Custom Weapons     Introduction   [MAIN]  [NEXT]
 
So you want to make a custom weapon.  There's A LOT involved in creating a weapon so I'm going to spread out over several tutorials. They're not going to be your basic "copy these files, make these objects, tweak these setting, put it in an .mn3" tutorial.  If they were you'd spend 20 minutes here and the next month testing and re-testing.  For those who just want the 10 minute overview go to Custom Weapons Fast.  Come on back if  want learn more.  There's still a lot I need to learn but I'll save you a lot of wasted time 'discovering' how most things work.

What these tutorials will teach you:
1) The structure of events that are involved with a weapon
2) The different files required to produce a weapon
3) How different settings effect the weapon's behavior.
3) The .gam settings that control nearly all aspects of your weapon's behavior.

What they won't teach you:
1)  OOF, OGF, and OAF creation.
2)  MOD work.

I personally feel to many people are confusing customizing or the use of custom elements with MODs.  MODs involve C++ scripting that I haven't learn.... yet. ;)  There's plenty that we can do through the creation of custom oof, ogf, oafs, and the gam file.  As far as oofs, ogfs, and oafs are concerned there are plenty of tutorials on those subjects including my 3 part series on custom objects (oofs) which I plan on revisiting once I'm done here.

There will be five sections.  The first (this one) will cover an overview of what makes up a weapon.  Next I'll go over setting up the powerup .gam.  Third will be a review of the weapon.gam.   In the forth section,  we'll bring evrything from the first three sections together to create a simple primary weapon.  Finally we'll examine the ship.gam where we set up the firing details weapon.   I'm not going to into counter measures.  This is because they're not fired from a ship causing them to be very limited.  Most countermeasures (mines, seekers, and gunbouys) are actually robots spawned from invisible weapons (it'll make more sense after learning the weapon.gam)

Enough hot air... first a quick review of basic definitions for those who need it:

1) OOF:  Outrage Object File- Physical object model such as a powerup, a missile, barrel, crate, etc.,.. 
    (See "Custom Objects"  for creating oofs)
2) OGF:  Outrage Graphics File- A static texture (picture).  Note that an ogf can 'slide', but that doesn't make it "animated"
3) OAF:  Outrage Animation file- An animation clip, similar to an animated GIF.  The difference between an oaf and a
    sliding ogf is the sliding ogf is ONE picture being moved (slid), an oaf is several different pictures (frames) creating
    animation.
4) GAM:  The .gam file contains .gam pages for every element which describes their properties and behaviors.

You're going to need to look through the Table.gam (D3's main .gam file) and the oofs, ogfs, and oaf that are involved in the weapons.  To see how to extract the table.gam, oofs, etc, from the d3.hog using Hog2WorkShop take a look at
Make Mesh Glass Break".  To make things easier I've made AllWeapons.gam; a .gam file containing all weapon, generic, and ship . gam pages we'll need.   I also extracted most of the .oofs, ogfs, and oafs that are used by weapons and the 3 main ships.  Download WeapObjs.ZIP if you'd like them (warning! it's about a meg).  You will also want to have gamtool and OOFEditor installed so you can view things as we go along.  Hog2WorkShop, gamTool 0.61, and ModelView32  are all available on the GameEdit's Editing Tools page.  Once you have these files set up go to the next page and we'll get started. 

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