Improving Moving/Shooting 3rd Person Animations?

[Gnalvl]

I'm just curious if anyone's tried this...

As everyone knows, Doom 1 through Quake 2 feature "surf-shooting" animations, where player animations adopt a standing stand even when shooting on the run.

Hypothetically speaking, it seems like the easiest fix would be to have no specific 3rd person "shooting animation" at all. Instead, all the player sprite frames would be changed to hold the gun pointing forward, as if the player is always about to shoot. Then when the player actually is shooting, the game would just spawn a muzzle flash and firing sound in DECORATE, while the player sprite continues to use its normal running animation uninterrupted.

Has anyone tried this before, or is it even possible? IMO this is the jankiest and most immersion-breaking aspect of OG Doom in spite of all the great progress that source ports and mods have made in many other areas.

[Nash]

It would require some kind of skeletal model system where you can animate each limb separately. Or a ghetto solution would be Quake 3's tag system - 2 separate actors for upper and lower body.

[Jaxxoon R]

The annoying thing about that is there doesn't seem to be a way to prevent the player from seeing the actors other than the main playerpawn from the first-person view.

[Nash]

The annoying thing about that is there doesn't seem to be a way to prevent the player from seeing the actors other than the main playerpawn from the first-person view.

You can filter what the player sees by checking that that the current camera view is the consoleplayer's; and you can also retrieve the chasecam status through the player.cheats flags, but the problem with this approach is that it's not portal-friendly.

(Example: give yourself the Hexen boots of speed and notice how you cannot see the speed trails when you are in first person view, but they are visible in the chasecam view. But when you stand in front of the mirror, the same visibility rules are produced; you would expect the trails to be visible all the time in the mirror projection)

[Matt]

I really like the OP idea.

I think the best for that would be to have the muzzleflash actor be visible to the player and have no muzzleflash HUD sprite. (The real ideal of having the player see the same weapon as everyone else is, of course, impossible for Doom)

[NeuralStunner]

The annoying thing about that is there doesn't seem to be a way to prevent the player from seeing the actors other than the main playerpawn from the first-person view.

A system kind of already exists for this, projectiles are not visible within speed units of the firer's camera. (In simplest terms.) In essence, this prevents massive rockets and such from clogging the view momentarily (and slightly improves the illusion of it coming from the gun.)

There's gross hack potential there, of course, but ZScript should be able to do better.

[Zanieon]

Has anyone tried this before, or is it even possible?

Yes i have tried it in Hunter's Moon and it works for most cases and as it seems nobody here ever remember it for being the unique mod which does it for now, this was done when ZScript wasn't a thing yet, and with it should be even less complicated to do.