Hello there, I am in need of some feedback when it comes to a weapon creation/changing system for my FPS. In short, the player will be allowed 3 weapons; a Primary, a Secondary, and a Melee weapon. The weapons are spawned on the map and the players get to customize their abilities before the game starts. Think like Halo:Reach but more in depth. Now, when the player is spawned each player is given the basic setup of the 5 starter options (based on the players class type). But they are allowed to pickup other weapons which have spawned on the map. So here is the question which I am asking...

Would it be better to create the weapons by...

1. Preloading every available weapon before the game starts then just setting the weapons invisible flag on/off if its selected or not.

2. Creating a dummy entity then changing it with ent_morph if a player picks up another weapon. (System im using now)

3. Calling an ent_remove to remove the weapon pointer, then recreate it with the new weapon model.

Im not sure which way would be the best. Currently, I have 3 dummy entities set up (primary, secondary, melee) then I just change them with ent_morph when a player picks up a new weapon. But that creates a tiny bit of lag/freeze so the weapon can load. Are there any other ways to do it that I am missing? Any kind of advice would be EXTREMELY helpful. Keep in mind, this is an online FPS.

I'd go for first. Preloading removes any lag, and in a (fast paced) FPS any lag or flicker will cause a hindrance and in worst cases, kill the player.

you can use also option 2, but doing ent_morph for all possible weapons with a wait(1) between them in the beginning of the action. This way all entities are already preloaded and there won't be lag when they appear.

Hmmm, I see. Well the problem I am facing is the weapons have at least 100 frames of animation minimum. Not only that but their respective textures are a pretty good size too. So the problem I am having with preloading the models is it takes FOREVER to load. Well, at least a full 30-45 second pause.

What is the size of your models? 5MB? 10MB? How many of them you have?

Try 30-45MB!!! There are 16 of them The largest texture is 1024x512 and the average texture size is 512x512. Not only that, but the models have 2 skins, one for the hands and one for the weapon. I was considering making the hands completely separate from the weapon models, animating them with EVERY weapon animation, then just place the weapon at the proper bone positions. Not sure what I should do anymore The thing that makes the model sizes so big are the animations.

Save skins in .DDS, that will reduce size extremely
I hope you use bones for animations, cause vertex is big..
I'm using models with size around 10-15MB, with few skins.
I make function which creates all of them right before I launch the level
And deletes them all after creation, works good and fast

and use external textures, that way you can use a single file for all hands models