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Hi guys,

for my project i thought about the possibility to get more than 5-10 enemies on the screen at once. as we all know, script-calculation limiting the fpsc in a massive way so you are not able to get more than a handfull on the screen without busting your framerate.

what is now my thinking is that, done in an intelligent way, it should be possible to clone a character in defining, lets say, his arms as another, equaly animated "character" while the main character stay behind his "arm-characters" (so you have to shoot the limbs first to get not the whole character killed when you shoot on the main part) or defining with the script that main character has massive health and looses masses of it equal to the numbers of limbs shot.

basic thing for this is to get managed that you can shoot off limbs of characters (dont know if possible), everything else should be just a matter of meshes/animations and the right scripts.

could be that you have to create very complex meshes and bones-structures, but as far as i know this is much more ressource saving than handle a double or triple amount of additional scripts.

would help me and many others that want to integrate massive hordes of, lets say Zombies, into their games).

in fact that i cannot mesh or animate even a box yet, you have to start thinking of it, i just can give you this idea. look at it as a challenge to get that done

i dont want that anyone of you do me some chars this way, but it would be very informative if something like this is possible (also usable for extreme big endboss-fights equal in gameplay to things like lost planet, deadspace or other scripted bossfights with shoot-weakpoints)

so discuss and figure out if possible or not.

no one out there who can say if its possible to shoot off limbs?

that would be the basic to figure out anything else of the thoughts above would work.

edit: i think i have to do some screens for better understanding.

That was an extremely confusing comment . Try being more clear and you might get a few more responses...

Cheers,
Anayar

yeah, thats because its not that easy to think about.
ok, did a simple scratch to explain what my thoughts are about:




for explanations:

basic model: conker
yellow limb system = original vanilla-conker

concentrate on the yellow limbed conker first. this is how he show up in the vanilla. simple mesh, standard-limbs.

what i thought writing the upper post is that it should be possible to "connect" 2 other conkers (red and green) with additional limbpoints (blue marked) as "a second pair of arms".
in simplified, abstract thinking: think of 2 or more balls connected to a third one as one model.

so you are able to show up 3,4,10 conkers/balls with just one model/script to save performance. as we all know: fpsc looses more performance through script/char-calculation than through mesh-calculation, so this could be a way to get around this problem for enemy-masses.

it could be used for masses of characters, like a horde of zombies coming down the streets or something like that.
that will be a complex model, and animation would be hard to master, i know, but with a little thinking about light and level design, you could get animations to a basic, and if the chars are far enough away from the player even if they are nearly not animated at all would make no difference.

so, if enough additional "arms/legs" are added, you can make it that 5 characters look like 15 or 30.

thing is that for shooting these guys one after another it has to be possible that you can shoot off the additional defined limbs/conkers/balls.
if not, you will shoot at conker green/red but all 3 will finally die when life of yellow conker is 0, and that is not the best.

so the main question is: can you shoot off/destroy a single arm or leg from a character without killing him?

a picture to show the wished final result: 5 models (workable in fpsc) that seem to be 15 (fpsc will crash if doing this with 15 entities)

This would require extensive re-animation and a hell of a lot of extra bones. Im not an expert at animating, but I dont think that FPSC can handle that many bones and polies as one character. Plus it would look odd if all characters came in waves of three (three linked together; though ofcourse the bone is invisible).

Cheers,
Anayar

re-animation would be my personal prob, and lets face it: when you got in action with 30 zombies coming down a dark and straight road and you got enough ammo for your vickers-gun, it doesnt matter how they are animated, even if you use hands-forward-walking-gargling-zombie-normal-mode.^^
you just have to animate the legs and head, so only 4 bones per char-part > 12 overall for the model.

lets simplify this more to get the main point and use instead of human models 3-5 colored balls that explode when shot, so 5 limbs bound together in one model.

the main-point to get this done in theory is: can you shoot them one after one without getting the whole entity blasted away? so again can you shoot off arms, legs and heads in fpsc at the moment?

I think that might actually be possible with the new poly-perfect hit detection. The ball one I mean. Have the balls health set to 3 times the normal and then set the limb to be destroyed when shot. That way the whole character (assuming the ball is a character) would die when it is shot 3 times, or every ball is shot.

That actually sort of makes sense and sounds possible. Not sure how it would help though. The engine still has to render the same amount of polies and animations. The animations are what kills fpsc's framerate, not the number fo polies necessarily and this sounds like a whole bunch of unnecesarry animation.

Also, yes, If I was playing a AAA game, or even an Indie game for that matter, and saw a line of zombies moving single file at me, I would be pretty disappointed lmao.

Cheers,
Anayar

that was the main point i didnt know yet,have to look for the keywords . thank you anayar.

its not in the main about zombies for me. i am trying to do a "cryptic techshooter, 2d-shooter gameplay in a 3d enviroment", so its not neccessary for me to get it as real as possible (i think some of the enemies will be some kind of balls^^)
but i will figure out how to get the limbs destroyed and in the future how to build-up 4d-models. then, if everything works fine, i can do some videos for this thread.

also i would not say that fpsc has problems with animations. tested some stuff and it seems that the main entity-calculation is bound by the scripts itself, wether the char is animated or not.
i changed the aiko-model into a vickers-gun once, and processing is the same with animated char and unamimated vickers.
but we will see, i do some tests at this the next days.

thanks again for the keywords.

NP . This was quite an interesting conversation, and I would like to continue it if you make any progress. Maybe you could email me or something (email is in my profile)? But yeah, Id love to see what progress you make on this.

Cheers,
Anayar

nice to meet you too.

i will see what i can do ... and when. reminder to you is set=1.


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