Toadie's SmallArms WIP thread

[enex 11]

Well Johnson thanks for this write up I read it twice.

[Drakenof 11]

Two things.

1. Arma, unlike other games, does not animate it's weapons via armature rigs of a skeleton. Arma chooses to animate via a config file. Where as in other games you could have the magazine move with the animation because it is attached a bone and the bone is animated, Arma uses what is comparable to an excel spreadsheet for animating the different pieces of a weapon (and vehicles and buildings).

As a result, your magazine doesn't track to a hand. It just robotically moves down and hides itself, then moves back into place. It requires many hours of work to make a magazine do a simple movement as rocking into place (FAL's, G3's, AK's). However, this system does allow for making minor animation quickly (animating the bolt while firing or rotating sights when you have an optic).

2. Grenade launchers cannot be animated (as of March 6 2014). In order to animate things in the "spreadsheet" you need to have an animation source. These sources cannot be easily custom defined and cannot be custom defined for weapons specifically. So when you reload your weapon, what tells the gun and the player to do its reload animation is a source called "reloadmagazine". There are other sources such as "reload" which is the source for shooting, "empty" when your gun is out of ammo, or "hasoptics" for when your gun has optics (this can be used to hide things like iron sights).

The problem is two fold. First Bohemia has defined multiple types of sources, but each muzzle your gun has (grenade launchers are a separate muzzle) requires its own source. For example. to zero yours sights and see it animated the source is "zeroing", to zero your grenade launcher, it requires "zeroing2". However, there is no "reloadmagazine2". So if you wanted your Grenade Launcher to move, it would also move when reloading the magazine of the main gun. Secondly, we cannot define the sources ourselves as they are apparently not defined in any config anywhere. This is also why there isn't a separate reload animation for one in the chamber.

TLDR : Weapons are not animated in Arma in such a way that allows for super smooth transitions of magazines. No, it isn't possible to animated GL properly right now. It might be in the future.

Damn. Worse than i thought. At least, if we disregard the magazines, we can have decent animations now... i guess it's a start.

Thanks for the explainations. And thanks for the time you took to write that.

[kgino1045 12]

I saw great W.I.P pictures of yours

And i see this

http://www.armaholic.com/datas/users/toadiesmallarmsandanimations_wip08032014_6_4.jpg

Is that picture at stock skinned? or just emblem?

Edited March 10, 2014 by kgino1045

[toadie2k 799]

It's skinned, but it's separate to the stock. It might disappear for the final release, though, depending on how committed I am to the personalizing of that particular rifle.

You bring up an interesting technical question- Do squad emblems actually work on rifles? I know that it's doable for vehicles, haven't seen any implementations to infantry weapons yet. Might have a look into that.

[kgino1045 12]

It's skinned, but it's separate to the stock. It might disappear for the final release, though, depending on how committed I am to the personalizing of that particular rifle.

You bring up an interesting technical question- Do squad emblems actually work on rifles? I know that it's doable for vehicles, haven't seen any implementations to infantry weapons yet. Might have a look into that.

No sir i thought it work like in vehicle so i ask to you.

[Drakenof 11]

It's skinned, but it's separate to the stock. It might disappear for the final release, though, depending on how committed I am to the personalizing of that particular rifle.

You bring up an interesting technical question- Do squad emblems actually work on rifles? I know that it's doable for vehicles, haven't seen any implementations to infantry weapons yet. Might have a look into that.

Doesn't work. As fas as i can tell.

Anyway, it's not like messing around with the skin of a weapon is complicated whatsoever.

[Siberian_Cossack 1]

Today, after mod installation, I decided to test weapons. when I tried to place the weapon to my inventory,I've got an error message "Bad version 59 in p3d file hlc_wp_ak_mesh\ak12\ak12.p3d " (this happening with each model of AK but changing only model of AK in error message), and then my game crashed...help me :j:

[kukaracho 10]

Today, after mod installation, I decided to test weapons. when I tried to place the weapon to my inventory,I've got an error message "Bad version 59 in p3d file hlc_wp_ak_mesh\ak12\ak12.p3d " (this happening with each model of AK but changing only model of AK in error message), and then my game crashed...help me :j:

try to reinstall HLC core and HLC AK

[zukov 484]

Toadies, Bis has stolen your M14 ;)