Hello everyone,

Some mini progress on my game! Ive added a new "Touching Automatic Cover" similar to Gears of War/Killswitch. If you push towards a surface, you will lean on the surface for cover. This system is based on the camera angle and player movement direction, so if the camera isnt facing a wall, but you lean towards that wall, you will not stick toward the wall.

While you are leaning on a wall, you can strafe left and right, and if the left or right of the character is open, the camera will move to see around corners like metal gear solid.

Also, you do not need to explicitly press a "cover" button that snaps you into the cover state. All you need to do is use your WASD and move towards a surface you want to lean on. Once you move away from the surface, you will automatically stop leaning on the surface.

Currently only full body cover is implemented, and the character will not crouch down for lower cover yet. It should be pretty easy to put in however.

Take a look at the below video and let me know what you think.

All models, animation, code are WIP:

[video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isfx6fthddg[/video]

As always I'm very impressed with your work. All the debugging info bewilders me. The animation transitions and mixing look great. And the cover-system seems to work great.

Looking forward to more!

Jibb

I need to agree with Jibb, great as always. Will there be a playable demo?

Just great cover system
A8 should have one example one day on it's sample package !

With all your previous work, you have a solid gaemplay framework
now ! what is your next step ? graphics, more gameplay ?

nice ? is the cover model specific though ? i was thinking about doing automatic cover for scion but i fathomed that a cover system would inevitably slow the gameplay down too much as players make use of it so i retracted the idea, plus gears of war already has the multiplayer cover based tps genre covered, what do you think ?

cover systems indeed slow the gameplay down a bit, but with clever level design it can make game more open to be able to apply different attack strategies.

Also never look at genres like "That AAA game already covered this genre, so skip that.", because AAA titles cover a lot of gameplay elements ^^

yes thats true however, once someone hears cover and tps, i assume everyone think gears of war, surely they cover alot of elements but they have elements that are key to them, gears = cover + gore .

i think i'll stick to the decision of keeping cover out of the game though, in my mind, i can already picture a few maps that would have reduced pacing if it were used

i like this auto system though, definitely better than button based cover

It looks really good. I like automatic cover systems, though without thinking about gameplay. I just like the idea of coding one and I like having characters interact with their environment.

So do you mind sharing more about how you achieved what you show in the video?
You said it's based on camera angle and character, but how do you do it? Where do you trace? What do you do with the results of the traces? How do you decide whether or not the wall has ended? And how can the player shoot around the corner?
Sorry, lots of questions, but it'd be great if you had the time to answer a few

I don't think it can really break gameplay.
And it can bring on lot more strategy , like having to use another way to reach someone using cover. Or the use of grenades also !

I played Uncharted 2 and it was great just great and fun with the cover system, and the gameplay was really fast and furious.
You can't hide a lot when people have seen you or your gun fire

Even better make deeper gameplay :
with destroyable cover objects, less or more destructible by grenades, fire power etc ...

Well , keep it up !

One thing I like about it is it is not a "snap to cover" thing like in a lot of games where you press a button to go into "cover mode" and press it again to be able to get off cover.

This way, I don't think it would really slow down the gameplay much at all. In any shooter players will use cover -- it's just a matter of putting something between you and the enemy -- this appears to be something more aesthetic to encourage players to use cover, perhaps with some perks regarding hit-box size (I don't think you've said whether or not this is done), so it looks to me like it does nothing but augment the TPS experience.

Jibb