Hmmm, well you seem to have a good deal of expertise in this area. I think you may have slightly misunderstood the question, but I believe you still answered it. I was hoping it was possible to have multiple pieces of geometry within the .b3d file, but still sharing the same surface...and then attach them to the bones without setting weight-maps or whatnot. I guess I misunderstood what the guy was saying...
It seems my greatest problems with the "normal" method come with humanoid characters, which have at least 1k polygons and many bones. However, I've now got it set up where in my game there will only be one animated human character (all other human models are static corpses), and the others will be alien "critters." That way I suppose as long as the human character is kept within a reasonable polycount and fairly few bones it will not cause a problem.
However, I want to be able to have a decent number of said critters on screen at once. There will be four uniqiue types, but regardless each one will have a single texture/surface and few animations. Basically I'm looking at zerg/tyranid type creatures so they have fairly rigid joints, which is why "tomb raider" style animation would have been so useful here (no need for bone deformation). However, I can't seem to do that without extensive surface counts by using multiple meshes per character.
Since I can't do that, I suppose the key to success will be keeping the meshes very low polycount, make extensive use of texturing to make them look as best we can, and keep bone count to a minimum. Correct?
It just won't be fun if they can't swarm the player in decent sized groups...and the chaingun just won't serve much purpose against a couple of drones.
It seems my greatest problems with the "normal" method come with humanoid characters, which have at least 1k polygons and many bones. However, I've now got it set up where in my game there will only be one animated human character (all other human models are static corpses), and the others will be alien "critters." That way I suppose as long as the human character is kept within a reasonable polycount and fairly few bones it will not cause a problem.
However, I want to be able to have a decent number of said critters on screen at once. There will be four uniqiue types, but regardless each one will have a single texture/surface and few animations. Basically I'm looking at zerg/tyranid type creatures so they have fairly rigid joints, which is why "tomb raider" style animation would have been so useful here (no need for bone deformation). However, I can't seem to do that without extensive surface counts by using multiple meshes per character.
Since I can't do that, I suppose the key to success will be keeping the meshes very low polycount, make extensive use of texturing to make them look as best we can, and keep bone count to a minimum. Correct?
It just won't be fun if they can't swarm the player in decent sized groups...and the chaingun just won't serve much purpose against a couple of drones.