Customizable wielditem animations for items with on_use func

[MirceaKitsune]

https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/2811

Whenever you left-click, your empty hand or the item you are wielding swings forward. While this is the sane and normal behavior for most items, it would be extremely useful if the animation of the wielded item could be disabled or overridden by the items. This is an obvious and problematic limitation, as it's impossible to have a matching animation for items with special uses.

The most common example are items you eat: When you left-click to eat an apple, you swing that apple forth as if punching, instead of bringing it closer to the camera where your mouth should be, or not doing any movement at worst. Weapons are even more affected: You cannot make a bow or pistol that shoots upon left-clicking, because it looks like you're punching with it... Kaeza's firearms mod is an example of how ridiculous that looks.

I believe we seriously need a way to disable or customize the wielditem animation for items that have an on_use function. The easy solution would be a flag to disable the punch animation altogether, which would make weapons being fired not look so weird. The harder but better fix would be mechanics to customize the animation... perhaps a Lua table containing a set of positions that the wielded item goes through? Whichever implementation is best, I think a solution for this is highly needed, and that someone with knowledge in this area should look into an option for this.

[mahmutelmas06]

Its should have been already included after 5 year development, its a big gap in this game.

[MirceaKitsune]

Its should have been already included after 5 year development, its a big gap in this game.

I agree. It's clearly a large limitation, which doesn't allow making items do a lot of things (because it looks bad). I hope attention can be brought to this issue... I don't think a simple way to override the direction / distance / speed of the wield animation for items should be hard to come up with.

[mahmutelmas06]

Yes, we want to compete to minecraft but not only this issue, we cant even bind/use most of keyboard buttons :/ These reasons made Voxus like games cancelled which could be minetests future.

[MirceaKitsune]

Yes, we want to compete to minecraft but not only this issue, we cant even bind/use most of keyboard buttons :/ These reasons made Voxus like games cancelled which could be minetests future.

Agreed. With the disclaimer that "compete to Minecraft" does not mean "copy Minecraft", but simply to have as many or more features and abilities and improvements compared to it.

I heard about Voxus, it is sad. If it's any comfort however, I am planning to create a large and ambitious game project for Minetest, and have already invested a ton of time into two mods that will be crucial to it. I do not plan to switch engines... although I might insist that the devs prioritize a few features or bug fixes, which hopefully won't come out as rude to anyone (given I don't know the code to do everything myself).

Since I plan to have weapons that shoot on left-click, this is a feature that will be essential to achieve my game. It's already essential to the existing bow or firearm mods, which look completely wrong due to the wield animation.

[Melkor]

I just want to bring this back... what's new?

[hooram95]

Yeah, this is honestly a long-standing annoyance using items like food or ranged weapons always looks off with that punch animation. Even just a simple toggle to disable it would already make things feel way more natural. Full customization would be ideal, but I’d take any step forward at this point.

[Wuzzy]

Since 5.16.0, we can skip item wield animations with a new argument in player:set_wielded_item.

That way, I managed to properly implement/fix the compass wieldhand animation in Repixture. Now, when the compass needle changes, the annoying "up/down" movement is gone, only the needle moves (as it should).