I found out that the weapons have recently been scaled up in the first person view - and I am not sure whether this was intended or not. In the end, for me personally, it is VERY annoying, as the weapons take away more space from my view.

In case you want to respond, please avoid giving "useful" tips such as "have you tried turning it off and on again?" or "use r_drawviewmodel 0 if you don't like it", they do not actually help me or others

Please keep in mind: I respect all the work that was done on the models, and I'm aware these were needed to finally have proper positioning of the weapon models, also regarding the fact to have g_shootfromcenter being reflected by the weapons being centered. However, apart from the fact that this (i.e. show weapon in center when g_shootfromcenter is 1 and the resulting model changes) is a new feature that was relentlessy added after feature freeze, I'm just asking for the sense of all this, and I'd like to hear more opinions about this change.

If anything of the following comes across as "rant" or anything: it isn't, it's just my sarcastic comment .

When I asked around in the devs channel about this issue I got different responses, such as:

- "they are bigger? I haven't noticed"
- "yeah they are a bit bigger but I like it"

As I feel as if I'm in the wrong movie, I'd like you to judge it yourself. The shots were taken with fov 110, at fov 90 this issue gets even worse - the left screenshot is taken from nexuiz20090224.zip, the (first) v2.5 beta build advertised here in the forums. The right screenshot is taken from SVN, 5 minutes old.

Shotgun:

One of the very few examples where the weapons didn't change much. Of course orientation changed a bit, but that's fine imo.

Laser:

The new laser is certainly 30% bigger and looks too big for me. Apparently, to the devs, it's just me... well well

Crylink:

Also here you can notice that the crylink grew quite a bit, and is also much closer to the crosshair which is quite annoying imo.

Rocket launcher:

This is the only other weapon, aside from the shotgun, that now looks better in SVN.

Machine gun:

I'm wondering what the intentions were to only show 75% of that weapon.

Nexgun:

Just as MG, only parts of the weapon are show. It is positiioned relatively low and looks just weird to me.

Camping rifle:

The CR was done completely the other way round. More parts are now shown of the weapon. The reasons remain unknown. Apart from that, no problem from my side, you'll just see more of the weapon. But this shows the randomness of this change, which actually is a feature introduced after feature freeze was set, btw - but anyways, let's have a look at the real "crackers"

Mortar:

The weapon got at least 30-40% bigger and is now also closer to the crosshair. Severely distracting when I'm looking at it.

Hagar:

Same as mortar.

Electro:

Same as mortar.

Kind regards

Not wanting to judge, but i like most of those changes, seems more in line altogether now.
Especially in the line of fire If you compare the old guns and the direction they should shoot at they would never ever hit were you aim at with the crosshair

Its a personal preference but i have no problem with the slightly larger guns. Makes them look more powerful Especially that laser looks more like a gun now.. not a 'magically flying around toy' (hell you did not even see a hand holding it)

The crifle looks a bit strange to me, too small to be exact.

The changed positions are a result of the 'now-correct' handle locations. And i'm not sure if its wise to change them just ot have 'better displayed' guns.

I also noticed this change when playing on the .de green server. First I thought it was my fov that was messed up, checked it and I was surprised to see that I still had it set to 110.
Don't make me go to 130 or something
This change is bad IMO. I however do not know the reasons why it was implemented, could be good ones, but for now I'm gonna stick with bad.
With fov 90 you barely see some weapons. If this is a change that stays then the default fov has to be changed to 110.

It's not like they're scaled.

A completely different modeller had to reanimate them all from scratch, thanks to their original author not providing source but instead providing quite buggy models that don't even point in the right direction, ignoring criticism on this, and then leaving for now over a week.

Just look at this:

http://emptyset.endoftheinternet.org/~rpolzer/img/uploaded/54bb38a1a1bf6abb9ca346e8ca48b30d.jpg

And it was not possible to "simply rotate" the model due to no source files existing.

So in the end, the weapon system had to be changed to support a different way of storing animation, and all animations redone from scratch.

Now to the single screenshots.

Laser is NOT much bigger, but appears like it because it's closer. Other than that, it's less than a mouse pointer size difference. Some however really are, especially hagar, electro and mortar, but it matches their strength.

But basically, the only reason was "another artist did it, and no access to the original data".

What artist? Who re-did these? I thought pretty much only Morphed knew how to do that.

Still, I think it would be wise to either make the "bigger" weapons smaller, or allow the client to "scale" them down (there is a cvar for that without a function, cl_viewmodel_scale, maybe use this one?).

My personal issues are these:
- some weapons are shown in their full length (or almost), like SG, RL and CR, some others were basically cropped, like MG and Nex - inconsistency looks bad
- a few weapons appear to be bigger now since they are very close to the player (I am aware that the weapons were not actually "scaled", they just appear bigger). Maybe move them away a bit? Reason: they just take too much space now, imo

divVerent wrote:Some however really are, especially hagar, electro and mortar, but it matches their strength.

In this case, CR has to use much more space, since it is Nexuiz' BFG with its headshot-damage. Apart from that the mortar looks now even more powerful than the RL, which is a lie (considering one fired projectile)

Tell that to the guy who made them (motorsep), but keep in mind that it's quite some work to move them again and re-export them all. Plus, it DOES look good in my opinion (and yes, the CR does look a bit too lightweight, but it actually IS that way, when you e.g. compare to the third person models).

Why don't YOU do that, now that this can be done entirely with open source tools (motorsep was using Blender), instead of complaining about every single change?

I might try to get a hold of him and ask him how to do the movement so that I can do it myself. You should know that I am not lazy when it comes to doing something myself, given the requirement that I already can do it or it is somewhat easy to learn (with guidance).

Here is what i think:

positive:
- alignment is much better now and weapons are pointing at the crosshair
- position of some models is moved slightly to the left, i have now more the impression of someone actually holding a weapon

negative:
- "size": distance of some weapons are really too close, reducing vision
- some weapons are cropped quite much (minstanex, porto, hook)

hope that helps evaluating

Minstanex, Porto, Hook are actually pretty short to begin with, and only looked right because the first person model was artificially made longer (on the other hand, long weapons were artificially made shorter in the first person model). Now, no separate first person model is used any more.

See the third-person shots on

http://svn.icculus.org/*checkout*/nexuiz/trunk/Docs/basics.html

(note that the third person view of the weapons has not changed)

Red Dragon wrote:Here is what i think:

positive:
- alignment is much better now and weapons are pointing at the crosshair
- position of some models is moved slightly to the left, i have now more the impression of someone actually holding a weapon

negative:
- "size": distance of some weapons are really too close, reducing vision
- some weapons are cropped quite much (minstanex, porto, hook)

I agree with this exactly. There are definately pros and cons. The weapons actually look like weapons now. The laser looks frickin' huge!

i found the larger weapons hinder my view and my play. could we not have a player_weaponsV in the ADV settings to let the user set the scale?

Watching the models here: http://svn.icculus.org/*checkout*/nexuiz/trunk/Docs/basics.html I've noticed that many weapons aren't placed in a good way.

Maybe the position should be adjusted a bit to match better the left hand (the hand that keeps up the weapon). IMO this hand should be as much in the middle of the weapon as possible but keeping an eye to the right hand: it shouldn't be far from the handle of the weapon. In this way they will still look better in the player's hand and in the first person view too, I think.

Laser: a bit lower
Hook: lower and forwards
Porto: ok
Shotgun: ok
MG: ok
HLAC: ok
Mortar: a bit lower
Electro: a bit lower
Crylink: a bit lower and more backwards



Nex: ok
MinstaNex: forwards
Rfile: a bit backwards
Hagar: a bit lower and forwards
RL: ok
TAG: more backwards.

I perfectly agree about the things terence mentioned. I still dont undertstand however, why are these weapons are aiming so high, please could someone explain it to me?

Anyway, seems like this guy who is holding it has extremely strong fingers, many weapons like crylink look to be held by only with the finger of the left hand Also as i mentioned earlier to esteel, the crifle seems to be totally screwed up with this angle of hold, feels like it has no length from the players view. I would also like to point out that nex aims a little higher with the current settings than the crosshair in first person view in my opinion.

Luckily i play with 105 fov, and even with this the weapons cover huge part of the screen out. I really feel bad for those who got used to the 90 fov setting, for them often 1/6 of the screen cant be seen in some cases.

Got a chance to check them out today, here are my thoughts:

1 - I'm glad the positioning was addressed, that was something that needed to be done to remove some of the "quake 1" feel, and to make them feel like they were shooting at what they were pointing at. The weapons mostly feel more powerful now, like modern games have gone since UT2k3 was released.

2 - The Hagar, GL, electro, laser are well positioned.

3 - The machinegun and shotgun sit too low.

4 - the Nexgun is way too far back, you should be able to see the scope.

5 - The RL probably needs to be slightly higher to feel bulkier.

Keep up the good work, weapon positioning is very tricky, takes alot of trial and error to get right.

terencehill wrote:Watching the models here: http://svn.icculus.org/*checkout*/nexuiz/trunk/Docs/basics.html I've noticed that many weapons aren't placed in a good way.

Maybe the position should be adjusted a bit to match better the left hand (the hand that keeps up the weapon). IMO this hand should be as much in the middle of the weapon as possible but keeping an eye to the right hand: it shouldn't be far from the handle of the weapon. In this way they will still look better in the player's hand and in the first person view too, I think.

Yes, but all this wasn't in the scope of motorsep's changes. He didn't touch the third person models at all, all he did was making animations for them that are stored in a separate file (h_*.dpm).

The weird up-aiming is because of the player model's animation, and not because of the weapon models. Fixing this would be a LOT more work. Also, it's easy to remake a fire animation from scratch (like motorsep did), but it's not that easy to reanimate a whole player model.

IMHO the player models should simply ALL be erased and replaced by good ones (or fixed versions of the current ones). But this will take years.