so i'm working on the attack animations for CAVEMAN.
63 weapons times two views (1st and 3rd person) times 2 sexes( male and female) = 252 animations total.
i'm finding that for each weapon i must set the rotation and translation of the weapon relative to the player's hand to place the weapon in the hand correctly. these are constant values which, once determined, will never change.
i've created a "mesh / model manipulator" which i can "hook up" to any mesh or model drawn with one line of code, and edit its transform in real time in the game. i use it to position the weapon in the player's hand correctly, then write down the rotations and translations, and then go back and hard code the numbers into the drawing routines.
i've considered "soft coding" the values, but it seems like a lot of work and sort of a lazy way to get around waiting for a 55 second link time for each code change.
the "mesh / model manipulator" can currently handle 10 meshes or models at once. a typical animation only has 1-3 meshes or models that need to be manipulated. so i can "hook up" the manipulator to the animations for multiple weapons, recompile once, then run the game and adjust all those weapons and get my numbers, then code in all the values and recompile once again. short of making making the "mesh / model manipulator" handle more meshes / models at once (such as 100 at once), i'm not sure what else i can do.
how is this sort of thing usually handled?
i'm taking a weapon, rotating and translating it relative to the player's hand, applying an animation rotation / translation, then calling a routine that applies the hand's transform and draws.
for 3rd person animations, i use the limb based modeling and animation system in the game. i have a routine that draws a weapon at the player's hand, based on the current frame of animation for the model of the player. but i'll still need to adjust the position and rotation of the weapon to fit correctly in the hand. so far, i've only done 3 of the 3rd person attack animations.