Leans in Battlefield 1942?

[Diamondback]

I don't know how many people on the forums have played Soldier of Fortune II Double Helix. The image I posted above is from a client-side mod called ICS for this game. If you look at the soldier closely, you will see he is leaning to the left. Yeah, it's hard to see from this perspective, but if you tilt the image 90 degrees to the right, you would see the soldier's gun inclined at a 45 degree angle to the left while he is hidden at 90% by the wall (from a 1st person view).

In Soldier of Fortune II Double Helix, a player can lean left and right while standing and crouching. This offers huge strategic advantages, since you can hide almost your entire body behind a crate or wall and only have the tip of your gun visible to the enemy, while at the same time still being able to see them.

Now, from a modders perspective, this would be quite interesting to implement into Battlefield 1942. My best bet would be to replace an already existing infantry "movement" by the leans. For example, replace the ability to prone (which slows down the game drastically and provides exaggerated accuracy to the player) with the ability to lean left and right. In the Infantry Controls menu inside the game, two movement controls would have to be eliminated in order to do this.

Of course, new animations would have to be made in third and first person, but I think the most challenging thing would be to make the gun tilt at a maximum angle of 45 degrees left or right and make it look nice to the eye. It's probably similar to the "third person crosshair" debate, but a bit less complex in my opinion.

Share your thoughts here about the possibility of implementing this into Battlefield 1942. Do you think it would be a nice asset, or that it can even be done?

[Apache Thunder]

It could probably be done, but it would be cosmetic. The camera in BF1942 can't be "animated" to move off to the side like that. I think maybe BF2 could, but definitely not BF1942. So you can have the soldier lean over (most likely via a special handweapon), but the bullets would still originate from the camera. I think if you disable the "ObjectTemplate.fireInCameraDof" command, then the bullets will come from the handweapon. But last I heard that is buggy I think and makes the weapon very inaccurate or fire from a location unusable to the player. But even if it could be done, the player would still be staring at a wall, because the camera can't be animated to move off to the side.

EDIT: Though one idea is to use a second version of a gun to go on the key that has the idle/fire animations use a lean over animation. Then have the camera settings for that handweapon set the camera to the side. So when ever the handweapon is selected, the soldier leans over and due to the camera settings, the camera also moves over (one would need to animate the 1p mesh to also move over otherwise the player won't see the gun/hands anymore).

But this would take up a lot of space on the kit this is on since you would need yet another gun to have the soldier lean over in the other direction. You would definitely need to extend the available slots beyond 6 to make good use of this. Definitely do able. I believe I made a thread awhile back that details how to add more then 6 weapons to a kit. It involves meme file editing of the ingame HUD and some custom control settings. If you set up weapon icons to create "lean left" and "lean right" versions of the primary weapon, then set this up with those weapons, then this could work.

BUT, it would looks weird if the soldier walks around with that lean over gun selected since he would retain the lean over animations while walking/jumping. You can edit the animations so lean animation only occurs while in idle animations/fire animations. But the camera would remain off to side while that weapon is selected. Not exactly the best results, but this is the only way I can think of it being done in BF1942.

[Diamondback]

But this would take up a lot of space on the kit this is on since you would need yet another gun to have the soldier lean over in the other direction. You would definitely need to extend the available slots beyond 6 to make good use of this. Definitely do able. I believe I made a thread awhile back that details how to add more then 6 weapons to a kit. It involves meme file editing of the ingame HUD and some custom control settings. If you set up weapon icons to create "lean left" and "lean right" versions of the primary weapon, then set this up with those weapons, then this could work.

BUT, it would looks weird if the soldier walks around with that lean over gun selected since he would retain the lean over animations while walking/jumping. You can edit the animations so lean animation only occurs while in idle animations/fire animations. But the camera would remain off to side while that weapon is selected. Not exactly the best results, but this is the only way I can think of it being done in BF1942.

So then have a "center position" (in which the gun is at a 90 degrees angle), a "left position" (in which the gun is in a -45 degrees angle), and, finally, a "right position", in which the gun is at a degree angle. The player needs to be able to switch swiftly to left/right leans while in combat for this to be efficient. I also want to combine the leans to the crouched position if possible.