Product Chat / My Crazy Idea for a Pseudo 3rd Person Controller

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tomjscott
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2014 17:27
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OK, so since we have some issues with physics on/gravity off, and we lack a few other nice Lua scripts for making a true 3rd person controller, a crazy idea popped into my head a while back and it invaded my brain once again last night and today. The concept is a pseudo 3rd person controller. While certainly not a long term solution and it has its share of problems, it might be fun to give this a try if I have free time.

The basic idea is that the person playing the game moves around the game world as he normally would, but there is also a 3D character model in the scene that represents the actual player. Using a combination of custom keystrokes and mouse button input, the player controls the 3D character model to move around the scene. This, of course, requires all characters in the game to be completely custom scripted. Obviously we wouldn't want the enemy characters to be blasting the player moving around the scene, but rather the 3D representation of the player.

It would be like following the 3D character around, but just directing him to do things for you. I'm not sure how far I could take this or how good it would work, but it's a crazy idea I had that I might try. If anyone else is ambitious and wants to do something like this then feel free to give it a shot.

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tomjscott
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2014 17:41 Edited at: 3rd Sep 2014 17:42
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To add to this, you could make the 3D character model a teleport to entity and have the "real" player transport to the 3D representation when a specific key is pressed. So, then you could have the 3D character be able to scale walls and ladders and the "real" player pop up there afterwards. You could use the typical hurt the player concept if the "real" player decides to wander too far from his 3D avatar as well. Or just transport him to the avatar if he goes too far.

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tomjscott
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2014 19:07
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This is starting to turn into more than just a pseudo controller. I'm experimenting with some new functions in Omega Core that might actually make this controller more viable than originally thought. Stay tuned as I test out my ideas and see where it leads.

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Posted: 3rd Sep 2014 19:25
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Quote: "The basic idea is that the person playing the game moves around the game world as he normally would, but there is also a 3D character model in the scene that represents the actual player. Using a combination of custom keystrokes and mouse button input, the player controls the 3D character model to move around the scene. This, of course, requires all characters in the game to be completely custom scripted. Obviously we wouldn't want the enemy characters to be blasting the player moving around the scene, but rather the 3D representation of the player. "


It has been done like this in a few FPSC Classic mods. It had good to mediocre results. I'd say that you can pull that off, but on the other hand, it might just get added in the future anyway? I'd wait for the official release and start modifiying then...but if you feel like doing it now...please! I'd love to see that happen.



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tomjscott
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2014 19:29
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@Wolf, well I've really wanted to do this for a while now. I wasn't going to do it though until I came up with the new Omega Core functions that might make this a bit more than just following your avatar around. I'll experiment with this new idea and see
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2014 20:43
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my question would be with the combat mechanism. How would this work with say for example, over-the-shoulder aiming in games like GTA IV?
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tomjscott
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2014 20:55
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Quote: "How would this work with say for example, over-the-shoulder aiming in games like GTA IV?"


I would never play that game so I wouldn't know what you are referring to.

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Posted: 3rd Sep 2014 21:13 Edited at: 3rd Sep 2014 21:29
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it basically means whenever you aim your gun, the screen centres on the line of aim rather than the direction the character is walking so you can see clearly what you are shooting at.



If you've played third person shooters before the need for this is pretty apparent.



Personally i want TGC to apply the option for multiple camera view points so that not only can i switch to third or even fourth person mode, but when i switch back to first person we can see the player body and legs when we move the mouse-look down. This is going to be pretty necessary anyway, if the final release of FPSCR is going to stand a chance of competing with other game engines.
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tomjscott
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2014 21:51
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Quote: "If you've played third person shooters before the need for this is pretty apparent."


I don't think I've played a 3rd person shooter before. I've played a lot of games that use 3rd person like MMORPGs, for example. But, with this pseudo 3rd person controller I'm working on, it's doubtful it'll be precise enough to do what you're suggesting. I'm not yet sure it'll even be worth the effort, but I'm going to give it a try.

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Posted: 3rd Sep 2014 22:03
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Quote: "or even fourth person mode"


I never heard of this before so I had to look it up. That's actually very doable in Reloaded right now. It's very much like the idea of following the avatar around and doing various things to get the avatar to do what you want. I could see that being possible right now.

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Posted: 3rd Sep 2014 22:09
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Quote: "I don't think I've played a 3rd person shooter before."


If you never played them because of their violent nature, I can understand, but if you wanna take a look at some, I can recommend a few good ones.

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tomjscott
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2014 22:15
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Quote: "If you never played them because of their violent nature, I can understand, but if you wanna take a look at some, I can recommend a few good ones."


No, not really interested. And I don't go for titles if they are rated im-"Mature". lol. And I'm pretty sure most shooters have that rating nowadays.

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Posted: 3rd Sep 2014 22:35
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from a game design perspective its a good practice to get familiar with different genres, even if you don't particularly enjoy them personally.
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tomjscott
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2014 22:39
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Quote: "from a game design perspective its a good practice to get familiar with different genres, even if you don't particularly enjoy them personally."


I'm pretty familiar with most genres, but certainly not all. If I decide to venture into an area I'm not familiar with, I always do whatever research I need to do in order to get up to speed on it.

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Posted: 3rd Sep 2014 22:41
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Quote: " And I don't go for titles if they are rated im-"Mature". lol. And I'm pretty sure most shooters have that rating nowadays."


Got it! I prefer fun adventures over elaborate murdersimulations myself

You know, on a semi related note: You are very ambitious and motivated! I hope we keep you around as our resident LUA guy!!



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tomjscott
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2014 22:46
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Quote: "Got it! I prefer fun adventures over elaborate murder simulations myself "

Same here. I don't mind fantasy or sci-fi violence (up to a point), but gun 'em down, murder, blood, gore, theft, profanity, and sexual content are out of the question for me.

Quote: "You know, on a semi related note: You are very ambitious and motivated! I hope we keep you around as our resident LUA guy!! "

Thanks. I'm having a lot of fun with Reloaded as my second engine of choice right now. Unity 3D being the other. As much as I like Unity 3D, I think Reloaded is going to have a place in my game development repertoire for years to come.

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tommy8
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2014 22:49
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I would argue that action intense games have led to more breakthroughs and innovations in gameplay mechanics. Grand theft auto is a prime example as the player evolved from a 2d birds eye view speck with four directions of motion to a fully rendered 3d figure with almost parkour abilities. When you are in soft action games where the objective is to walk around and talk to people, the need for complicated movements is less pertinent. Just my opinion.

Though FPS games aren't usually reknowned for their non-violent content so i find it odd that fans of non-violent games would be attracted to development software like FPSCR.
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2014 22:51 Edited at: 3rd Sep 2014 22:52
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Quote: "my question would be with the combat mechanism. How would this work with say for example, over-the-shoulder aiming in games like GTA IV? "




For a 3rd person view mode the camera would just move back behind the players collision cylinder/box. An entity representing the player would appear inside the collision shape. For over the shoulder the camrea would move to over the shoulder of the entity representation of the player.



The big issue with this that most 3rd person/1st person games suffer from is camera collisions. You need to do a LOT of scripting to make sure the camera never bumps into a wall. For Grand Theft Auto the camera will move towards the player entity if it bumps into a collision (wall, object, entity etc). This means you would have to create some type of "collision box" coordinates around the camera I believe. Fallout also does a great job of 3rd person/over the shoulder/1st person camera angles, without mashing the camera into a wall blocking your view of the player.



Also keep in mind the FOV doesn't move the camera it just changes the field of view. You may want to reference Skyrim to see if the FOV ever changes depending if your in 1st preson mode or 3rd Person. I believe pressing the ~ button allows you to go into command prompt and you can check out the FOV settings from there.

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Posted: 3rd Sep 2014 22:55 Edited at: 3rd Sep 2014 22:56
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Quote: "Though FPS games aren't usually reknowned for their non-violent content so i find it odd that fans of non-violent games would be attracted to development software like FPSCR."




It's because I can see a lot more potential in an engine than just what it is necessarily designed for out of the box. If you haven't noticed yet, I do a lot of out-of-the-box stuff, going to places where others haven't gone and pushing the boundaries and limits of what's possible. My comp demo was a Fantasy RPG with some shooter elements via the fire blast spell power.

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tomjscott
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2014 22:59
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Quote: "The big issue with this that most 3rd person/1st person games suffer from is camera collisions. You need to do a LOT of scripting to make sure the camera never bumps into a wall."


With the present engine, there isn't a whole lot of control over this aspect. Getting this early pseudo 3rd person controller working isn't going to be a work of art or even be fully functional as you'd hope. Although I'm confident I can make "some" sort of 3rd person controller using the techniques described here, it may end up being unusable anyway. If all goes well, I'll be trying some things tonight and will report back any progress.

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tomjscott
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2014 23:00
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You guys should hop on into the IRC chat. Would be so much easier talking about stuff there.

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Posted: 4th Sep 2014 00:26
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Been reading the thread as it sounds interesting
I personally would always prefer a 3rd person over 1st, though I tend to stick with whats available in the engine over mods. In the past when I've worked with some software, and used mods, I've been held back by mod developers working only with older versions, or good mods being inexplicably dropped when partially implemented. With beta software it becomes trickier to keep up and unwilling to add multiple potential error sources this early on. I do like what your doing with Omega though, and when I resume some sort of serious development (rather than occasional mucking about) its definitely very appealing

Quote: "You guys should hop on into the IRC chat. Would be so much easier talking about stuff there."

I know I've been in the forums less lately, what is this IRC chat of which you speak?

On another note, where is everyone? Come on now and it says on the homepage only 2 users online in last 15 mins! All time low, or the counter broken?

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tomjscott
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Posted: 4th Sep 2014 00:28
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Quote: "I know I've been in the forums less lately, what is this IRC chat of which you speak?"


Goto http://webchat.freenode.net/

Enter the channel as fpscr. We have a chat going right now.

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Posted: 4th Sep 2014 15:17
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@tomjscott

[quote=]The basic idea is that the person playing the game moves around the game world as he normally would, but there is also a 3D character model in the scene that represents the actual player. Using a combination of custom keystrokes and
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Posted: 4th Sep 2014 15:36
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Quote: "Namely, if you add to OmegaCore the capability to programmatically send keystrokes to the FPSCR engine, then one can use scripts to move the Player/Camera around"


Funny you should bring this up. I just added this capability to Omega Core yesterday.

Quote: "PS1. While I am looking forward to some kind of programmable keystrokes in Omegacore , I am even more expectant for Camera/Player Lua functions; Lee made some mention of these a while ago; has there been any progress in this front?"


Unfortunately, no. Lee has my list of needed functions along those lines, but he's too busy with performance issues at the moment to consider working on these.

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Posted: 4th Sep 2014 15:37
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Quote: "So Tom, what are the chances of you adding the programmable keystrokes to Omegacore anytime soon?"


I just need to clean some things up and update documentation and it'll be released. This week for sure.

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Posted: 4th Sep 2014 15:46
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Quote: "I just need to clean some things up and update documentation and it'll be released. This week for sure."

Very very good news! Looking forward.

Just to make sure I got this right: in my script I have a line like

SendKey("w")

and when this runs, the engine will think I pressed the "w" key. Right?

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Posted: 4th Sep 2014 15:50
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Quote: "Just to make sure I got this right: in my script I have a line like

SendKey("w")

and when this runs, the engine will think I pressed the "w" key. Right?
"


Not quite. Because of the nature of Direct Input, if we just provided a single function like that then the key would remain pressed forever. Thus, I have the following:

ocSendKeyDown("w")

and

ocSendKeyUp("w")

So you are responsible for sending key down and key up.

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Posted: 4th Sep 2014 15:51
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This might actually make scripting easier!

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Posted: 4th Sep 2014 15:55
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I also have ocMouseMove for moving the mouse position by a delta x and delta y value. So, you can simulate looking left/right and up/down.

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Posted: 4th Sep 2014 16:03
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And ocLeftMButtonClick, ocRightMButtonClick I am sure ...

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tomjscott
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Posted: 4th Sep 2014 16:04
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Quote: "And ocLeftMButtonClick, ocRightMButtonClick I am sure"


I still need to add something equivalent to those before release. I haven't done that yet.

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Posted: 4th Sep 2014 16:41
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This sounds so cool are you going to implement it into omega core? Also if i make a game and sell it can i use omega core with my game?

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Posted: 4th Sep 2014 16:50
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@tomjscott

Quote: "I still need to add something equivalent to those before release. I haven't done that yet.
"


Hmmm, this is pretty crucial, because LMB is the shooting button (or is there an equivalent key?)

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Posted: 4th Sep 2014 16:51
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Quote: "This sounds so cool are you going to implement it into omega core?"

In the current state of the Reloaded engine, I am definitely going to need Omega Core features to get this working, if I can get it working at all. I was side-tracked helping someone with video playback last night so didn't get time to work on this controller idea.

Quote: "Also if i make a game and sell it can i use omega core with my game?"

Omega Core is free to use in commercial and non-commercial projects. I am going to be adding a requirement that you put an Omega Core logo in the About screen of your game (e.g. "Powered by Omega Core"), but that's about the only restriction I'll be imposing.

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Posted: 4th Sep 2014 21:37
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Quick update. I was side-tracked last night helping someone to get video playback working in their game so I didn't have much time to work on this. So, nothing to report yet of any consequence.

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Posted: 4th Sep 2014 22:53
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I should also add that I'm quite interested in this possibility of 3rd person

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Posted: 4th Sep 2014 23:09
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Quote: "Hmmm, this is pretty crucial, because LMB is the shooting button (or is there an equivalent key?)"


Oh, yeah, definitely. I just got side-tracked with other stuff. I'm not releasing it without support for LMB/MMB/RMB. I'll also see if I can do mouse scroll wheel.

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Posted: 5th Sep 2014 21:31
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Full control for player's camera, keystrokes, and mouse (as you state above, are needed.
after that sure speech would becomes as necessary/complementary too.

an sort of pointer addressing to player's coordinates, to knows each moment, the exact player position on the map. Non only respect to entity position.

And of course a full animate caracter being able to walk, run, jump, climb walls, swim, dive under water.

Able to express emotions, pain, fatigue, breathing hard by the lack of air, etc.

Cutscenes are often needed too.

Despite all this, it remains a good idea.

I'm thinking in a genre like Syberia, (I love Syberia), Or Tom Ryder too. (The range of motion of Tomb Raider, is so accurate).

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