[SUGGESTION] Just a thought

Character animations in Xonotic are definitely, well let's just say not up to par with the rest of the game. From what I understand the process of animating them is absolute hell right now. With that said, I think someone needs to spit out some ideas on how to VERY CHEAPLY animate these character models. I'll start with an idea I got when I was playing the original Unreal. In those games, the character models legs were always positioned in a way where it always looked like their feet were planted on the ground when looking down at them, however that actually wasn't the case and whenever a model looked up or down, their wasn't much if any noticeable segmentation in the model, but instead THE ENTIRE MODEL WOULD TILT DEPENDING ON WHERE THEY WERE LOOKING. It was a very cheap effect that worked in Unreal and Unreal Tournament, the trick is to position the legs in a way to where they don't appear to weird when you look down at them. Just a thought, maybe this can be experimented with and instead of having the weapons move up and down in the weird fashion they do now, get the entire model and maybe their hit box to do that. The leg positioning on the character models in U97 and UT99 had the models always having a foot in front of them and one behind them with their legs bent slightly. The only exception to that was when viewing them outside a match such as when snooping the enemy profiles in the singleplayer or changing your character in the preferences, in which case it would show them in a more normal fashion. I'll post some pics on what I'm talking about there.

Animation is the forgotten side of gaming that receives little credit (another is sound design). Modelers, writers, and hackers take most of the glory, but the animators are often like bass playing in bands: people think their role is easy and not very much needed.

The thing is animation isn't modeling, you can get full BA's in animation, it requires training and often specialization. We need experienced animators, we have decent modelers and hackers already, but I'm afraid we might not have anyone like that as part of the xonotic project right now.

it doesn't help that the animation rigs for the current player models kind of suck. However, I dont know how to make something that would be any better. :\

I could probably improve the animations a little from where they are. I now have a little more experience with it than when I started, however with the code the way it is, they will look bad no matter what, because the individual animations aren't the problem. the problem is the transition between the different animations. namely, there isn't one.

If one could grab Blender, suck some files, read some instructions and start animating it would be cool

How is animation currently handled in xonotic?

If one could grab Blender, suck some files, read some instructions and start animating it would be cool

Then its cool atm; riged blend files are in the mediasource repos, and you'll need to read some instructions to get along with blenders animation part

If one could grab Blender, suck some files, read some instructions and start animating it would be cool

Then its cool atm; riged blend files are in the mediasource repos, and you'll need to read some instructions to get along with blenders animation part

Really? Oh cool! I'd love to check if I can make some nice animations

Where are those files? Can you link me there?