by Spike » Sun Jun 29, 2014 4:35 am
well, I've done most of the menuqc part at least...
a csqc hud isn't exactly hard, although as you'll want to customise that to match your mod anyway, I'm not entirely sure what a framework can actually provide.
csqc shotgun/nails/rockets are part of what csqc was originally envisaged as doing, the issue however is that for this framework to be generally usable, it needs to contain *only* csqc such that it can be dropped in. It can use tutorials to add ssqc stuff, but that will still restrict the extent of the changes possible there.
skeletal animations tends to require some worthwhile skeletal models. none that I've seen really provide the animations that are required for a decent example of it (or even to test the framework code properly). or maybe I'm just making excuses. The previous point is especially painful here - the ssqc needs to be heavily modified for any of this stuff to be even remotely clean.
with builtins like frameforname and frameduration, once you have one weapon animation implement, you presumably have them all.
any sort of ragdoll code will require configuring the various bodies+joints of the doll. there's simply no way around that. doing it via entities was never a practical idea, I agree, and yes, a nightmare. With FTE you can actually enable ragdoll by writing a .doll file (text format... sorry) and setting the ssqc's entity's frame to |= 32768;
If you're refering to the code that xavior wrote for you, then yes, that was an absolutely insane way to do it - but what other choice did you have at the time? I think that was what gave me the motivation to bother testing fte's csqc ode support properly, and certainly helped push me towards doing the 32768 thing too...
Anyway, the jist of all this is that the issue with frameworks depends upon the expectations of the people using them. Most people around here seem to me to want to be able to continue using their existing ssqc code (often people already feel they have a heavy investment in it, and don't want to feel like they're starting from scratch). The people joining the community that I've spoken to seem to want something small they can expand from, and have unfortunatly heard horror storys about csqc having no docs etc, and tend to want to focus on the bare minimum - ssqc. The remaining few mods are so different from quake that a quake-like framework simply won't do much for them (and yes, I regret that there are not more resources to help these guys, 'luckily' they're the ones that will need to learn it all for themselves anyway - or at least one of their programmers will), as a result they're hard to support - all we can really do is provide a few good examples... And that requires stuff.
For comparison, Unreal Tournament (I've not seriously looked at any more recent version, but I assume they're the same) supported mutators - multiple sets of gamecode all running in a single VM. As such, things written for that engine _NEED_ common viable frameworks in order to avoid conflicts/hacks/bugs. Quake never supported that, it is not traditionally object oriented, there just isn't the same motivation for such colaboration. Which is a shame.
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