The walking alone is the only 'janky' part of the animals, and in truth, I feel can be excused by the fact this is Gmod. Willard itself is no stranger to certain features being perhaps 'unperfected' Some bird models T-pose outright permanently. The rest, occasionally.
At no point have I ever required
perfection. I only ask that the
minimum requirements be met. All of the examples you gave above at least have met these requirements, the very requirements which
ALL player factions (including birds, vorts, synths, civil protection, and OTA) have:
- A proper quadrapedal bone rig (not a lazy hackjob of headcrabs/birds/humans).
- A set of inverse kinematics chains be defined which dictates locomotion for walking and looking at things. This has a large set of problems associated with it:
- Turning:
- Strafe movement must be disabled (this is easy).
- When they do turn, IK needs to drive the body to turn to face in whatever arbitrary direction is desired, then multiple steps must be procedurally generated for the model to turn in a wide arc to face that direction (sort of like the hunters in EP2, but their anatomy allows them to do it in place. cats cannot) (this is quite difficult to do)
- If this is not done, cats will just freely snap to whatever direction they want to walk in, which looks quite jarring.
- If this isn't defined, when a player using the cat model turns it will fall back to the bipedal locomotion (which look fine for humans, but not for quadrapeds). This results in their neck and shoulders twisting to orient the head at the angle they're looking at to a predefined limit, and once that limit is reached, the model turns to face the angle and it all starts over again. On a cat, this will just result in the neck stretching beyond reasonable limits, then every so often the entire body will just snap to a certain rotation, and it will repeat forever- allowing them to just spin in place like a top. That's not acceptable.
- Walking/Running:
- IK must synchronize the speed of the weighted walk cycle sequence to match the speed of the player, otherwise they will just look like they're completely disconnected from the ground and sliding on it like it's ice.
- IK must place the feet, bend the joints, and etc to match the height of the ground underneath. This is very important for stairs, ramps, walking on props or objects, or on displacements, or really anything that isn't perfectly flat. Our maps are full of such things. If a cat player walks or stands on them, it'll be very immersion breaking as it'll look like they're hovering above all. That is also not acceptable.
That's it. If you find someone to do those things, then you all are more than welcome to have this faction. I am in no place to say that cats are "silly" or whatever, and honestly I have no disagreements with them existing in-universe or whatever. The raw
code to implement them as a
faction is trivial, and I've done it before myself with the WN7 cat assets. However, they and myself ran into the
same set of issues as described above, which is why it was scrapped back then and has never since seen the light of day until someone recreated it for a
joke on April Fools Day.
I will reiterate that I
only require that the
bare minimum be done for them. However, those minimums are
really difficult to do completely from scratch, as no similar analogues exist from Valve. It's a somewhat straightforward process to port new vort models to the existing bones and IK. The same goes for humans, OTA, civil protection, stalkers, and so on. Cats have no such set of bones or locomotion chains and all of that must be done from scratch for them to look even passable. Many workshop addons exist which more or less just rip the cat models from other games (Alyx, Witcher, etc), hack together a scuffed bone rig, and package them with a few frames of unsynchronized weighted animation sequences. It's serviceable as a meme or as a gimmick, but not good enough to be a permanent fixture in the server for any player / donator / etc to insert into roleplay.
We even extensively make use of stiff Half Life(1) NPC's. This is tolerated because expecting visual perfection and a bugless experience from a Gmod schema is a bar set just a bit too high.
They're NPCs which are used in specific circumstances by GMs. They're spawned in, shot at, and turn into ragdolls. At no point does it
matter that the above requirements are met. I do not care if the animations are stiff, or the models are low poly. At no point have I said that poly count is a requirement. The only requirement I have stipulated is that all player models for permanent characters have proper locomotion defined for them. If you want these cats to be
NPCs then I don't really care. That's not what you're asking for though. You're asking for a player faction and pointing to some NPCs as a cherrypicked example as to how my reasoning for denying it is somehow arbitrary. This isn't really valid or fair though as you're comparing apples to oranges.
