Better 1st Person View

Rammoth · 07-09-12, 04:20 PM

I was wondering, with the state of the current API in WoW - is it yet possible to create a mod that will make 1st Person View like it is in Skyrim, where you can see your arms and weapons and when you cast spells and attack it shows up how it does in Skyrim?

That would be awesome, I think it would be a cool thing to have, maybe be able to bind a key to it so you can switch back to normal mode, and back again any time you want.

Haleth · 07-09-12, 04:28 PM

This is beyond the scope of an addon. There is no way in WoW currently to be in first person and still see your own character.

Rammoth · 07-09-12, 05:02 PM

Originally Posted by Haleth

This is beyond the scope of an addon. There is no way in WoW currently to be in first person and still see your own character.

Understood, well hopefully it will be eventually - if we're lucky.

Brusalk · 07-09-12, 06:21 PM

You might be able to do it on a character by character basis if you made a large PlayerModel frame and managed to find the right coordinates to place the view inside the chest of the player-model. However, you would have to manually add in code which causes the PlayerModel to animate if you wanted to see anything other than static nothing. (You'd have to set the base animation to like unarmed attack or the like, and then when you did something, you'd have to catch that and change the animation. Would take a lot of coding and the coordinates/animations would be completely different for different races.)

You might be able to do it, but it would take a large amount of effort.

Othgar · 07-09-12, 06:32 PM

Originally Posted by Brusalk

You might be able to do it on a character by character basis if you made a large PlayerModel frame and managed to find the right coordinates to place the view inside the chest of the player-model. However, you would have to manually add in code which causes the PlayerModel to animate if you wanted to see anything other than static nothing. (You'd have to set the base animation to like unarmed attack or the like, and then when you did something, you'd have to catch that and change the animation. Would take a lot of coding and the coordinates/animations would be completely different for different races.)

You might be able to do it, but it would take a large amount of effort.

And I'm pretty sure this method would be against the EULA and all that.

Haleth · 07-09-12, 06:47 PM

How would it be against the EULA? It is possible to create custom ModelFrames with addons, they're even animated. In -theory- this could work, but it'd be near impossible to pull off.

Brusalk · 07-09-12, 06:55 PM

Originally Posted by Othgar

And I'm pretty sure this method would be against the EULA and all that.

Nah it wouldn't. Blizzard fully allows the creation of PlayerModel frames (that's what you see for animated player portraits, though they use PlayerModel:SetCamera(1) to get the off-center look.). They also allow altering the placement of the camera within a playermodel frame through the use of PlayerModel:SetOffset or something like that, where you can provide x,y,z for the player model to be placed relative to the origin.

What gets hard is that animation durations/keys are completely different for each race, (last I messed around with them they were) and the x,y,z coordinates to provide that perspective is completely different for each race, due to different sizes and what-not. You could do extremely basic playermodel animation based off of spell-casts or special attacks from the combat log, and you could mimic what the WoW engine does, just with a playermodel frame. However it would take way too much effort to produce an addon that would do such a thing, at least more than I personally would be willing to spend.

(I was designing a UI a long time ago that had full-player models off to the left and right where they performed the actions the actual character was doing. I got it working for male trolls, but doing the dual-wield animation timing as well as target-animations was way too much work for what I wanted to do, so I kind of just left it at that.)

Othgar · 07-10-12, 02:22 AM

Yeah I was about half awake when I read this last time... I misunderstood the method. crawling back into my cave now.... carry on.