Smoother weapon sprite animations - Released!

[perkristian]

EarthQuake said:

perkristian: can you tell me the approximate number of frames that your new weapons require? I want to start planning ahead and seeing how many frames are available for use in DeHackEd, and what needs to be sacrificed in order to get this working in DeHackEd. I'm not talking about the sprites, by the way, but the number of actual frames in the animations.

Oops, sorry... I only mentioned the number of sprites earlier. Here is the complete frame sequences - including muzzle fire frames:

Pistol - 8
Shotgun - 18
Super shotgun - 24
Chaingun - 11 (made the barrels spin down after fire)
Plasma rifle - 16

[40oz]

Are all the weapons going to fire the same speed and rate as before? I dont know if it's just the soundfx but the chaingun looks and/or sounds like it fires faster than before, which is a downer. I'd rather the animations be smooth but essentially the weapons are exactly the same as before.

Also. I'm really looking forward to seeing the punch in action. It always looked like a mediocre love tap to me, especially with berserk. You should make the punch look like it was thrown faster. Instead of the lazy but smooth motion that doomguy typically does, the fist should be cocked back for the first couple of tics, then lunge forward at the time of contact, then pull his fist back at it's normal motion. I hope that made sense, I can't find any video depicting what I mean, but if you've ever seen the melee attack in halo, they look like they dish some damage.

[perkristian]

All weapons will fire with the original rate, that was one of the key goals from the beginning. The chaingun sound fools you in believing it's faster as the gunshots overlap each other, notice the ammo count is dropping at the normal rate. I'll also try to keep the plasma rifle pause the same, although it's a bit difficult measuring it.

I haven't played Halo, but I've sort of pictured in my mind how the punch should look. It's sort of similar to what you've explained. Getting the timing right may not be easy due to the delay.

[Reisal]

How would I do with the chaingun by making it 1 tic faster with this release, just 1 tic ahead like I do with Dehacked now?

[perkristian]

Not sure if it's possible. The chaingun now fires once during 4 frames with 1 tic each. I tried with 0.75 tics for each frame, but all the ammo was gone in one shot :-)

[Reisal]

Heh, the Skulltag minigun uses ammo quicker tho. I was speaking the number of tics used when altering weapon speeds in Dehacked.

[Fletcher`]

This actually makes the pistol look fun to use again

[DaniJ]

You are correct, you can't use fractional timing for states, either in Doomsday or via DeHackED.

What you actually want is a way to map multiple sprite frames to a single state. Doomsday already offers such a feature for model frames but we don't currently offer the same for sprites. This sounds like a nice feature to me and it should be relatively simple to implement so, please submit an RFE and it will be considered for a future Doomsday release.

[Use]

I like these.

[40oz]

I know I'm being a pain in the ass but will we be waiting long for this? I refuse to play doom regularly again until I get this wad.

[EarthQuake]

Well, perkristian is doing his wad for Doomsday, so if you want to use his new sprites in anything else, you'll have to port the wad to another source port, or wait until someone else does.

I'll be doing a DeHackEd version (assuming perkristian is okay with others utilizing his work) where the goal would be Odamex (and probably Boom), ZDaemon, ZDoom, and Skulltag, but I'm sure someone will soon make a DECORATE version available.

[esselfortium]

I would definitely be up for doing an EDF version of this for Eternity, particularly if perkristian wouldn't mind its usage in a certain project. (With name credit given, of course.)

[perkristian]

As with the sound effects; making this is lots of time consuming work, so as long as I get the credit it's OK with me.

Not all weapons are ready yet, the chainsaw, rocket launcher and BFG remains, but I guess I can release a update later when these are done. Still there's some tweaking to do.

Here's a video with the fist and plasma rifle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyqCOMzeoeA

[esselfortium]

Holy cow, that looks unbelievable :)

[KuriKai]

[40oz]

Perkristian that is soooooo sexy.

[DuckReconMajor]

Of course I'm speechless as to how awesome that is :)

Silly question: does it still look as good with texture filtering off?

[perkristian]

I've only tried with Doomsday, but the actual sprite bmp's looks more or less like the rest of the Doom sprites.

On the chaingun I've only animated the visible part of the barrels, also had to remove a bolt on the rear barrel clamp to make it easier done.

Thanks :-)

[40oz]

I noticed the chaingun can shoot one shot at a time, instead of it's usual 2 round burst. Do you plan to fix that for us purists or are you gonna leave it as is?

[esselfortium]

JohnnyRancid said:

I noticed the chaingun can shoot one shot at a time, instead of it's usual 2 round burst. Do you plan to fix that for us purists or are you gonna leave it as is?

I don't understand all the specifics, but from what I've heard the Chaingun's behavior relies on some extremely strange hardcoded stuff. As such, I'm not sure if it's even actually possible to retain the original behavior while adding new frames to its firing sequence. :S

[Dad Raulo]

Great job with that Plasma Gun, I really want to test this.

[Khorus]

JohnnyRancid said:

I noticed the chaingun can shoot one shot at a time, instead of it's usual 2 round burst. Do you plan to fix that for us purists or are you gonna leave it as is?

If you're a "purist", you wouldn't be using this mod at all. :P

[Super Jamie]

I hadn't read this topic up until now, and I severely wish I had.

First you painstakingly find almost every Doom sound in its' original form and package them up to use in an engine, now this.

These look absolutely amazing! I could just sit there and fire these weapons forever. What a great idea, and executed so well. Perkristian, you are our hero :)

Can't wait for a download. Another vote for ZDoom-compatibility, I play almost exclusively in GZdoom (and PrBoom for demos) these days.

[DaniJ]

esselfortium said:

I don't understand all the specifics, but from what I've heard the Chaingun's behavior relies on some extremely strange hardcoded stuff. As such, I'm not sure if it's even actually possible to retain the original behavior while adding new frames to its firing sequence. :S

An engine feature which mapped sprite frames to states with fractional tic timing would be the best solution. With such a feature there would be no need to change the states at all.

I'm quite happy to implement such a feature in Doomsday as it sounds really useful to me.

[myk]

Khorus said:
If you're a "purist", you wouldn't be using this mod at all. :P

That is more so if it starts to break the functionality of the game. Many might accept cosmetic refinements as long as they don't disrupt anything else. The higher frequency sounds, for example, don't condition the behavior of the game in any way.

[Khorus]

myk said:

That is more so if it starts to break the functionality of the game. Many might accept cosmetic refinements as long as they don't disrupt anything else. The higher frequency sounds, for example, don't condition the behavior of the game in any way.

The fact that it's a) for JDoom and b) to work on the original exes would require sacrifices elsewhere (dehacked) makes that a bit mute. I wasn't being very serious in my comment though, hence the :P. ;)

[myk]

Yeah, well, it erodes gameplay, which isn't exclusive to vanilla. As seen above, a JDoom dev is even interested in supporting it without the issue. The best way to support something like this is with a port that's fully capable of it, and not something limited like DeHackEd or while breaking the chaingun's behavior.

[40oz]

myk said:

That is more so if it starts to break the functionality of the game. Many might accept cosmetic refinements as long as they don't disrupt anything else. The higher frequency sounds, for example, don't condition the behavior of the game in any way.

Thank you.

[Super Jamie]

myk said:

That is more so if it starts to break the functionality of the game. Many might accept cosmetic refinements as long as they don't disrupt anything else. The higher frequency sounds, for example, don't condition the behavior of the game in any way.

That's right. Increasing immersiveness is different to altering gameplay and game balance. I dunno about you guys, but I use the double-shot snipe with the chaingun all the time, especially on harder maps, so I don't have to face as many of those damn chaingunners.

[perkristian]

If DaniJ implement the new frame feature the chaingun could act as per the original, but for now I'll just leave it as is. Even though I want Doom to stay Doom, I don't mind the ability to fire single shots with the chaingun.