How Do You Modify The Player Movement Mechanics?

[TacoShank 10]

I've been reading through the scripting commands for ARMA 3, and I don't see anything related to the modification of movement mechanics (e.g. make the player slower, faster, etc). There are some posts on these forums that look promising, but nothing that is specific to ARMA 3. I have no idea if the scripting/modding ability and tools of the ARMA platform have changed drastically and most information is old, which is why I come here for help.

Speaking of which, would an ARMA 2 scripting tutorial be roughly compatible to ARMA 3? From what I can tell both use the SQF scripting language but have slightly different commands available.

Thanks for the help,

~TacoShank

[-LTac- Imperator 10]

@TacoShank: Hey, always good to see more people getting into SQF Scripting - its a frustrating (at first) but rewarding experience to see your thoughts come to life inside of a game environment.

If your talking about restricting the speed of the player you may want to look at the following commands:

https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/forceWalk

https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/forceSpeed

Otherwise, are you talking about the speed a unit plays through animations?, you may want to be more precise in the actual mechanic you are wanting to acheive in your question so we can help you with more precision.

As for SQF Scripting, not a lot has changed from ArmA II to ArmA III, I would recommend checking out the following sites:

https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Category:Scripting_Commands_Arma_3 - Bookmark this, this is literally the first bookmark on my browser. I use it everyday.

http://killzonekid.com/ - The Tutorials section on here is great, he provides some foundational programming concepts that are needed to understand scripting for new people.

[TacoShank 10]

Well I did a couple hours of digging last night and I stumbled upon the hidden world of config files. I took apart some other mods in ARMA 2 that I saw did something similar to want I wanted (yes indeed I want to modify the speed of player animations). However, there seems to be a secret cult of config file experts who have all the information to be able to actually mod the game, and the rest of us are left with absolutely no documentation. The best I got in terms of documentation was the SIX Config Browser, but that didn't have the classes I wanted to modify in these cryptic C++ files. Finally I stumbled upon this wiki page that helps a bit, but is still far to opaque to be of any real use.

Now I get that what I am trying to do is modify the animation speeds, but honestly there is so little information about these config files that it looks like it will be a nightmare to try and edit them. What are we even doing with them? It seems like we are injecting some sort of code straight into the engine itself (considering it's C++), but this is the strangest C++ code I've ever come across. Browsing through the SIX Config browser leads you to config files with hundreds of lines of undocumented member variables, and nothing else. How are we even suppose to attempt to understand what legitimate data values are for each one? What are their ranges? How do they effect the game? BI, are you hoping that the new contestants for Make ARMA Not War will be willing to waste endless hours on trial and error just to figure out which one changes the value they want to change?

I'm sorry if I sound frustrated but it's simply because I am. I would love to be apart of this contest and the community in general, but the difficulty of some modding tasks like this one (which are well documented in other engines) really put me off.

@Imperator: By the way, thanks for those links on scripting. I appreciate it!

Edited December 11, 2013 by TacoShank

[shinkicker 5]

Thing is, its not that this is a simple task that would be documented as a set of values to change, as it extends way beyond config files and variable values to change.

To speed up a units run or walk you will need to create new animations beyong the current set. The reason for this is the timing mechanic of the walk (each step), needs to match the relevant ground speed, otherwise the unit will look like they are ice skating or doing a moon walk. For a car it does not matter, so you can just speed it up, but for a human skeleton it has too many moving parts that dictate the speed.

Now as to if you can do that task it would depend on how fluent you are with a 3d modeling application (blender, maya etc) and the rigging of a character and then creating animations. This is not easy stuff for someone new to this area, the info on how to do this is out there, but its far to extensive to cover in one forum thread.

P.s, yes the documentation is pretty bad and what there is around is often outdated, so i feel you there. Try to get on the skype channels in dwardens post (not easy for me to link to now as i am on my phone).

Edited December 13, 2013 by shinkicker

[TacoShank 10]

I was almost certain nobody else was going to reply to this thread. Thank you many times over for explaining to me exactly what I wanted to know. I suppose I never considered the issues one might have when trying to speed up the player. I was looking into whether or not the animations could be speed up through the config files, but it seems from what you posted that this is not a possibility without making new animations for the models.

I have no intention of working with custom models and animation (not my forte), so I think I'll drop the idea for now. However, I still wish there was more information about these config files out there. I'll try and drop by the Skype channels like you said. Thanks for the help!

[Kunsa 10]

A bit late to join in but if you speed up the animation and if your using setvelocity you could make the animations look correct without having to change them. So i think its a viable method but only for specific uses like short burst extreme sprinting or such