Dual Wielding Pistols - My Blender Game Engine Project

[Danny]

...I really like the hand swapping idea (with one gun). I can see something like that being useful when shooting from corners.

I actually meant to say something about that as well. I worked on Troopers: Dawn Of Destiny ( a UT2004 Star Wars modification ) where we actually fired blaster bolts from the tip of the weapon utilizing true aiming. When we added lean, we made the pistols swap from the right to left hand when leaning left and vice versa. It felt fantastic and was more than just a visual feature as it improved the leaning gameplay because you could keep your body hidden a lot more by leaning left and shooting with the left hand. So yeah.. great feature

[MoreDread]

I was actually thinking about something similar myself, but I don't have the means nor the skills to put a demo together.

actually i didn't have the necessary skills either.. until i actually just started doing it

My idea involved holding an hostage much like you do with one cube at some point and using gun orientation to affect enemy AI (point at hostage head to say "stop or I'll kill him!", point at ceiling and fire to get attention etc.). My idea was also based on the Move tech, so I was struggling figuring out how to preserve camera control during the hostage situation, which is not a problem with the Hydra since it comes with a two sticks. I assume you are using the right stick for camera control right?

interesting ideas.. and yes currently i'm using the sticks for movement and camera control

How much control do you have over the camera FOV? Would it be possible to dynamically increase/decrease its range as the red dots are moved farther apart/closer together? I wonder how that feels (probably not very good because changing the FOV on the fly would require constant target reacquisition).

dynamic FOV shouldn't be too hard to do.. i might give this a try.. i'm not sure if this would feel very realistic or immersive tho.

Since you are doing head position tracking already (as far as I understand), perhaps adding orientation tracking would help in aiming the two guns when they point outside of the FOV, albeit one at the time of course. This would be ideal for recreating Mexican stand off situations

i'm already using orientation tracking as an overlay on the camera controls. for obvious reasons, (you can't turn your head much without loosing track of your monitor) it only allows for slight adjustments..but its a nice little extra.. as a pc gamer, using a stick to look around feels a little awkward.. using headtracking allows me to remedy some of it.

I really like the hand swapping idea (with one gun). I can see something like that being useful when shooting from corners.
Overall, great job!

well, thank you =)

I actually meant to say something about that as well. I worked on Troopers: Dawn Of Destiny ( a UT2004 Star Wars modification ) where we actually fired blaster bolts from the tip of the weapon utilizing true aiming. When we added lean, we made the pistols swap from the right to left hand when leaning left and vice versa. It felt fantastic and was more than just a visual feature as it improved the leaning gameplay because you could keep your body hidden a lot more by leaning left and shooting with the left hand. So yeah.. great feature

it was a happy accident, but i really liked it.
and it gave me the idea to create a system that has context specific, collision based actions.
that is to say the analog triggers on each hydra are dynamically playing grab animations, that get switched out
depending on what kind of object is near them.

some examples:

if no object is close to the left hand and the trigger is pressed down, the hand turns into a fist.
if a box is around, a grabbing animation will be played instead and the box will be picked up.
if the hand is near the slide of the colt, it can be grabbed and pulled back, then rotated to see if there is a bullet in the chamber
if it gets close to a keypad, the index finger will extend to make it easier to enter a keycode
etc

[RealoFoxtrot]

if no object is close to the left hand and the trigger is pressed down, the hand turns into a fist.
if a box is around, a grabbing animation will be played instead and the box will be picked up.
if the hand is near the slide of the colt, it can be grabbed and pulled back, then rotated to see if there is a bullet in the chamber
if it gets close to a keypad, the index finger will extend to make it easier to enter a keycode
etc

Be very careful with the same key doing multiple things, it probably would work but i personally would suggest using the bumper buttons to use as the grab button, doesn't have to hold it down, but making a fist and shooting could possibly work better if it was just those two put on the trigger

[MoreDread]

Be very careful with the same key doing multiple things, it probably would work but i personally would suggest using the bumper buttons to use as the grab button, doesn't have to hold it down, but making a fist and shooting could possibly work better if it was just those two put on the trigger

well its not set in stone and i will probably experiment to see whats working best for me.
i didn't really mean to say that it all has to be done with just one button.
but i'm using the trigger for now because i liked the idea of actually being able to control the frame value of the grabbing animation instead of just triggering it.
as in, the more you push the trigger, the closer to a fist you get.
its a neat thing to play with.. its of no real use but its just fun to do and feels a little more alive.

i haven't really gotten around to adding any new features because i was trying to fix some bugs and improve some things.
i just got the animations to play again so there will be a little update showing these and the headtracking this weekend.

[Marcello Cangialosi]

MoreDread, in case you didn't notice, your video is here as well

http://sixense.com/developers

[RealoFoxtrot]

but i'm using the trigger for now because i liked the idea of actually being able to control the frame value of the grabbing animation instead of just triggering it.
as in, the more you push the trigger, the closer to a fist you get.

That does sound like an awesome use for the hydra actually... have you seen that PSMove game called.... uhh... two secs

-after a quick google search-

Yeah, it was a PS3 game called Datura, and it had an idea to use the PSMove in order to move a disembodied hand in real space
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ng8UW1_F1g

[Marcello Cangialosi]

That does sound like an awesome use for the hydra actually... have you seen that PSMove game called.... uhh... two secs

-after a quick google search-

Yeah, it was a PS3 game called Datura, and it had an idea to use the PSMove in order to move a disembodied hand in real space
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ng8UW1_F1g

Here is a better video of Datura explaining it all (shameless self-promotion :P)

http://youtu.be/R7rtL8Caqhg

Datura also supports head tracking via a second Move (to be attached to your head), as you'll see near the end of that vid.

[MoreDread]

@Marcello Cangialosi, RealoFoxtrot:
wow that looks quite amazing... my plan was to implement all these things, compared to that my system looks really cheap (and it is)
but i'm just figuring this out as i progress.

sadly i ran into alot of problems.. the animation bug that i thought were fixed reappeared.
it seems to be a bug with the experimental blender build i used to create this demo.
basically whenever i save and reload the file, all animations on the hands stop working.

and to make it even better, i can't open the file in any other build. it just crashes.
i've been trying to find a solution for this for about a week, no luck so far.

thats my excuse for not posting a new video, like i promised.

i'll probably have to start from scratch. doesn't sound good but it might actually help me reorganize and clean stuff up.

this might take a while to do, but i can still record the video with the bugged version in the meantime.
i might do that later today after work, or tomorrow if i'm too tired.

(now that i know that it is actually embeded on the dev page i wanna put a better video out there)

[MoreDread]

for various reasons i decided against recording the video like i had planned.

here is the main one:
thx to mr.wonko, we now have a python integration for the sixense SDK.
this has alot of advantages:
i no longer have to use an external program to get the hydra data, and an unsigned driver for virtual joysticks to get it into blender.
i'm getting a little improvement in accuracy, which means i can tone down the smoothing filter i applied to get more responsive controls.
it also means, tho, that i have to reorganize and rewrite alot of code to actually use it.
once i've done that i can release a demo that is easy to install and requires no extra steps to get it working
(that is, unless you want to use the head tracking feature... this still requires the unsigned ppjoy drivers and faceTrackNoIR)

it turns out the animation bug i had was a problem with the hydra input wrapper 0.4
the animations are working for real now, which means i do not have to use another build of blender and start from scratch.
it will still take a while to make the necessary adjustments for the python integration.
right now i'm still struggling with translating the orientation matrix to something blender can understand.
this is quite a bit harder and taking much longer than i imagined.
but i'll get there eventually..

[movieman999]

once i've done that i can release a demo that is easy to install and requires no extra steps to get it working

Looking forward to it!

We'll probably get this before direct integration for Left 4 Dead 2 comes out.