or "How a Chainsaw can solve most problems in life". ( disclaimer - just messing around - I'm not crazy or anything )
I just wanted to share this, as it's the result of scouring through the forums, getting responses from the community (well clues really) and trial and error.
I started on the road to success by purchasing Luke314pi's Egyptain Axe as I knew it would show me how a melee weapon works.
Then I grabbed a chainsaw for $2 from TurboSquid and found a free set of hands from TurboSquid too (had an uzi but I removed it) then I prepared the model in Lightwave. I had to pose the hands, and eventually I will animate them gripping the handles, but this is just the first test.
Next I had to animate the chainsaw, so I set up an idle anim, an attack anim and a put-away anim as that's what the gunspec.txt file expects. I exported the anims to HUD.x in my new weapon folder under gamecore\guns and then discovered I could change the icon that appears onscreen by modding the hud_icon.dds file in there.
I created a standalone unanimated version of the chainsaw which went into the entities folder as the pickup version of the chainsaw I placed in the level.
I discovered the HUD.x could only take one dds file so I had to merge the hands and chainsaw UV's and textures together.
I grabbed some sound effects by googling and ended up on this site.
http://www.sound-effect.com/sounds1/warsounds/
I don't quite understand the sound and animation linkage at the moment so that needs some tweaking.
I found the scale was pretty much unknown, so I set it up in Lightwave as I felt comfortable with, and then scaled the chainsaw when held using the scale command in the gunspec.txt file.
A few hours of tweaking I've got as far as you've seen in the video above. You'll notice when the chainsaw hits the walls it shows an effect but leaves a bullet decal. I set the damage done to 30 so you have to hack into enemies a few times before they go down.
Changes I want to make.
1. Smoke from the chainsaw when you attack.
2. Runs out petrol (reload) and animate pulling the cord to start it.
3. Sparks when it hits objects such as rock, concrete and metal.
4. Leave grooves and cuts in walls.
5. Figure out how to spawn pools of blood splatter from the enemies.
6. Figure out how to chop off limbs of enemies.
7. Figure out how to slice tables, chairs and doors into pieces.
Be nice to try and make a simple Dead Island clone with these techniques.
