Third Person Action Gamey Goodness

Ery' one and their mum' hassa blog thingy, so I'll throw a quick one up I guess.

So I been lounging around GG for a while, and occasionally I even do things. I've had a TGE Licencse for... I dunno how long, ever since they gave it to me. I only even tried compiling it half a year or so ago using TBE. Started to mess with it a little, worked on an official project for a bit before that got dull, and I sort of fell out of practice.

Then after 1.4 comes out I eeeeventually learned to get the engine compiled with VSE and after too long ported all my old work from 1.3 to 1.4 . And after another month or two of working on and off with various bits, I've got lots of a nifty core for a third person multiplayer action game setup. I've been working off games like Gunz: The Duel and Unreal Championship 2 as inspirations. Lots yet to go, but I'm happy with the relative ease I've been able to get so much working. Look at the shiny list of things!

* Two key dual wield system (one key for each weapon)
* Core weapon classes for guns and melee (written to make subclassing new weapons easy)
* Single wield bonus options (for example, second hand key gives acc+zoom bonus to first hand gun)
* Dynamic fire spread/reduction system with adjustable ranges/rates/cooltimes
* Support for using raycasts with projectile effects (basically, script created explosions with decals)
* FULLY working clip based ammo with reload mechanisms
* Melee framework for fast, simple, arcadey attacking and blocking
* Blocking and reflecting bullets with swords... kay not really much a code feature, but it's neat =P
* Simplified hit location checking
* Tighter, more responsive player control
* Player acrobatics (air movement, air dashing, wall jumping, wall running)
* Conditional player torso twisting
* Basic third person crosshair

And probably other stuff I'm forgetting. But a couple points from all this. Even though TGE was originally used for the floaty bouncy terrain based combat of Tribes, it's not that hard to get it work like a more like other FPS engines ala' Unreal or HalfLife. Secondly I've done a vast majority of the coding in Torque Script (though some parts like the wall running could stand to be ported to C++ eventually). A lot've people seem to think TGE can't do tighter action intensive shooters, but so far it's been able to handle everything I've tried quite well.

Yes, I'm a screenshot whore too, so here's horrible picture things.