Drawing'n'Offset

Hi,

I finali did something that I planed for a few weeks now. No, the physics are still in unfinished, but I finaly made a Weapon Offset for my bullets.

What I mean with Weapon Offset?
Easy, when I first started to use bullets to shoot around in my games, they always started at the center of the ship that shot them, or in use of a simple Vector3 value that I tiped in by my hand.

Now I finaly tryed something I knew that it works, but not how.

In Blender you can draw stuff like meshs, bones, particles and other stuff, on of this stuff is a simple thing called 'Empty'.
A Empty is like a mesh, just without a mesh ... So it only contains the center position of an mesh with 0 verticles (at least that how I understand it).

And I always knew that there is a way how the pros of game development tell the game wher to shoot the bullet aways (form a weapon, for example), something that they can place in the 3D model and later only have to call in the code to get that Vector3.
They use those Emptys (or something similar).

I first thought that I have to search for the Empty in the mesh part of the Model class in XNA, but I later found out that they get handled as Bones.

With a little try and failer I managed to let they bullets fly away from the sides of the ship.


But belive me, the bullets a unimportent compared with thos Emptys that I placed with the weapon Emptys.
Like the Docking Empty, the Cargo Empty, or the Engine Emptys ... :D



And now about something different:

Like you may know, there is that new Fable2 fanart part on www.lionhead.com and that I already painted some pictures for it.
I just yeasterday I started my new ... BIG ... picture.
I don't know if it will be that special, nor if it will look ... great ... but it will take a few days till I finished it ... so there woun't be any update in the next days ... like always. ;)


Greg the Mad