I know the place to post these is GitHub, but i thought that as Lee is working on characters at the moment, and has specifically been looking at making it easier to import third party characters, i would post it here as well as GitHUb and send it to Lee and Rick via email.
One of the biggest hassles i have found, and in my opinion one of the top three reasons that people don't make many custom characters for GameGuru is the FIRESPOT. This is a technique of adding weapons to characters that is fairly unique in GameGuru, i haven't seen another engine do it this way, and it can cause some frustration when creating custom characters because;
1. Most 3rd party characters do not have a FIRESPOT bone
2. Most 3D modelling programs don't just export bone names as written, for example Blender will export FIRESPOT as armature.FIRESPOT, which confuses GameGuru
I've made a few characters for GameGuru in my time, you might remember the Penguin i made for one of the community member games (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSSA8AH4AIE), but i tend to avoid creating characters because the biggest hassle i have is getting the FIRESPOT right, my workflow for it is long and laborious, and is as follows:
Create the character in Blender and export it to .X, then:
1. Import it to GameGuru, notice the gun is missing
2. Add FIRESPOT in Blender, and export it back to .X
3. Import it into GameGuru, notice the gun is still missing and realise it's the naming issue
4. Import it into Fragmotion, change the bone name from armature.FIRESPOT back to FIRSPOT and export it back to .X
5. Import it into GameGuru, shoot myself in the face
6. Import it into Fragmotion, adjust the offset and rotation/roll of the FIRESPOT bone by guess work
7. Import it into GameGuru, shoot myself in the foot
8. Import it into Fragmotion, adjust the offset and rotation/roll of the FIRESPOT bone by more guess work
9. Import it into GameGuru, shoot myself in the backside
10. Rinse/Repeat until i get it right or rage quit.
This is extremely frustrating and as i say at least in the top three reasons people just don't make custom characters for GameGuru any more.
Might i suggest that with GameGuru Max we try something different?
The idea i had is as follows:
In the properties of entities have a character section with the following:
1. A tick box to define it as a character so that it uses the correct shaders etc.
2. A drop down box listing all the bones on that model, from which you can choose which bone to assign as a FIRESPOT
3. A set of sliders for XYZ offset of the weapon from that bone
4. A set of sliders for XYZ rotation/roll of the weapon
In my opinion if something like this was implemented it would really make a difference to the ease of adding new characters, people would be able to create their own characters or use third party with so much more ease than they can now, and would likely increase the amount of custom characters we see in projects a hundred fold.
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