New animation
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Well, I’ve been a busy beaver since my last post. The Fury now has a fully functional BayDoor animation. As does the Serpentail. And a Blood Dragon Serpantail. And the Testudo. And the Hellhound.
In fact, the Hellhound in 100% Vanilla. It has a custom SUR, custom wireframe, destroyed components, and now a BayDoor animation.
Please excuse me while I go cackle like a madman.
MK
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No, I didn’t get that detailed. And in fact all of the ships with a baydoor animation also have a custom SUR. As for a wireframe though… the Hellhound was my test ship, it was the first I made a SUR for and also a wireframe. I’m in no hurry to repeat the steps to make a wireframe though, that was just ridiculous. I’m going to wait for LS to come up with something to help.
MK
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off topic question
whats so special about that new utfeditor?
and where to get it?Yeah good question
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The new UTF editor, v4, is God. It allows you to open multiple files, and you can click and drag nodes from one UTF file to another, no more having to add it manually. Change around a CMP? Now you don’t have to readd the hardpoints, you just drag it from the old to the new and voila! It still has a few bugs (such as the aformentioned inability to change names on the Rev and Pris nodes), which is why it hasn’t been released to the public. BJ sent me a copy, although I’m not sure if I’m supposed to send it to others. BJ?
MK
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Know it’s a bit late, but Wolfie? Any chance you want to help me break into M$ Headquarters and get the FL Source Code? I want the stuff in that trailer. XD
Anyway, Good work guys… I’d never even thought about this function of FL. Now I come to think about it, it makes sense to have had it. Why they didn’t have folding stuff in cruise for the Original thing I don’t know. Any chance this’ll be released as a standalone thing? I’d play the campaign again if all the ships did that. -
Just an update / side note on this: If you’‘’'re making new Animation scripts, be sure to drag-copy over the related “Header” section from a similar vanilla animation. Using the simple data editor “float array” will corrupt the data in this section otherwise. Frames, Parent, and Child can still be edited as usual though.
Animated parts can also be “chained” off each other; a rotating part can have another rotating part moving around it, or a sliding part. This opens up some fun prospects for looped animations -extend arm, “collector” dish swivels out of arm, then dish pieces rotate to fully form the dish. Conveyor belts, etc. Just have to offset the start times of each animation sequence properly
Alternatively, you can edit the Header data as an integer array (edit only the 1st value to change frame count -which is the pair of time and radians).
Note; Header consists of three 4 byte sections:
- a Long INT value for frame count
- animation type as IEEE single (float)
- a Long INT value of 1 (every one I’ve looked at is 1, and that’s it)
If you really feel like it, you can edit #2 as a float array, click update, then go back and edit #1 and #3 as int array back to their previous values.
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this is very cool!! we are looking at this at freeworlds and thinking of implementing it for the s-foils on the star wars ships!!!
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Only downer is so far there’s only been one “trigger” available for ships; jettison cargo. And for stations, the docking animation. Both can still have constant animations attached via the methods listed in this thread (select_equip.ini), but it would be nice to be able to tie animations to other state changes like Cruise Charge, strafe right / left, etc. Just have yet to find a way to accomplish that
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that would be cool, hopefully someone will be able to figure that out. i would love to see it linked to the cruise function or even the docking function.
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Thing is though without a trigger, the ship would look a bit more like a bird trying to take flight, or would only spread the wings when dropping cargo.
Let us know if adding an Sc_open dock script works on a ship though if you do try that Zaxx
Workin on a SUR for my lil habitat, otherwise I’d give it a run a couple different ways to try it.Oh, forgot about the Sc_fire on the Liberty Cruiser. That’s one more, though I can’t remember if it was triggered in its weapon entry or the ship. That part may be mentioned somewhere in this thread.
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<winces>Oh dear, I forgot about the SUR file. Assuming you’re making a custom SUR (and if you aren’t, for shame ;D), well, having the wing SURs move with the model might be a wee bit more difficult. I didn’t do it for the bay doors on my ships because the doors are so small, but the wings make up a significant portion of the ship. That certainly changes things a bit.
I wonder if somebody could look into the DLLs, see…. you know what, I’ll take a looksie myself.
MK
edit
Hmm, interesting. I find it odd that nobody put this together before, or looked in common.dll before now, but I’ve found a few interesting things that should be brought up. First of all, there is another type of animation, one that plays even in Vanilla. That would be the jump gate/docking ring opening up (actually, that might be the same as for docking bay doors opening, not sure). Common.dll contains three promising entries: anim, bay_door_anim, and open_anim. It might be… try adding the anim to engine_equip.ini, set it equal to an animation in a CMP… you know what, I’ll test this too.
edit2
Well, that did jack-diddly. I’m out of ideas :(</winces>
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assuming that the animated component has the same name in both CMP & SUR, then the SUR component should follow the movement of the CMP component.
Creating the trigger to start the animation is the only stumbling block as I have no idea how to do that.
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is there any way to make a dummy command, like for instance one that is linked to the cruise or the jumpgate and then dummies the cargo drop without actually dropping anything? the default for us would be wings open, then closed during jumps and cruise, if that idea has any merit.
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well maybe if the hook is part of the mod client side it may be possible, but for freeworlds its mainly online players, so that wouldnt really matter as long as it was smooth animation and worked without crashes. but there could be another solution, it would have to be heavily coded but i was thinking earlier and thought what if.
say you link the animation to the cruise button or dock button like this: the button activates the code for the sequence in question (dock or cruise) and there is a line added that tells the game that the ship is releasing cargo. the cargo is a null cargo, the cargo never depeletes or takes up any space and is invisible to the player. the cargo is also linked to the cruise or the dock function so that unless the ship is clear of the cruise or the dock the wings wont return to their normal configuration. im not sure if that can all be done in code or it actually needs an object that tis invisible and coded in to be non depleteable and weightless.
im not an expert coder and im not even sure that will work, but its an idea.
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Ideally this should have nothing to do with cargo drop, as that’s a relatively short … state change, a few seconds and 'tis done. Hopefully more something linked to … “in_cruise” or “in_formation” etc, as a toggled thing so it could be of an indefinite length but still represented as a 1 / 0 or true / false which the game engine already checks regularly. That would let modders play with lots of fun stuff and ensure many more hours of developing on each model
lolPerhaps a parse of the CMP file on player loading, for Animation node elements, resulting in a short list of hex coded flags. If a nice standardized list of useful states can be formulated, then we can all name our scripts to adhere to that from the get-go.
Docking
Landing (baseside landing sequence)
In_Cruise
Engine_kill
In_TradeLane
Tractoring (loot)
In_Formation
Is_Cloaked (since this seems to be making a comeback, lets not re-open the topic tho eh? )
Hailing_ship (for all those instances some turd scans your cargo- their “sirens” could go off)bout all I can think of at the moment.
Does your custom SUR include the baydoor as well? (meaning, the fighter the size of a mosquito can fly inside the ship?)
