search for Third-Person-View mutator or mod

[papercoffee]

Referring to this Post: http://www.ut99.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=2589

Is there somewhere a useful TPV mutator or mod?
I mean not this implemented one where you get the camera right behind your Avatar... without any cross-hair. I search for a real one.

[UnrealGGecko]

I sure wish for one. It might also be nice if the angle of the view would be better (like closer and higher, above the right (or left) shoulder. That would automatically fix the sniper rifle zooming into your a$$.

[Ðàrk-_¦_-Ñìght.:]

There's no real convenient way to make a mutator to serve this function.

To get a real nice third person you would have to make a playerpawn class that has the CalcBehindView function overwritten.

Otherwise you'll have to spawn, track and constantly move an actor CLIENTSIDE just to serve as the proper third person view point.

[papercoffee]

Hm... I found this.
http://www.moddb.com/mods/smashdroids/images
it looks ugly, but they managed to implement a third-person-view.

[EvilGrins]

Smashdroids is interesting. Found it years ago, tried to extract the droids out of it as monsters to use but that didn't go so well.

[Ðàrk-_¦_-Ñìght.:]

It's because they used their own PlayerPawn superclass that has a proper CalcBehindView function. Just like I said in my reply, there is NO easy way to do this outside of modifying the PlayerPawn directly.

Another problem with making a proper third person view in Unreal (though I had since long solved this) is having the crosshair actually accurate to where you are aiming.

The way I fixed that problem was to constantly trace and position the crosshair infront of whatever your character is looking at straight ahead. This works perfectly in every situation I tested it in and does not cause much confusion when using my fixed third person view I made for my space marine playerpawn I did for Unreal 1.

[papercoffee]

It's because they used their own PlayerPawn superclass that has a proper CalcBehindView function. Just like I said in my reply, there is NO easy way to do this outside of modifying the PlayerPawn directly.

That's what I'd thought ...damn!

So ...to make it clear. There is no such mutator or mod for default UT without making subclasses of all playable models?!

[Ðàrk-_¦_-Ñìght.:]

Nope, the only way to make a mutator out of this would be a replication nightmare.

The local clients would need to beable to spawn and dynamically reposition an invisible actor and when bBehindView 1 is detected it simply makes the client ViewClass this actor instead of letting CalcBehindView work. The biggest problem here is bBehindView needs to be set to 0 while viewing this actor, so there's no real good way to determine if the player still want's to be in third person anything short of "ViewSelf".

[papercoffee]

Ok, thank you for your explanation.

[Ðàrk-_¦_-Ñìght.:]

No problem. In theory this might be really doable if not extremely hacky under UT99, because of the RegisterHUDMutator function and mutators getting PostRender calls will allow my trace crosshair code to work just fine in a situation like this. And given UT99's focus on clientside execution it might not be that hard to pull this off... I'll experiment a bit on this and I'll let you know what I come up with eventually.

[Dr.Flay]

Maybe look at how the vehicle-mods move your view-point around.

[papercoffee]

Maybe look at how the vehicle-mods move your view-point around.

I think those vehicles are subclassed player models ...

[Feralidragon]

Maybe look at how the vehicle-mods move your view-point around.

I think those vehicles are subclassed player models ...

The vehicles I made certainly do not (although the system is based off .:..:'s vehicles system, but I improved it in the offline side a lot, specially on the camera on the aiming abilities as well as zoom, and even distance from the vehicle).

Just looked at this topic, and tbh I don't see any major problems in doing 3rd person. There are some few things that need some "hack-ish" ways to work, but nothing in the realm of the unfeasible.
- Basically, you need an actor to be your view reference
- This actor will be updated, and it will dictate how it zooms, how far it's from the player, etc
- This actor may actually adjust/dictate the player viewrotation so the weapon aim matches what you're seeing
- ???
- Profit!

Subclassing a player would make it easier to do, but considering the amount of mods that subclass the player already, if you want compatibility you certainly don't want to do so.

[papercoffee]

How exactly can I do something like this?

[Feralidragon]

How exactly can I do something like this?

Well... since there seems to be nothing done like this that I know of (something really aimed for true 3rd person gameplay), you (or someone else) would have to script it, there's no other way that at least I know of.