I've worked with some of the dual plasma rifles messing around with the Ranger Elite,
and was wondering whether anyone was working on or knew of Dual plasma pistol weapon.

The dual rifles fires rounds from both guns with one trigger, but the pistol is chargeable so I don't know how two chargables would hold up on one trigger, if its sensable in game.

Any thoughts or suggestions?
I think it would be a great pairing for dual weapons maps,
(dual p rifles, plasma pistols, msg's, mk's, dual ak, ect. )

Sure it's possible, but why would anyone want two plasma pistols? The best thing to combine one of those with is a magnum or an smg.

Yup. Plasma is good against shields (overcharge) and projectiles are good against flesh. Two plasma pistols would just be a death sentence I think.

You can't have dual plasma pistols because the plasma pistol already uses the secondary fire.

I'm making duals, except the secondary trigger is a problem. Plus I haven't made a good pistol-pistol fp animation set yet, only rifle-rifle and pistol-rifle.
I was going to make the left mouse-click fire both, and holding left-mouse charging both. For rifle duals with the pp, like smg-pp or pr-pp, I can't decide if the pp trigger will be either charge-only or normal-only.

duals could work decently in ce if people weren't so gung-ho over making it act exactly like they do in halo 2

you see the halo 2 e3 2003 trailer? the smgs were obviously one .weapon. they fired perfectly simultaneously, indicating the fire input fired both at once

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOyeyV0mowM

at 4:09

you could emulate this style of dual wielding easilly by disabling grenade throwing, and having the weapon fire two projectiles at once. limitation being they'd have to be identical weapons, IE two smgs, two plasma rifles, etc in order to work properly. technically, you could make dual plasma pistols like this. you'd also have to worry about balancing it with weapons that are capable of using grenades

In that case, you can't have AYTHING with with plasma pistol.

I'm considering that one-button, two-trigger idea... especially for pistol combos.

it's been attempted, I believe in some headlong map. if I remember correctly I heard it was glitchy, you lose weapons, doesn't sync over the net due to the game's fantastic network coding, etc

thanks for the insight, i would want two plasma pistols becuz it would be a good competitor against all the other dual wields that have been made, in multiplayer maps.

(who wouldn't want to hold two fully charged plasma pistols against someone )

The two different weapons idea does work but so far only with the brute plasma rifle and regular plasma rifle has it worked for me in wielding both.

For them it works however, the first person fp shows just one of the plasma rifles.

well, clearly if you've got two different weapons that only have one mode of fire, that's also possible in a single .weapon. primary and secondary fire can launch different projectiles. you can even have separate firing animations, but the problem with doing it this way is the fire animations will cancel each other out, you can only have one reload animation, and secondary ammunition isn't replenishable via anything except swapping for a new pickup of the same .weapon

only way to get a glitchless, reliable dual wield is by doing what I've stated above. make a single weapon with dual wield animations and grenade throwing disabled that fires two projectiles with each shot, and have everything happen simultaneously for each. a bit bland and boring, but it's as seamless as you'll get in this outdated engine

I think this can be done by studying the plasma rifle. Basically how the plasma rifle is one weapon, but fires two different projectiles from two different nodes. Have them alternate and it would probably be even cooler, though it would be crap for dual SMGs, but a dual PP would be perfect.

I'm pretty sure the alternating system the plasma rifle uses only affects the where the effects are spawned, correct me if I'm wrong. the projectiles come from the center of the screen and do not alternate their offsets. and I think it still only has one firing animation, and one overheating animation. if you were to do this with a plasma pistol dual wield animations, the firing animation would have to either be both guns staying still, or both guns kicking back simultaneously. not sure how the overheat would look, either.. but I'd imagine it wouldn't look good

plus, I'd imagine doing it that way, the weapon would function just like a normal plasma pistol. the only thing you'd be adding is some glitchy, imperfect cosmetics

e: you know what, since I've never seen the concept I've suggested attempted before, I'm going to blow the dust off of my crap and try it. I can't believe I'm actually going back to this worthless engine

Wait what?

Also, having dual PP does have its uses in coop campaign. One guy gets a BR or dual pistols, one guy has dual PP to quickly get rid of shields on multiple enemies so the guy with the guns can finish them off easily. Or you can dual-wield PP and then kill a guy with a shotgun in close-quarters and taunt him over it.

well, I was GOING to give you a completed product, but unfortunately the engine decided to take a fat crap on my model_animations so no fp shows up in game. everything was rigged properly, materials applied. it doesn't make any sense sense why they don't work. don't care anymore, just reinforces my hatred for this rediculous engine



so have some broken-ass tags and the full animation set in max 9 format in case anyone wants to wade through this crap and fix this up for you

the weapons are tagged like I said, based on the e3 2003 demo. they fire two projectiles with each shot (tiny bit of spread added to make it more apparent that there's two projectiles, since the pp is 100% accurate by default), so you don't have to worry about triggers. forgot to disable grenades, easy fix, just tick the box in the weapon tag. get the animations working and you should have decent dual plasma pistol tags. third person will show players holding a single plasma pistol.

http://www.mediafire.com/?c07f3evdcstd6fq

I'll fix and release soon, but it will they will be halo 1 shaders.
EDIT: I see what you did there, the node hierarchy is not set up correctly. I'll fix it with my method right now.

Edit: Well, should I post updates here or in the weapons WIP? It's not really a weapon, just animations.

Edited by SlappyThePirate on Jan 26, 2011 at 02:26 PM

Change the origins back a bit.

Once I finish them all, yeah. Thanks for pointing that out, I wasn't sure.

care to elaborate how you fixed them? I'd at the very least like to know where I effed up and maybe have the chance to at least see them in the engine, if only to grab a movie clip and give this guy a decent idea of what the functionality is like

and I'd consider them a weapon considering the functionality has been modified appropriately

Good idea, here's what I found:

• "frame_bone24" should have been names "frame bone24". Halo takes your model and links it to the fp arms, and moves the weapons parts/fp arms based on the animation graph. If the fp arms model doesn't match the one you animated with, then halo can't implement any fp.


• The gun model nodes didn't have the right hierarchy. You had the frame_gun_right linked to the right hand, like it's supposed to be for normal guns... but linked to left gun to the left wrist. It makes sense to do so, but the frames of the weapon model must link to a master frame, in order to be one model and not two. What I did wan link the frame_right_gun to the frame_left_gun, making frame_left_gun the main node and the frame_right_gun something that can be animated alongside.


• Once I got it ingame I noticed the markers were named in an unorthodox way. I renamed the markers to what they are on the normal plasma pistol, one doesn't have to go change all the marker names in the effect tags. For example, there was a #primary_trigger_right and #primary_trigger_left. I just named them both to be "#primary trigger".


• There were no luminous or gauge materials on the glowy part of the meter, respectively. So that's why the materials look bad in the screenshot above.

The thing with duals is that you can only really have one gun model, but to bypass this I make the right gun a skinned part of the first gun, like the mag on the AR.
Once that's done, you have to set the second gun to not inherit any movement from the left gun, since it does that by default when you link.
Then it's a matter of adding a controller for the second gun and the right-hand wrist, to simulate a link.

btw, these are neat animations. Did you make them yourself?

the info is appreciated, I'll see if I can't at least fix these up into at least a displayable state.. that single underline in bone 24, ugh. time has made me rusty

yeah, I made them, just slapped them together in a few hours for a proof of the concept I was talking about. they're a bit sketchy, the overheat loop is terrible, and I didn't even bother using the curve editor for any of it

I'll admit the ready and moving animations are sketchy. I also removed the ready animation on the right-hand pistol... in the release there will be both versions.

fixed the materials and the node names, easy fix with kornman's editor. got it in game. also disabled grenades. only problem I'm seeing is the overcharge light, only shows on the right gun. never really been an effects guy

the heirarchy in the model was fine the way it was by the way. I've done weapons like this before (guns with knives for melees), and as long as the pieces are rigged properly to their respective nodes and there's only one base frame, the model's hierarchy doesn't complain about it too much. only real problem was the name of bone 24. thanks for telling me about that

updated tags and model max file:

http://www.mediafire.com/?ufopa78uu93jau9





there you go. simple e3 2003-style dual wielding. if you do dual weapons like this, the animation systems will be as seamless as any other weapon since it's using the same triggers as the original, and with some refinement this would be completely glitchless and sync online properly since it doesn't rely on questionable scripting

So you've used controllers for the second object/gun?

The effects are probably not coming up because of the marker names, rename all of the secondary flash markers to "secondary trigger flare1".

Some sounds, like the ones that aren't syncing, have to be set up in the animation graph. There is a list of sound references in the animations tag. At the bottom, with the master list of animations, you can set the keyframe that the sound plays on. This is also where you set stuff like melee timing.

Edit: Well, the release of these tags has just about proved my work today a big waste of time :P
I will, however, continue to make dual wields, using this animation graph (along with some rifle animations) as a proof of concept. It was a pleasure working with you on this.
Edited by SlappyThePirate on Jan 26, 2011 at 09:36 PM

nope. used the same animations, and same model heirarchy. all I had to do to get them visible was change bone24's name. the only max file I touched was the model one for the materials which I included in the link above

How did you export the model with multiple frames?
Edit: Oh I see what you did there. The parent node to the left gun is the right gun.
Edited by SlappyThePirate on Jan 26, 2011 at 09:38 PM

Wow you're work is definately impressive considering the short time you all worked on this since I posted the concept, thanks alot to both of you,

The third person view shows only one but that would be a good deception, surprise two shots fired instead of one on closeup opponents

Thanks again
Edited by darknesssamurai on Jan 26, 2011 at 09:51 PM

__unnamed is the model for both guns after I reimported the gbx model to fix the materials. it's rigged to their respective nodes via the skin modifier

e: crap. late reply



yeah no problem, just took me sitting down for a few hours. figured I'd give it a shot since no one has tried this style of dual wielding to my knowledge. doesn't work like it does in the other game, but it works and should be glitchless if done properly

Yep, that's the way we do it. Or, instead of skin, you can have two geometries, link them one to the first frame, one to the second, and export with the JMS exporter... it does that rig for you. In the gbxmodel you get the same result.

yeah whenever I rig anything mechanical I use seperate objects and just link them to the bones, the skin modifier's all the importer

e: if you know how to fix the overcharge light, I just might add an overcharge jitter, then after any minor tweaks we might want to make I'd say this would be just about acceptable for a collaborative release on the main site

e2: yeah, the overcharge light is an engine bug (big suprise). picking up invis and charging causes both nodes to light up like they should. I'm going to assume there's no way to fix this without getting hacky and resorting to work-arounds

Fixed the effects tag for the charging light, both light charge together without error. HaloIsAHorribleGane and SlappythePirate I will send them to you so u can determine their release since its your work,
Edited by darknesssamurai on Jan 26, 2011 at 11:09 PM

sweet. go for it. I'd say upload it to media fire and post a link here for archival purposes. you'll get props
Edited by HaloIsAHorribleGane on Jan 26, 2011 at 11:09 PM

Exactly how did you do that? I've been trying for weeks to figure out a way to make a couple of duel wielded weapon animations for some of the guns I'm working on. I've been able to set-up everything except animating the second gun to animate with it's corresponding arm.(I'm not exactly new to animating, but I haven't had much experience setting up new animation rigs)

for dual wield animations, the heirarchy of the gun does NOT have to be the same as the model exported to jms. therefore, feel free to parent each weapon frame to it's respective hand. it will move with the hand appropriately when you do that. you don't have to use link constraints for simple weapons such as plasma pistols. on bigger weapons though it's probably a good idea.

Charges fixed and thanks for your sweat and energy!

Would you consider (maybe at another point in time since it took you a few hours to make this) making a double plasma pistols in third person fp? I can still help with effects if its undertaken.

Also I thought about the concept based on work with dual plasma rifles for elites which I completed today. I could use some aid in creating a dual first person fp, since this has 3p duals.

These two plasma type dual wields as finished weapons would be a good submission. Any takers? The Dual pistols need dual third-p and the Dual Rifles need dual f-p






Edited by darknesssamurai on Jan 27, 2011 at 12:45 AM