Moving parts on weapons

[upQuark]

I've been playing Nexuiz for a while now, and there was always something about the weapons that made them feel less... smooth when compared to the weapons in other games like Quake or Unreal. I think it is because of the lack of moving parts in any of the weaposn in Nexuiz. There's nothing that spins around, and nothing that blows back. Even some of the weapons in the original Quake had moving parts (Nailgun and Super Nailgun). If just one weapon in Nexuiz like the machinegun or mortar had some sort of moving part, it would improve the appearance of Nexuiz a lot. Extra points for something cool, like being able to see the grenade being loaded into the grenade launcher in Quake 2. What do you guys think about moving parts on weapons and how they can be implemented?

[obi_wan]

really great idea

[Bl@nk]

Ye good idea, i think go put it in the to do list of nexuiz. I mean the wish list.

[Shoe]

I was thinking about this the other day - not so much inclusion of them, but more wondering if all the weapo animations were done dynamically ingame as opposed to predefined frames. As it is, it looks more like they're done just by moving the static models around with the engine.

It would be nice to see actual full-on animations, though. It'd add some extra umph to the graphics :]

[upQuark]

I don' t think that the Nexuiz developers should see moving parts on the weapons as a big project. If just one or two weapons had even a simple spinning part, it would go a long way to improve the graphics and the "feel" of Nexuiz.

[obi_wan]

imho spining parts are not that good coz it can be disturbing for aiming.

but a moving part that moves back when shooting could give a pretty cool 'back-kick effect', especially with the RL and the nexgun

[Crashzor]

the moddels are already bad for you're GPU now.
if you include moving parts you ask more of the GPU whit in the end means you need a faster system to play nexuiz.
oke i play @ 200 fps but stil its a bad suggetion for the user dat don't have the money to update there pc.
i don't know about the progamming side if its hard to model and maken but atleast it takes more of you're GPU.

[upQuark]

the moddels are already bad for you're GPU now.
if you include moving parts you ask more of the GPU whit in the end means you need a faster system to play nexuiz.
oke i play @ 200 fps but stil its a bad suggetion for the user dat don't have the money to update there pc.
i don't know about the progamming side if its hard to model and maken but atleast it takes more of you're GPU.

I don't think that adding moving parts would cause a significant framerate drop. And I think that the playermodels have too many polygons but not the weapon models (unless I'm mistaken, correct me if I'm wrong). But there could be more optimizations for the weapon models too. For example, in Doom 3/Quake 4/Half Life 2, the vWeps have a lower polycount than the actual weapon model. In Nexuiz, the vWeps and the weaponmodel are the same.

[KadaverJack]

For example, in Doom 3/Quake 4/Half Life 2, the vWeps have a lower polycount than the actual weapon model. In Nexuiz, the vWeps and the weaponmodel are the same.

No, nexuiz actually has 3 different models for each weapon: viewmodel, extirior weaponmodel and dropped weapon.
They might have the same polycount, but they differ in scale and animations.

However i think the 1st person viewmodel should have the highest polycount for 2 reasons: it's always on your screen and there is only one of it's kind visible at any time, so it's polycount doesn't affect the performance as much as the polycount of the other 2 models.