(great idea) Doom Gun creator

[Shyboy]

The idea is, a program where you select (for example) a chaingun handle, Super Shotgun barrels, and a BFG body. There should be a variety, like barrels, bodies , stocks, etc, even stuff not from game. and you should even be able to put it in a color, or skin, and export as wad file, then BAM! 

if this exists, could i have link?

if not, plz make!

 

no need to credit me if you make it, but it would be appreciated

Edited July 24, 2019 by Shyboy

[RonnieJamesDiner]

1 hour ago, Shyboy said:

(for example) a chaingun handle, Super Shotgun barrels, and a BFG body

 

I'm just trying to imagine what this would even look like from a player perspective, and it's making my brain hurt xD

 

I'm not trying to be mean, but even if someone was willing to take the time to create this - which seems incredibly dubious, given the sheer amount of work that this would likely entail - I don't think your approach would garner much in the way of interest. The biggest reasons for me personally are, (1) this is desperately lacking any kind of detail, and leaves me with endless questions*, and (2) I think it would help your case tremendously to show even a little bit of conceptual work, by way of examples.

 

* Does a BFG body with SSG barrels fire 2 simultaneous BFG shots? Would the various weapon stocks affect the accuracy of the gun? Would the choice of weapon handle dictate the fire rate of the weapon? (i.e. does a Chaingun handle make a shotgun have automatic fire?) Or is all of this simply meant to be a visual gimmick? So many questions...

 

As far as the visual aspect, perhaps @Sgt Nate V might be of some help in creating mutant sprites from various weapon pieces (if you ask him nicely). He has some experience in creating fusions of vanilla sprites.

 

[The Nate]

40 minutes ago, RonnieJamesDiner said:

As far as the visual aspect, perhaps @Sgt Nate V might be of some help in creating mutant sprites from various weapon pieces (if you ask him nicely). He has some experience in creating fusions of vanilla sprites.

Hehe, actually, I attempted some sort of  "plasma chaingun" a while ago, couldn't really get the muzzleflashes to look good tho.

[kb1]

It's a Catch-22: To get any respectable results, the author would have to be master artist. But, if you're a master artist, you don't need said program.

 

But, considering you venture forward: Just imagine how it might work. First, each weapon fragment of a particular position would have to be roughly the same size, for it to "connect" - that alone would stop the project, since a shotgun barrel is so much thinner than the chaingun rotor.

 

Also, what about coloring? You'd want all the metal to be one color, wood to be another, etc. So, do you just make all the weapons the same color?

 

It's a nice thought, but a lot more work than just drawing weapons from scratch (even if you're not an artist). The only way it would work is if an artist could describe how to draw, by giving you instructions, and, somehow those instructions taught you to draw beautifully. Cause that's what the programmer would have to do to get a computer to produce a beautiful weapon out of components.

[RonnieJamesDiner]

@Sgt Nate V That looks pretty cool! Would the muzzle flash (if you can call it that) from the Plasma Rifle not work?

[The Nate]

13 hours ago, RonnieJamesDiner said:

@Sgt Nate V That looks pretty cool! Would the muzzle flash (if you can call it that) from the Plasma Rifle not work?

I was trying to get it to line up with the regular Chaingun muzzleflash, and it didn't look good.

[Shyboy]

(UPDATE)

@RonnieJamesDiner to your question, i just had an idea, so i didnt add much, but i forgot to add you could change the ammo type to cell, shell, rocket, or bullet. The body determines the projectile, unless you have a SSG Barrel, then it fires two of the chosen projectile. And yes, the various weapon stocks, barrels, handles, and body will tamper with the projectiles. The stock adds accuracy,handle for speed, body determines projectile, and barrel decides refire. A BFG body with SSG barrels will fire 2 simultaneous BFG shots, BTW.

[Shyboy]

@Sgt Nate V No offense, but what is the point of a plasma chaingun? its just a mildly slower plasma gun.

[Shyboy]

@kbl the skins/color part just is a transparent layer over the weapon, like how when you stand under a light, it colors the gun                                                                                            and im no master artist for this...    ಥʖ̯ಥ

[RonnieJamesDiner]

This is still a tremendously ambitious project. So, leaving the fists and the Chainsaw out of this, if I break down just the vanilla guns alone, we're looking at approximately 24 separate components (I'm just kind of assuming that the Shotgun, SSG, and BFG are the only guns that actually have Stocks, looking at their sprites). Based on all of the separate Barrels, Bodies, Handles, and Stocks, there are more than 5000 different combinations that can be made. Obviously, a lot of these combinations you'd probably never want to make, but if the whole idea is total freedom to create any kind of customized gun you want, then we have to cover our bases.

 

So, either someone would have to...

 

(A) Undergo the painstaking and monumental task of hand-crafting more than 5000 different weapons, based on every possible combination of vanilla components.

 

- or -

 

(B) Write a program that can somehow take any 3 (or 4) of the 24 different component sprites (which, someone would have to create by carefully dissecting the vanilla weapons and isolating each piece into individual sprites, I would guess), and automatically assemble them in a way that looked reasonable (at least from a player perspective), regardless of which pieces you're combining. 

 

Perhaps I'm missing something that makes this whole process a lot easier and more simple, but, it seems like a rather complicated idea.

 

Would it be awesome? Sure! I'm imagining a weapon that shoots out 40 tracers (or however many the BFG shoots out)… except with the fire rate of a plasma rifle... and, where each tracer lands, the weapon shoots a rocket there... hehe. 

[Zulk RS]

Sorry if this comes off mean, I really don't mean it that way.

 

I don't think this is a good idea (definitely not a great idea). What you're essentially asking is a program that will not only mix and match various weapon parts but also create a Decorate file that will have all the coding necessary to make the weapon work. It will allow the user to choose weapon ammo type and each combination will essentially be a different weapon based on weapon spread, projectile/hitscan fired etc. You are asking for a program that writes code. Now I can imagine some ways this might be possible but it is going to be pain to code(but I'm no programmer so I don't really know).

 

The really hard part is the sprite. The easiest this can be done is by having the various bits of weapons crudely cut into different sprites and load them into the program during coding. Then the program will join these parts together. It will look shitty but that's the easiest that can be done. Of course, you'd want weapons that doesn't look like they were created in under an hour using MS Paint so you'll have to have the program edit the sprites to make them look good together. I have no idea how that might work but anything is possible with coding... It's just going to be impossibly difficult.

 

Finally, you'd want to have the program output the created weapon as a collection of sprites and the decorate file. Considering how the decorate code works in GZDoom for some vanilla weapons like the BFG, to have the program actually write a non-buggy decorate code for the weapon combination picked is going to take more than just attaching a bunch of code bits together like strings and calling it a day.

 

So in conclusion, doing this is going to be a massive pain and will take a lot of work. If you're willing to do this work, you'll have much better results by just making the weapon you need yourself. You can create more appealing looking, balanced and better weapons than a program like this could ever create by just editing the sprites in paint.net or something and writing the decorate yourself.

 

tl;dr: This program is cool but it is pain to make and you'll be able to make weapons better than anything this program can ever create if you just edit the sprites and write the decorate yourself. This program is pointless.

[kb1]

3 hours ago, Shyboy said:

@kbl the skins/color part just is a transparent layer over the weapon, like how when you stand under a light, it colors the gun                                                                                            and im no master artist for this...    ಥʖ̯ಥ

Not right now, you don't. The proposal is to split up pre-drawn rectangular chunks of weapon bits and randomly stick them together, with no consideration for centering, scaling, or color-matching, as if they were Legos. That will produce, at best, an MSPaint-looking 3 year-old's rendition of a BB gun.

 

However, a very complex program could achieve better results. Instead of pre-rendered chunks, you could define a drawing language designed to automatically handle rotation, scaling, centering, and color-consistency. A drawing command for a barrel could render, in 3-D (it'd have to be 3-D to do hidden surface removal, handle refraction and shadows, etc), cylinders with small variations and deviations. But before that, you'd build skeletal definitions of how the various definitions should be joined in 3-space (the handle attaches to a trigger, and at least one barrel, further down, optionally with a scope attached.

 

In lieu of really designing the program, let me just state that, essentially, you'd have to develop a program that, driven by a pseudo-random number generator, constructs rough blueprints of each element of the weapon within certain ranges (it can't be 10-feet long, but also it must be big enough to carry). Then the program must "manufacture" the weapon, voxel by voxel. Furthermore, moving parts must be accounted for, for animation, so you must define all possible acceptable movements for a random weapon with randomized moving parts.

 

If you make it that far, you could render the final weapon using ray tracing, and create all animation frames by rotation, scaling, and animating the trigger and other moving parts.

 

For this to be realistic, the program would have to be taught how to build a real-life weapon from scratch, including the ability to execute those plans in 3-space. We're talking about a team of very experienced programmers, artists, and gun building specialists, spending hundreds, if not thousands of man-hours to create a program that outputs a dozen sprite frames - a task that a good artist can do in a fraction of the time, and produce better results.

 

Yes, it would be a great thing to have. It's just not practical to build.

 

By the way, building the Decorate would be a walk in the park vs. the image generator. There's no reason you couldn't build a GUI that accepts certain choices, and generates perfect Decorate code from scratch - that's very do-able...a weekend project to produce v1.0 ready for initial testing.

[Shyboy]

@kb1 @RonnieJamesDiner in short, thanks for the go-through on what to do. i will start with the program development

 

 

p.s. the idea for this was from OBLIGE, because maps randomly generated? why not.

[kb1]

If you can pull it off, that would be great! And it could be used to generate weapons for many games, including games that use full models. Sorry for sounding discouraging. I just believe that, for high-quality results, it's going to be an incredible amount of work. But there's nothing wrong with that.

[Dylanblitz]

Looks like an interesting concept for a mod!