UE1 - UT Third Person Weapon Rendering - How Does it Work?

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Rajada

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Jan 21, 2008
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I'm curious to know how 3rd person weapon rendering works in UE1 (let's just say I'm working in Unreal's version of the engine, not UT, though I think in this case they have similar systems). I'd like to know as much as possible about how the engine determines the position of the weapon triangle, and whether or not the code to render the ThirdPersonMesh of a weapon is native code or not. At this point, I've dug through several classes with no mention of the ThirdPersonMesh variable anywhere. I suspect this stuff might be native but I want to be sure. Asking in the coding forums because I want to use the third person weapon position in some code if possible.
 
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meowcat

take a chance
Jun 7, 2001
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When nobody responds there is a very good chance that no one knows (and this is a very old engine now...). your initial research matches what I vaguely remember.

In my limited experience it was pretty much all native code. If I recall correctly the only access you had was through the weapon's default properties dealing with third person model, scale and maybe weapon flash location. If you wanted to change the position of the third person weapon model, you had to do it through its own weapon model's animation set (I don't even remember if there was a way to specify playing a new animation for the third person model). I could be wrong... its been about ten years since I compiled anything for UT(99).

The weapon bone attachment point (for player models that uses the skeletal animation patch released later for UT) allowed you to specify where the third person weapon was during model/.u file compilation. I'm assuming that for the vertex animated models, the weapon tri data was embedded in the vertex data too in some vector array and interpolated just like the other mesh vertex data when animating. For vertex models you animated on your own you had to use a custom program to select the weapon triangle. I forget the program's name but its posted somewhere on the UnrealWiki (it also let you set other triangle flags like masked, translucent, environment mapped etc.).
 

gopostal

Active Member
Jan 19, 2006
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You can do some adjusting through pivoting the attachment point but it will still react to the player's animations. I remember working on a Stargate staff weapon and was able to pull off a semi-convincing Krall type of use with it with the player's standard animation package. It wasn't perfect but it looked OK(ish).

Good to see you still plugging along Raj. We ought to get together on Skype sometime my brother. Message me if you ever feel like doing that.
 

Rajada

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Jan 21, 2008
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When nobody responds there is a very good chance that no one knows (and this is a very old engine now...). your initial research matches what I vaguely remember.

I don't know what you're talking about, I was just posting a humorous quote!

In all seriousness, I usually don't bump things but I really expected someone would come along pretty fast and confirm my thought that in this version of Unreal, that particular rendering is native. While I do know that I could adjust rotation and offsets of the model itself, what I really needed was the pivot point during runtime. My hope was to use it to render a shell around the gun for a shield effect, but from what you told me, looks like it'd be impossible.
 

meowcat

take a chance
Jun 7, 2001
803
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Hi Rajada,
Yeah in my response I kind of thought you were being "snarky" rather than humorous, glad it was meant to be humorous!

I looked through the old UT weapon/inventory code and it is indeed very, very limited on what you can do for the third person mesh; appears you can only set the mesh, its drawscale, and some muzzleflash related vars.