Creating a FPS / Open World the "right" way?

[David_Prentice]

Now before you post please read what I say / ask. Also I think this is the best place to post this.

Well I have noticed that many Youtube tutorials are a bit older and I’m not sure if their methods are outdated so I’m here to ask a few questions regarding characters, weapons, and projectiles, and a few other things.

What I’m trying to achieve I’m trying to make a game similar to Battle Engine Aquila. but with obvious enchantments. I don’t have a team and what I’m trying to achieve is a FPS that can switch to other the shoulder, and also the ability to get into vehicles. The game had small levels but gave you a sense of an enormous battle (mainly due to everything being scripted mostly, but still).

Question 1) A lot of FPS tutorials say to attach arms and a weapon and use the built in animation system to animate the weapon and such. From their you can script in your raycast (I don’t really understand raycast yet) muzzle flash, and the things you would expect to happen when you press the left mouse button BUT I also know their is the new Mecanim system. Now I was wondering is it better to animate in Mecanim a character with shooting animations and than from their script in any gun properties like muzzle, rigidbodies, and all that or use the regular method I see where it just shows people making keyframes in the editor view?

Question 2) So pretty much I want to create an FPS with full body awareness. Would I do this in an external program bring it into unity and animate it in Mecanim (with a weapon? if you can.) Also how do you animate none humanoid things such as tanks and program to work with such animations? Would I use Mecanim? Or create those externally? I have 3DS Max and created some things for the game, but I feel like I’m not going anywhere without a working game mechanic to scale with and such.

Question 3) (Might not be right section) Any tips on UV mapping in 3DS Max? I made a generator and want to texture it.

Thank you guys in advance for helping lead me in the right direction for correctly (as possible) create a game. Also do you guys think I would benefit posting for team help? I got playmaker if that helps.

[rapidfirestudio]

You generally don’t want to do any bone-based animations inside of Unity. You’ll want to create these in a program better suited to that purpose and import them. The legacy animation system and Mecanim are there to manage your animations, applying them/blending them as required.

Mecanim has advantages over the legacy system if you’re using full body (humanoid) animations, specifically its ability to retarget animations made for a different (but similar) model. It also has the advantage of being the only system that will exist inside Unity at some point in the future.

As for arm rig vs full character: An arm rig is easier to animate if you’re doing the work yourself (fewer bones to worry about). If you’re going to buy animations most of what you’ll find available will be for full characters.

For the kind of FPS character with weapon animations you’re going to want to do there are many available resources on the asset store. Unless you also want to learn animation I’d suggest you buy them there. Contracting an animator for that purpose will be much more expensive (by an order of magnitude at least). You may also be able to find free animations (Unity has at least one free pack for Mecanim in the asset store).

UV mapping is a huge topic and these forums aren’t the best place to get help. Just google around for tutorials. Many exist.

[LaneFox]

UV Mapping is a boring, tedious, frustrating task. It’s a pretty simple workflow but there is nothing fun about it. You can try a few automatic unwrappers but they’ll need tweaking when its finished. Find some tutorials online, there are plenty, and just jump in. The best way to improve at it is to practice more and find what works best for the shape you’re working with.