Models (be that MD2/MD3/Unreal format or Voxels) do pretty much what is required here and, because they are designed for a true 3D view, would probably do it better too.
Not that I think this feature is viable, but that's actually one of the things that probably could be solved reasonably easily. There is already something similar in principle to what I'm thinking about in the player sprites. PLAY* are the regular player sprites but PLYC* is used for crouching. The engine knows to use PLYC when the player is crouched and there has to be a PLYC sprite for every equivalent PLAY sprite. A character definition in ZScript could be given additional properties to specify which sprite set to use when the actor is seen from upper/lower angles. Of course, it would get messy for actors that use a variety of different sprite names in different states.Arctangent wrote:
- Actor sprites require a very specific naming scheme, which isn't expandable at all. Like, how would you add a top view of BAL1A0? BOSSE3? POSSF2F8? That's already up to eight characters, the max amount in the .wad format. Even if we make this feature .pk3-only, though, how would we add information for vertical viewing angle without confusing the parser?