Mess

[KingDaniel]

Hi there,

Sorry for the late reply. Was Kinda busy in some work and didn't get much time to play NecroVision.

Well I think Kr3v has already given a lot of feedback on your MOD.

Gniarf, check your PM. Thanks.

[Gniarf]

I'be got a problem with effects attached to the weapons. To understand what I'm talking about:
1-Take a (machine)gun and fire. -> Oh a muzzleflash !
2-get next to a wall/ennemy and fire -> Oh no more muzzleflash !
3-Step back a little -> still no flash.
4-Step back a little more -> Oh, my muzzleflash is back!
(and if you're smart/lucky you can even see the it halway into the wall)

I suggested one solution, pulling back the weapon when you're close to a wall, so that the effect never get into the wall....but apparently people don't like that.

How come that we never see weapons going through walls? That's because they are "GunPassed" - always visible if you want. So I thought about gunpassing effects aswell...turns out that they simply disappear. (did I code it wrong?).

WTF?? But in painkiller (overdose) weapons are gunpassed AND muzzleflashs are rendered correctly! That's because in PKOD muzzleflashs are "sprites" whereas they are particles in necrovision.
Then why not using sprites? Because it would mean converting all weapon effects into tga or dds. I don't know how to do that, but just for muzzleflashs we could actually take any flame, doesn't matter if they're like the originals or not. But I don't know if we can do the same for other fx, such as the flame on the flame hand (and maybe the blue thing on the ice hand). Not to mention that tga/dds are NOT animated (and muzzleflashs in PKOD are not animated).

I also thought about reducing the size of weapons(+moving them closer to the camera to preserve the aspect), but it's not really a solution, it just gives you more time before the effects disappear into the wall.
One viable solution would be to microsize weapons and increase the player collision box so that weapon+fx are kept within.Perhaps we could run into trouble if the player grows too fat and cannot go through certain doors...perhaps, but the main problem is that I don't know how to increase that box size.

Help!

[Csimbi]

Before I fully read your message, I was thinking about this response:
Isn't it possible to change the size of the player to make sure that it can't get closer to a wall/enemy than the "sweet spot" for the muzzle flash?
But, then I saw that you already thought of that (collission box).
I wonder if the devs would be able to tell you where to look for the size of the collission box.

[Gniarf]

After reading your post I decided to spend more time trying to increase the size of the solision box. Results&various findings:
1-The devs could most likely tell me where the size of the collision box is defined: in engine.dll
2-Although the player is an entity, using ENTITY.SetScale(....) cannot increase the size of the player model+collision box (why??)
3-Editting CreatePlayer() in engine.dll I managed to twice the size of the "entity"; it twices the size of the model, but not the size of the collision box.
4-Fiddling a bit more with engine.dll I managed to twice the size of the collision "box". Yet it's more a collision plate than a collision box (it's not 0 tickness either) so when I twice its size, it's like walking on stilts 2m above the ground and gaining only 10cm to hide the weapons. I still have to find where the the dimentions of the box are defined.
5-you actually have 2 collisions boxes: one when standing, and one when crounching.
6-weight for physics = 10 000*(size*0.2)^3. The player weights 80 (kg?)
7-Bounding boxes/BBoxes are NOT collision boxes, they are boxes used to wrap actors in the game editor (which I don't have)
8-I found 3 strange functions in engine.dll: IsBlackEdition(), IsBooHInstalled(), and IsPKInstalled()...