How Should Problems with "True First Person" Gun Handling (Animation Weighting/Inertia) Be Fixed?

Development Character & Animation
1

Hello,

I was hoping for some feedback and suggestions related to a problem is see on the horizon. This question is still a ways off in my development, but I’ve been looking at some various tutorials online and none of them seem to address it. It regards how gun movement in a “True First Person” camera setup appears stiff and awkward (kind of like all the ARMA games). If you remember, games like HL2 had smooth feeling weapon movements with weighting and inertia behind them (the guns weren’t locked forward, they would sway side to side to follow the aim point, only turning the player when it reached a threshold).

This Escape From Tarkov developer Diary goes into this issue in case it’s hard to visualize: Escape from Tarkov. Developer's diary #1 (English voiceover) - YouTube (relevant segment at 13m 47s which that link should take you to).

So the question is, how do you go about setting something like that up? Is it on the animation side, or the blueprint side? How difficult is it to get going, understanding that tweaking might take a while to get perfect? Is the whole “True First Person” thing a bad way to go, maybe there are other tricks to allow players to see their feet? If any of you have implemented a similar system, what did you do?

I just feel like the whole “Tank Turret” look that most TFP systems give off is kind of amateur, and I would rather go with a pair of disembodied arms and get them to look good than to have the animations feel awkward just so that the players can look down and see their feet.

3

It sounds like what you’re talking about is having the weapon lead or lag during looking left, right, up, down etc. I’ve always accomplished this with an aim array type treatment where i make 9 different poses that will play additively while i’m looking around, and stop when i’m center center.

4

iamjohngalt1975
Thank you for the video link John, I’m taking a look at that now. Just what I’ve seen so far, I figured that some games companies were in fact using multiple meshes. I remember Oblivion you could “catch” the magic in the act by hopping out to third person, as the animation snap would be delayed enough for you to see it.

Daniel.Bodinof
Daniel, I think I get the gist of what your talking about here, but would you be able to go into a little more detail? I assume you mean angling the weapon slightly in the various directions so that you have a solution to blend in with the various ways you could point your gun?

5

I’ll recommend to check cryengine documentuation about STAP animation system. There are some interesting thoughts about true fps mode and procedural weapons anims/offsets.
http://docs.cryengine.com/display/SDKDOC2/STAP+System
http://docs.cryengine.com/display/SDKDOC2/Procedural+Weapon+Animations