Looking into .dml's and having them be applied in mod order to avoid having to worry about patch-dml's of vanilla patching mod gamesys...
Personally I've been looking as much into the viewmodel (arm and guns) as I can, and concluded it should be possible to bypass weapon stuff and make custom weapons that don't have to follow the limitations of the hard coded system.
The new weapon stuff currently parses all the information from weapon properties, as well as a few additional NVscript args to build up the new viewmodel, and it's entirely in squirrel, this allows for post fire ejection of shotgun shells and can be extended to anything imaginable.
I'm doing some research into making melee weapons more easy and flexible, including an idea to have the melee weapon viewmodel pick the world model and attach it to an empty handed viewmodel, so that new melee weapons could be implemented without having to touch rigged meshes.
Hypothetically, does this also mean you can decouple arm models from weapon models, so a mod can now reflect a player career choices/level actions? So you could have a Navy arm-sleeve for players choosing Navy, a different Psi arm-sleeve for Psi players etc? If so, that'd be fantastic news. I know there's newer SDKs for Half Life 1 that allow this e.g. mappers can now more easily have the player use scientist arms, then change them to HEV arms, when the player gets a HEV suit later on.
There'll be a toolset (collection of scripts and batch files) I hope I can release in the future to make asset-exportation way more seamless than it is now, I have it down to one .bat file to export models from blends, textures from .psd's, animations, scripts, dml's, compile a motiondb and copy them all into a modfolder, in just two clicks, and the setup is just a single config file.
Absolutely, please release those tools if you can: there'll be a whole new audience checking out Enhanced Edition & thus potentially a new generation of modders, so easier to use tools, would be a godsend. Even if we have to pester Nightdive on your behalf, hopefully it won't come to that!
On another note, I know I'm the dumb, incredibly naive ideas guy, there's a ridiculous amount of complexity involved and so on. You've said here previously, that the Half Life 1 method of "put a skeletal animation joint on the mouth, with the audio file volume controlling its movement" won't work on the vanilla models, as there's not enough space on the vanilla models for such a method, which is 100% fair and valid. No point in having a solution that doesn't work both with vanilla and enhanced models!
However...for very obsessive/determined modders who don't mind deliberately breaking vanilla model compatibility, would it possible to add in a mouth joint, that's not working in the game only due to an deliberate "typo" in the code? So for FM authors or campaign modders, they can easily fix the "typo" to enable it, albeit it'll obviously only work with Enhanced Models? HL1's method allowed for both plain maps & vastly more expansive mods, to implement custom dialogue very easily. Just make the custom sound file in the required format and voila: no need to muck around with face posing, syncing up mouth movements etc like in later games. Plus it's from 1998, so it'd be era appropriate for the level of graphic fidelity Enhanced Edition is going for.
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