This is a discussion on some modding things, not a mod I'm releasing. (I'm not about to break my own rules. )

You know how soldiers with vests have a vest model?

I tinkered with that, and got this:
Soldier has a model for an AT launcher on his back when he has one in his inventory!
(Before picking up)
http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/468 ... 9BB07FCCA/

(After picking up)
http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/468 ... E086FBEBD/


Note, model is WIP. Unfortunately I can't just copy-pasta the AT launcher onto his back.

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now that looks great! even thought its WIP

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co-owner of NEWA

Yeah, there's a lot of things one can do with this. From making MG belts show on a soldier when carrying an MG, to having a soldier take on a special appearance. Like, making some scifi mod and giving someone a power-armor suit if they have a special armor, or so.

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great job on the models and how did you get the camera angle like that?

That's the debugmode camera. On steam's launch paramaters for RWR (or on a shortcut for the game) you put "debugmode" without quotes, and then hit one of the FX buttons. I think it's F4, but it may be a different one. It lets you move the camera around independent of your soldier, and put it at any angle and height.

important: don't forget to remove the launch parameter if you want to join a multiplayer server, else you won't be able to connect.

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Wouldn't this require you to recreate a player model with each item and then link the model to a config file to determine which model to load?

Or is there an easy way where we can load the item onto the player's back the same way they load a weapon into their hand?

I'd really like to see more of this or a way to make more dynamic characters.

The rendering method can't handle the dynamic body part assembling that well; it's already struggling with having to render those ~20 on screen animated soldiers and their 20 weapons and the 40 items lying on ground, each of them needing ~4 passes because of outline rendering, "ghost" rendering behind structures, the actual appearance and shadows. Using the same system to draw several animated character models (to create models from parts) per soldier would be leading to a performance disaster I believe.

Technically there would be other ways to make that happen without losing performance, but the development effort would be substantial. Maybe it'll happen in the next game based on work made for RWR in a few years.

The available way to achieve the same result is to pre-create the models with loadout specific appearances, like you were anticipating, and use the config to link the model between the loadout. To avoid much of manual work if different base models are wanted, someone might be able to create a piece of script that would be able to merge voxel data from several sources into one, to make it possible for the asset creator to work per body part basis.

Would it be possible to avoid shadow rendering on certain things?

Could you still have the items/gear on the soldier but exclude it from rendering shadows?

Sure, but it wouldn't help enough. Every rendering batch at this point is too much when the count is high to begin with, especially as the multiplier per added visible element is between 20x1 to 20x4 assuming worst case of 20 visible soldiers and the extra passes.

Just precreate them on the soldier model and there's minimal to no performance hit as the batch count won't change.

It's a shame the models require a lot of memory.

I think recreating each model individually is a bit of a grind, however it would be well worth it. I'd be willing to add some simple edits to the player models if some one else did the link to each weapon. I quite like the level of detail you get in-game with so few voxels.