Player Shadow

[The Black Arrow 18]

Hey, I don't remember well and this could be a removed feature but, didn't TDM have a "Player Shadow" that you could enable through the console?

Can't seem to find it, I can't even remember which first letter(s) it started with either. If this feature still exists, please do tell me what it is.

Would be great if the Doom 3 Engine had a "Find" function.

[Jedi_Wannabe 216]

seta g_showPlayerShadow 1

While not perfect it brings back old memories and I prefer it on.

[The Black Arrow 18]

8 hours ago, Jedi_Wannabe said:

While not perfect it brings back old memories and I prefer it on.

What do you mean by that? It used to be an available and enabled-by-default option back then?

And thanks a lot, this is what I was looking for. I just hope TDM get an animator so they can do the player first-person and third-person models much better, make it similar to Thief 3.

[Jedi_Wannabe 216]

No I mean memories of TDS not TDM. 

[freyk 474]

See a topic with other old opinions about playershadows:
"the player has no animations or shadow"

Edited July 17, 2020 by freyk

[chakkman 382]

I should activate that too. I love games where you see the player shadow. Adds a lot of atmosphere.

[AluminumHaste 1054]

On 7/16/2020 at 4:26 PM, The Black Arrow said:

Hey, I don't remember well and this could be a removed feature but, didn't TDM have a "Player Shadow" that you could enable through the console?

Can't seem to find it, I can't even remember which first letter(s) it started with either. If this feature still exists, please do tell me what it is.

Would be great if the Doom 3 Engine had a "Find" function.

For future reference, you can type listcvar in the console and it will print all cvars and then you can do a condump and search it that way.

[Anderson 318]

On 7/17/2020 at 10:06 AM, freyk said:

See a topic with other old opinions about playershadows:
"the player has no animations or shadow"

Right. The consensus seems to be that player shadows should not affect the light gem and the player's visibility to AI. Just like Thief Deadly Shadows.

The main hurdle is the lack of third person animations - they were really good in Thief Deadly Shadows.

[demagogue 1252]

I understand that animations are hard to make and even harder to make look good, but you'd think in 15 years somebody could just bite the bullet and make them...

 

Alright, I can look into it (after/if I finish some other projects). I've been making models for my own projects in Blender and lifting animations straight from Fuse (which is awesome system once you get used to it BTW. You just remodel their stock model, and as long as you keep a small set of key vertexes in basically the same key places, you get to use their ~400 animations for it). But I've been looking into making and tweaking some of the animations for my own purposes. I suppose I could look into the TDM player animations. I don't know if it affects gameplay, e.g., with the movement, bounding box for collisions, falling of ledges, things like that, side-effects which were admittedly annoying in TDS. Presumably it'd be ideal if it also had no effect on anything and was just a visual effect; but I don't know if that's possible as it is the model.

[New Horizon 507]

If you're just adding animation for player shadows then that won't cause any issues since the first person system doesn't rely on the player model for collision.  It's just there for shadow projection.

If the first person system was adapted for body awareness like tds, then that would cause the same issues.

 

[AluminumHaste 1054]

Yeah please no body awareness, while it's cool, in practice it sucks to be limited in what you can do by the player model.

It really made Thief 3 feel super janky when doing anything.

[New Horizon 507]

1 hour ago, AluminumHaste said:

Yeah please no body awareness, while it's cool, in practice it sucks to be limited in what you can do by the player model.

It really made Thief 3 feel super janky when doing anything.

Yes.  No body awareness please.

 

[Jedi_Wannabe 216]

Just one guys opinion: if that’s the case and the animation for the shadow can be altered, simply widening his stance when crouched (looks like he’s sitting on an invisible chair with legs at right angles) and doing something really anything with the arms ( currently just down by his side like standing at attention) would go so far. 

[demagogue 1252]

I'm wondering how much coding support would also need to be done. It sounds like some of this would call for cuing and cycling through idle animations, cycling through animation variants for different things, and for things like mantling, to do it justice you'd want the animations to be in line with the different mantling mechanics, i.e., responding to things like cancel conditions, morphing a jump animation into a mantle animation, etc. Just off the top of my head, some of that sounds like it needs code support to handle it, which is a bigger can of worms than just making a few stock animations.

[AluminumHaste 1054]

This is why it hasn't been bothered with all this time.

It's a shit ton of work, for very little benefit, and most players have gotten used to the player having no shadow.

Though I have to say I always turn it on now as it's very immersive, I love seeing my shadow splashed across a wall.

[RedNoodles 9]

I love playing with shadows on, a slightly more elaborate walking/crouching animation would be awesome

[New Horizon 507]

Can't remember the name of the mod but someone imported the garett model and animations from Deadly Shadows into their Doom 3 mod.  If you could track them down it might simplify things

[AluminumHaste 1054]

Can't use those directly as they are assets from another game that's not in public domain.

They could probably be modified enough to be unrecognizable, but derivative works of copyrighted content is still a nono I think.

[freyk 474]

15 hours ago, New Horizon said:

Can't remember the name of the mod but someone imported the garett model and animations from Deadly Shadows into their Doom 3 mod.  If you could track them down it might simplify things

thats venture. https://www.moddb.com/mods/venture

garret in d3

 

[Abusimplea 168]

3 hours ago, freyk said:

garret in d3

It isn't AAA smooth (and actually can't ever be with instant input reaction).
But it is definitely good enough for the player shadow and would also improve mirror reflections a lot.

[New Horizon 507]

It wouldn't need to be perfect.  The model has no impact on the 3rd person movement or collision in TDM, as 1st person is a completely separate system.  So if the animations in that mod could work with the TDM model, it would be a massive improvement.

[chakkman 382]

On 9/10/2020 at 9:08 PM, AluminumHaste said:

Yeah please no body awareness, while it's cool, in practice it sucks to be limited in what you can do by the player model.

It really made Thief 3 feel super janky when doing anything.

Chronicles of Riddick did it very good.

Guess it's more a matter of personal preference.

[AluminumHaste 1054]

No man, Riddick was awesome, but the body awareness was super jank in a lot of situations, having to wait for your body animations to complete before you could do certain things is always bad.

[chakkman 382]

In which situation did you have to wait until your body animation completed?

If anything, games like Thief or TDM feel less immersive, because there's things which just don't make sense. like, moving your whole body 360 degrees while climbing a ladder, or a complete linear movement when you turn around.

You know, I don't want to cricitize it per se, because I get the point, gameplay wise, about not limiting the player's movement. But, it's simply less realistic/immersive that way.

Edited September 12, 2020 by chakkman

[Anderson 318]

15 minutes ago, chakkman said:

In which situation did you have to wait until your body animation completed?

If anything, games like Thief or TDM feel less immersive, because there's things which just don't make sense. like, moving your whole body 360 degrees while climbing a ladder, or a complete linear movement when you turn around.

You know, I don't want to cricitize it per se, because I get the point, gameplay wise, about not limiting the player's movement. But, it's simply less realistic/immersive that way.

I think the best example is Operation Flashpoint, ArmA body animations. Both in third person and in first person they are very clunky. AFAIK it's still clunky in ArmA 3 despite working on a new engine. Try climbing a ladder in those games and then returning to shooting in Close Quarter Combat.

Same applies to Thief Deadly Shadows. I liked the body awareness but it was buggy and ladder climbing, mantling, jumping sometimes glitched out.

Original Thief 1, 2, System Shock 2 had more fluid controls.

TLDR I think TDM should not consume precious human resources for a marginally cool looking gimmick. If body awareness was that important to everybody, everyone would have bought VR and play Half-Life Alyx. But they don't. It's still a thing for minorities. Until VR becomes more than something experimental, none of this is a priority. Not important to go all the way to the end with respect of this issue.