First Person View Discussion!

Somebody wanna make a first person view?! Read this!:

For us to make a first person view, we need each other's help. So I'm starting a thread right here right now: I've created a basic fpv (first person view), which I will improve during the next few days. I'll keep a journal on my progress and. I'll release a newer fpv a few times. Ofcourse I'll ask for help when I get stuck.

The two Attachments contain an fpv editable by all editors but with some custom text and an fpv that is only editable by weu (WE-Unlimited).

Here's a nice screenie:





Things I'm still working on (slowly):
- To make the angle of the camera change when walking up mountains, this is pretty hard.
- Perfected keyboard movement: I still think it could be better..

Updates:
Version 0.1 of fpv features:
- Camera Z axis stays the same when the unit walks over higher terrain
- Flawless rotating and moving of the camera.
- Some Kb control, the left and right arrows allow the hero to turn around while standing still.
- Order through mouseclicks.
- Order bug when standing against a cliff.

New version is out! fpv 0.2, it features:
- absence of clipping problems.
- enabled forward movement through up key.

Latest version of fpv!, version 0.4, features:
- Camera now also works on terrain with different heights! I finally did it! shit on all those fps mod guys!:ggani:.
- Kb movement is perfected, you can now easily walk using all of the keys, key combinations are also enabled.
- 12player support, will probably cause increased lag though;)
- A big memory leak issue which causes lotsa lag after a small while. (will get fixed in next version)

New fpv! Version 0.5, features:
- Some small adjustements that should -/ decrease leaking.
- The height system was completely flawed. It has been redone and works perfectly now.

Just check it out! Remy.

not really much

Are you saying everybody here knows how to build a FP view?
And I find the FPS mod not customizable enough, it works different from how I would like it too. I also checked out a bit of the code and I just do not agree with some of their methods, especially on how to calculate unit height. Read the creators's post, even he think it's done bad. It is done geomatricaly while there is a much easier way (formulae):

I define tiles as the points where 4corners of the medium editor grid connect. Units are always surrounded by 4tiles, a 'square' so to speak. If you divide this 'square' into 2 triangles you can use a formulae to define unit height, the 'square' is devided by a diagonal line that goes from the upperleft tile to the lowerright tile. This is the formulae with which you can define a unit's height:

Unitheight = Za+(X/128)x(Zb-Za)+(Y/128)x(Zc-Za)

The variable definitions can be partially found in the image of a 'square' I attached, the rest is here:
Za = height of tile A, Zb = height of tile B, and so on...
X = Xaxis of the unit within the tile. So if a unit's real Xaxis is 300 then his X will be 44 because an Xaxis of 300means the unit is standing in tile 3: 300/128 rounded down = 3. And 300-(128x2: there are 2 tiles coming before tile 3) = 44.
Y = some as with the X...

Pjew, hope y'all understood;)

Now this looks all nice and fine and stuff but the problem is that you need the heights of the tiles. They should be somewhere in the map file but I don't know where. Does anyone know how I can get my hands on those height valuas? It doesn't matter if they are stored in hex valuas: I've got a hex-decimal converter function.

Next post = next story of mine;), Remy.

Unfortunatly, you may have to import a height map, like the FPS mod. I cant think of another way.

I was a member of the FPS mod for a while and the only way we did the hieght was by an imported height map. Thats why our height calculations look so strange. Anyway I'll check out your map and reply back.

As far as a FPS goes I don't think you can have a very good one without WASD movements and mouselooking. You can try, hell I made a much better one than what you have in ROC but it still sucked because there was no mouse look. I had WASD movements though using a permenatly selected unit that could build units with A,S,D,W hotkeys. I even had jumping, sniping, a perfect firing system. But alas without mouselook it wasn't worth playing. I got so frustrated with it that I deleted the whole map in hopes that TFT would allow for mouse movement detection, all I got was arrow buttons. The FPS mod used that third party, courtesy of StonedStupid and my fantasy of a good FPS for Warcraft lived on. But then too many complications arose with firing such as no means to detect true deminions of doodads, of cliffs, or even units. You could fire right between the legs and still hit the unit. I was in charge of the firing formulas and when no answers came I droppped out. So I suggest you drop the idea of FPS mod, the Warcraft system is just designed to handle it.

FPS mod is about the best you can get the wc3 engine to run. There aren't really any ways save separating the models into different segments so that the models are not just one big cube but many big cubes with spaces in between.
However, if you've tried, like me, to work with FPS mod for a few weeks, you'll realise that it actually has a lot of room to do stuff and once you get the hang of it you'll realise it's not too hard to mod, save for the few clipping errors and movement bugs (which can be minimised). You should give it a try.
To top it off I don't know a single bit of Jass. Think of what you can do with jass knowledge. You just don't try hard enough.

I just finished a little less basic version of a FPV. Check out the file attached in the first post for the newest version. The new version has NO clipping issues at all and it has the Up Kb button enabled to move forward.

Import a height map? Yes, that's what I ment, find the height of the tiles somewhere inside the mapfile, but where can I find it and how can I extract it? I need this before I can work further on the FPV!

Edited because: : I found out that the terrain height valuas are stored in war3map.w3e which is inside the .w3x file (the map). You can open it with a hex editor but I don't know where the terrain heights are stored within the hex file, I did see some changes at points when comparing 2 maps that were the same except for the terrain height..

Does anyone know how to disable the camera view box in the minimap?
It looks kind of bad because it changes all the time. I've tried adding a custom minimap image but the dumb box stays where it is.

I still need to able usage of the Left/Right and the Up Key at the same time. Does anyone have ideas on how to do this? What I did was check whether both keys were check every 0.01 sec and then order the unit to move forward towards his own facing plus a little extra when left was pressed and minus a little extra when right was pressed. The problem with this is that the unit cannot execute the order in 0.01 sec and therefor keeps getting the same order over and over every 0.01 while not being able to start execute any of them/staying at the same place.

Regards,
Remy.

I've made a nice screenie for you guys to look at:

Oke sorry for all the doubleposting but I need to do this because of the attachments. I've attached a version of my newest FPV without any custom text in it, it does require WEUnlimited though.

Regards,
Remy.

eeep. I thought it was something new... I would like to direct your attention to this thread:
http://www.wc3campaigns.com/forums/s...threadid=27801
It's basically this thing just that it's in first person view. It also allows for quite flawless keyboard movement.
Also, go to the FPS Mod release thread and read the documentation and somewhere there they'll say how they get the height map.

Yessss. I finally got the height thing working! The camera now moves along with the unit over mountains. This is a real breakthrough for me:ggani:, I've been working on this for hours:bgrun:.

The maps does have uber memory-leak now so it only runs smooth for a little while ('boute half a minute with my 512mb ram). I'm going to have to wait for someone to fix the memory-leak cause I can't find it myself, I'm just experiencing it's there:(.
If anyone could help me with the memory leak I would be reaaally greatfull:ggani:.

Thanks, Remy.

New version very basic beginnings of AoA modification, turning + movement

Zip (no maps supported for uploading yet :< ) below