[Nuke]

im pretty happy with the vwep gatling guns ive been using lately, but i came up with an idea for making vwep models that do other things. you can make a barel recoil throu rotation if you put the submodel origin below the gun abit and rotate backwards on the y axis quickly a degree or two and then slowly reverse it so it goes back to its original position. also id like to do revolver type guns where whenever you fire the barrel must turn an x number of degrees to fire again (same as a gatling but withut the spinup delay and stepped). another idea for secondaries, rocket pods that have their own firing points.

[FireCrack]

revolver thing could be done with animation code (if a "Fire" trigger was added), rocket pods can be done with vwep, vwep models are allowed their own firepoints.

[Nuke]

no it cant, we still dont have a fire weapon trigger event. even if we had one it would also be a pita to have two meathods for rendering weapon firing animations. i learned this while switching over to the vwep system from the old style gatling guns. i think the animation code is suitable for turret fire animation, which would need to be built into the ship anyway. but if i wanted to put a recoiling heavy cannon on a herc for example, id have to modify that model to put barrel subobject in there and that would take away the ability to select weapons for a tweaked ship. and you would have to use it in a "special" mission. using the vwep system i could make weapons like that more portable. with the vwep system i can take any figter out of freespace, without model tweaks, and add a vwep enabled weapon and it would use that weapon's model animation effects.

seriously theres nothing more annoying than people who like to shoot down the ideas of others without giving them any serious thought.

[FireCrack]

Whoa, calm down, i wasn't shooting anything, just providing suggestions thaty would work in the meantime.

My main point in my last post was that the "rocket pod" thing was already done, you just add seprate firepoints to your vwep model. The stuff about the revolver was just a vauge thaught.

[Nuke]

i didnt know they had rocket pod capabilities already. the thing i like about vwep is that it allows for non-mandatory banks and you can get more ship flexability.

i wonder if we could get a model_animation.tbl so we can do animations on non-ship models so that we can use the animation system on vwep models, skyboxes, missiles, and the like. you could do folding fin rockets and more complicated guns with recoil. that would be cool and very usefull.

[FireCrack]

Hmm, so basicly a table that would have for each name feild a specified model and the specified animations? and then when you put the name in "models.tbl" into the model feild instead of an actual model it uses that.

If you have a 0 polygon subsystem does it still take more render time? With a set of two "arm" subsystems you could make a gun barrle recoil straight back the proper way.

[Nuke]

well you can do translation with intermediate arm objects, i just use the invisible texture (which shouldnt constitute a texture pass). this is good gor fighterbay doors and galactica's launch pods, but for something as simple as a a gun recoil it would be much easyer to place the submodel orgin way off to the side, you rotate the model a fraction of a degree and it moves quite abit back. ive done this with the lower missile pod on the pf chimera and it works pretty well.

as for implementation of model_animations.tbl. i dont really see a reason to create an alias. youd probibly just apply each animation to every instance of the model given. that way you dont have to alter the the weapons table parsing to accept a model alias.