I've concidered this method before, but to tell you the truth I'm still a bit of a newbie when it comes to coding and actual game creation. By spawning the bullet shell, do you mean like in the coding spawn it or in the animation (if it is possible in the animation). Like you said (and believe me, I'm going to talk for a while about WHAT YOU SAID from once sentence to a paragraph, so if you don't have the time just read a word or two in each line and try to find where I stop quoting what yous say in my own words) I would find that spawning a bullet shell in the coding would be simpler to keep track of, but since I'm a newbie I wouldn't know if that would be an easy task. I mean, when you spawn the bullet in the coding, do you have to input the code as in you make it so that where ever the character is you tell the program to find the character and then spawn the bullet in a location a little bit away from the player (in the gun) and then tell it to move here and there and etc. until the shell is completely free on its own, (and assuming if you wanted to do the bullet shells on the floor techniques which I think would indeed be a bad idea in case of lag) you could have some sort of physics engine that makes the empty bullet shell drop to the floor and bounce a little until it find a permanant locationl. (BTW, this whole bullet shell idea brought up a theory that I think many games do: whenever an object in a game is used up, as in it no longer has any more purpose in the game and you see stays there for a while, (I think I am right) the unusable objects get disposed of, as in get ridden from the game, and this technique is the thing that keeps those professional games from lagging when it comes to keeping unusable objects that just add polies to the game, right? On this one I'm just going to assume I'm right, for I have seen this technique done in some games, but since a lot of games have objects that are used then stay in the gaming world without being disposed of, I assume they will add major faces to the poly count of the game, therefore there is an overall limit to the polycount that when the program or game finds the limit exceeded it starts ridding the game world of unusable objects. (And I think this is unnoticable because when the game finds the limit exceeded it was to be when the player is doing something, (from shooting a gun and empty bullet shells falling on the floor to enemy characters dieing and their remains staying), the player is distracted by this action and the game rids the most unnoticable useless objects or the useless objects farthest from the player... I'm assuming this is a common technique used (key word assume). Anyways, back to the point. Next thing, when you say the scene being included, that sounds more like an animation made in the 3D modeler like blender rather than the modeling itself for the model to be exported. Anyways, I think one day I'm just going to try that technique I mentioned earlier, maybe make a program where the program keeps spawning random objects like spheres, cubes, and cones onto a plane, and the character is free to move freely as well as the random objects. There should be a poly count, and a limit to the poly count, and when the poly count is exceeded the program finds the farthest object, or any object not withing the players (the camera fitted on the player to show the view of the game, i. e. fps the camera is at the face) field of view and deletes it, without the character noticing. I think my "ideas" for a game might be too complicated for me to do it in a breeze, so I think I should test some stuff out first. But enough of my thoasand point plans, back to blender... actually I'm starting to run out of questions. But don't worry, there's always more:
When a UV map is made in blender, is there an option that you can put it so that you can change the scale of the UV map, or do you have to export it and then scale it in a different program, in which then the quality might be bad? (I underlined the question because it is the main focus of this message... I think...) Also, about the adding faces while animating idea you said, should I just deleted the bullet and top half of the magazine (which contains another bullet) and save this as an idle gun, and then have another gun with the same model but a different name to animate the gun's shooting (the slider sliding back), and a third model with the magazine and just the reloading? I would think so, as this would save polies.
. OH! and by the way, I was thinking of making a small little for-practice program that is like modeling, a bit. Actually, the models are already loaded, its just that the UV map is displayed, the user can use some paint brush tools to color over the UV map in their own detail, save the UV map, and then load it to that model and see what it looks like (all of it in one program). I dunno, I guess I just like games that have EXTREME interactivity between them.
DOUBLE EDIT: Nevermind about scaling the UV map question, I just found a little size meter when you save the UV map as an image from blender. (I finished the UV map for the gun but since this is my first complex model and since this is probably my fourth UV map IT LOOKS HORRIBLE (I mean some of the stuff doesn't ever look like the unwrapped gun parts). Either way, I figured out each part of the gun on the map and organized it so this part is here and that part is there and so on. I'm going to try to make the texture today, but I might be a bit busy. Also, I'm going to
try to make a texture for this UV map, but it will probably look horrible, and I'll have to make new seams, for the one's I made on my model are, in my opinion, in horrible spots and positions for a UV map.
