No worries It wasn't meant in your direction, I'm still very thankful that you want to help me. I just meant that I never plan releases, so after I worked on it for some hours, it might very will happen that I get impatient and just upload something.

That demo video is really, really impressive!
I suppose asking for animated overlays is a little too much to ask, right?

(Also, will the first release have premade associations for vanilla helms?)

Thanks.
Animated overlays are not planned. Some blinking lights wouldn't be the problem, but I suppose you mean something more sophisticated like complete/partial HUD integration? That would require a lot of effort. For now, the fact that the overlay moves when you turn your head is as good as it gets


I hope so, I didn't really try if that works yet Normally, it should only be a matter of dragging items into lists, so I just say yes. The general idea was to have pre-selections for as many items as possible (=the vanilla ones) with the ability to modify them or add new ones.

I was thinking more breathing effects - many of the helmet overlays from the STALKER mod had that condensation effect you get when you breathe on glass animating (Faster and slower depending on how much stamina you had, even, iirc!), though custom HUDs er helmet would be fantastic too


Oh goodie - I don't particularly mind adding them manually, but it's always frustrating to hear "Your thing doesn't work!!!!" from people who haven't read the readme

Oh ok, a condensation effect shouldn't be difficult, I will try to add that.

It'd be cool if the winterized PA in the Operation Anchorage simulation had some frost.

I think the ones included in the download are a little too intrusive. What your screen really is showing is the characters eyesight, so the goggles seem a little high and restrict the view far too much. But I do want to have the feeling of wearing a big helmet still. Perhaps have something a bit more conservative? Cutting off the corners and lower center (nose) might be a good a balance between view restriction and visual pleasure.

Also I noticed you had a breathing sound for the power helmet, might I suggest you make this an option through the menu? Both for people who don't like it and those who have a respirator that doesn't count as power armour. A nicer sound would be good too there's just something odd about that one.

On another note I might be able to try make some textures for this if I could get some help starting, I don't know much about making HUDs.

EDIT: Another idea, it might look nicer if the black was textured to look more like the inside of the helmet, just an idea. Also, would it be possible to add cracking to the visor as an addition to blood splatter? That'd be pretty neat.

The one included in the download (v0.1) can be considered obsolete now. How about the new one seen in the video or in newer screenshots (including those of mouse0270), are they better?


It's already optional as you can see in the video, I selected it in the sound effects menu (pretty much everything is optional). As for the gas mask breathing sound, you dont want to know what my sound source was (hint, go to youtube and search for "gas mask breathing" ).


Those are pretty much normal .dds textures. You can check out the ones that come with the download. They are automatically scaled to the user resolution, so you dont have to use NxN but something with a more suitable aspect ratio.
If you wanted, you could create overlays for cracks, blood etc, these then will get blended in on top (or behind) the overlay layer.


It would be possible, if there are textures (I said it many times, unfortunately, I'm not good at creating them ). For example I had a first try at creating a condensate effect which slowly gets blended in when running that ended up looking more like rain: http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/8498/screenshot29z.jpg.

How do I get to the sound effects then? OR is that still the upcoming version? Yes the ones by mouse look much more like what I was aiming for. I'm just going to make one for my own by simply scaling the original POV1.

I would be able to do a few cracks etc. What did you have in mind? Should I just send you them alone or should I add them onto the default POVs? And how do you plan on implementing the cracks? It'd be kind of cool to see the cracks reflect the helmets condition but maybe that's too much.

That condensation effect isn't too bad, I could give that a shot for you too if you'd like.

It's only in the upcoming version. The same goes for the bigger visor. But it's going along well so I might release that one soon.


Create them independently from the default POV textures so they can be applied to any of them. Implementation-wise, there are many possibilties. I can blend them in slowly, so there's another image is added to the HUD, with alpha=0. Then a script peridically polls health/helmet condition/etc and sets the alpha value accordingly. Or I could show them immediately, and/or have multiple crack textures for worsening conditions. So basically: Images (fullscreen or any other size) are added, script controlls their visibility, position, alpha, etc.


Yep, do that please!

(I'm off to bed now, good night)

Ok I'll give that a shot a see what I can do.

This is really coming along nicely!
Regarding the sound effects, is it possible to have the breath/heart-rate vary with exertion? E.g. when you run the breathing rate speeds up?
Also is it possible to make is so that the ambient noise drops when you don the helmet? Wearing a helmet drastically reduces external noise.

Breathing already works that way (frequency increases when running, decreases when walkin/standing). I can add a heartbeat effect, too. But noise reduction, I don't think that's possible. I don't know how exactly different sound effects stack, so maybe it would be worth a try looping an empty sound on top of the rest to see if this has an effect, but other than that I can't think of a way.

Will that work with the sprint mod? iirc, it changes the max running speed game variable rather than anything fancy in script (Though it does have it's own breathing effect, which could be disabled with a nice blank sound).
Seeing that condensation effect brought back great memories of Metroid Prime, too - when it was raining and you looked up, you'd get droplets appear on your visor, which looked pretty awesome. Actually, that whole game did the visor thing really well, effects from everything to walking underwater, to killing enemies a little too close, to even firing your weapon in the dark (You'd get a reflection of your own face. Now THAT would be a nice feature ). I'm just talking about one of my favourite games ever, though - I have enough of a grasp of what we can and can't do with the engine (or just how much work stuff would take) that I'd never suggest any of it seriously. (Apart from the raindrop thing, because that'd be awesome)

The condensation effect looks very cool. Schlanger, I think you underestimate your PS skill!
However, I find it difficult to imagine that any armor would make it out of the testing phase if it had such a problem with condenation.
Even old motorcycle helmets dont have such issues. I would suggest it might be a great effect for rain though.

Similarly, I love the idea of cracks, but I can imagine that hits to the helmet will not be rare, so I am guessing that cracked visors will be pretty common. The question is how would you get rid of the crack? I am thinking that replacing the vision blocks would not be a field operation.
I imagine that walking around staring at cracks would get tiresome pretty soon, too.

One more question, Schlanger. Can you build in Night vision ability? Those modules on the helm look very much like active IR spotlights.

Ok I've found some crack effects from CGTextures they look pretty good. Later I'll try to put them onto a mask to see what they look like in game. I've got a base condensation effect, I'm going to make a separate dds for the droplets so they're optional and I also made a condensation frost effect for the heck of it. I'm going to try do some scratches, blood splatter, and environment splatter (Water, Dirt, Rad Goo. Not sure you'll use them but just in case.) I will give you a heads up, I don't know how to do animated textures, otherwise I would try make some animated HUD type elements (Not actually HUD but just for looks).

Whenever I get some of that done I'll get some screens up.

Some cool ideas there! I have thought about sprint mod compatibility with the sprint mod (since I'm using it myself) but this will be something I'll have to look into later.
Rain droplets when looking up are a great idea, there are IsRaining and IsSnowing functions, so really easy to implement. To animate effects on the visor I would simply take 2 tiled fullscreen images, with one totally above the visiable are and one covering it. Then, both are moved downwards and once the bottom one is off screen its moved to the top, so the process repeats.
Also the thing with blood when somebody dies close to you is totally possible and I have also thought about that before, so all ideas have been noted



I'm learning And for those kind of effects there are some nice tutorials out there. Doesnt make me an artist though


Yep thats true, so I just make it really minimal?


Well, I say best not to make it too complicated? I plan to just couple it to the helmets condition (i.e. ingame repair). The fact that you can repair stuff anywhere in the field doesnt just apply to helmets, so changing this would be a job for another mod. (For example: Generally disabling the repair button and hotkey in the menu and only enabling it when approaching a workbench)


Thats planned, so is some kind of heat vision effect, but since this is a little bit more complicated than just adding the respective imagespace modifier (which is already possible => green tint + brightness).
The general idea is that you can enable vision modes for a helmet in the features menu, and then toggle modes by pressing a hotkey. But I'll have to think about this some more, Im not sure yet where it fits in best.

Edit:


Thats great! Having more art than ideas is better than the other way around As i wrote earlier, the only way to animate something would be somewhat "fake" animation by moving/scaling/blending static images. This definitely shouldnt be overdone, though I did not notice any performance problems yet, but also i didnt test for heavy combat.

Here's one that I came up for Army of Two Mask, but it might also look good for the Overseer Helmet and Goggles. I'm going to start making those scratches etc later and then make a few test screens for you.

http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/3658/screenshot18wm.png

Ok I've made a quick test screen showing some of the effects, the alpha in the screen could use some tweaking but it was really just meant for a quick demo. There's a couple holes and scratches, a dirt stain, some blood and some radioactive goop. I'll package up the files add post a link shorty.

http://img514.imageshack.us/img514/7519/screenshot19v.jpg

Here's the file.

http://uploading.com/files/1fam448b/POVResources.rar/

Are such things persistent? Having a chance for a bullet hole to appear on a headshot and not go away would be very cool.

Like I said it was only a test he's going to be doing stuff like that.

Thanks a lot, Uglulyx. It might probably take a while until you see them in action though (except for the cracks) because environmental effects aren't on top of the priority list yet.


Nope, they're not. They could be persisent for every type of helmet, but even that would be a pain. The way I imagined it was simply to display more and more cracks/stains etc as the item condition decreases, maybe with a little degree of randomization but even that's hard.

What I will do next are selectable vision modes (night vision, heat vision, EM vision?) to add some features instead of just penalites all the time These effects are supposed to look somewhat plausible and I don't really know much about the technical background, so while I'm creating the scripts maybe someone can give me a few hints. For night vision there are examples, but how are heat vision or some kind of EM vision supposed to look like, and does such a thing even make sense? The idea was that heat vision detects creatures, while the other one detects robots and maybe energy weapons if that's possible.

No problem I just needed something to keep me busy.

There are two main ways of displaying heat/thermal vision. One uses a colored or monochrome image where hotter objects display in brighter colors. The other way, which is common in military usage is to display a monochrome reversed heat signature where hotter things are shown darker. This has the advantage in low light environements that the background terrain looks clearer.
Some examples of both of these are shown here http://www.militaryinfrared.com/TIG_Thermal_Infrared_Goggle_System.html

Either of these would be very cool, but is there some way to determine object temperature in the game?

Speaking of benefits. Why not add an bonus for using POV? For instance using POV, headshots on the player do less damage, or maybe even none at all. Just an idea.