Idea: THN animation editor with 3D display.

TheDvDMan

So, who is up for helping me to create it?

FriendlyFire

Do you know programming?

TheDvDMan

What kind of programming?

tomsons26

An better question is do you know reverse engineering?
Afterall Thorn anims have there own 280kb DLL

adoxa

I found one function from it, which you can find here. I’ll tweak it a bit at some stage, but a 3D editor is beyond my scope.

OutCast

It’s just LUA after all so maybe you just need to make something like hardcmp that will load required objects and move them by the script.
Though you probably will need to make 3d ale editor to be able to just render effects.

Nova

It would be better to see ALE Editor with screen showing the effect while editing, without launcing a game.

StarTrader

tomsons26 wrote:
An better question is do you know reverse engineering?
Afterall Thorn anims have there own 280kb DLL

:roll:

A better question is: “Do you know how to reverse engineer?” After all, Thorn anims have their own 280Kb DLL.

M1C

Nova wrote:
It would be better to see ALE Editor with screen showing the effect while editing, without launcing a game.

Oh, yes.

But the thn-Editor is a good idea

IrateRedKite

Late to the scene, but THN is actually LUA 2.1 or similar. there’s a craptonne of stuff you can do with it linking to in-space/out of menu events. Pulling random numbers/system time/keymapping, is all theoretically doable.
I had a long, long list of functions a while back, and was actually halfway through making a wiki for it all , but the URL appears to have died. Will see what I can find.

Freestalker.fr

A 3D THN editor would be amazing, just for doing new campaign. It could be do a new life for freelancer, and someone can creat a freelancer 2, I think creat a freelancer 2 by a mod is not a good way, Why? Because all people will give the name of their mods Freelancer 2.

fdussault

With my little experience, I offer my help.

I do not know how to reverse-engineering. But with with many heads we may come to something.

On a side note, I am working on a THN -> LUA compiler interface. I did not find it in Freelancer Tools. The interface it-self is ready. I am now working on starting the LUA compiler. This first version works one file at the time. The next one will work on batches.

FriendlyFire

Make sure you’re using the updated FLEd-Thorn version.

Gisteron

is there a way to compile manually written thn’s to the FL format? just curious…

adoxa

FLEd-Thorn comes with the lua compiler, so yes.

lua\luac32 -o script.thn script.thn.lua
```That will take the decompiled file **script.thn.lua** and recompile it back to **script.thn**.

@fdussault: There's also the ["native" decompiler](http://the-starport.net/freelancer/forum/viewtopic.php?post_id=30586#forumpost30586) you might like to look at. I'll be making it work on entire directory trees at some stage.

fdussault

@adoxa

Thanks. I’ll take a look.

fdussault

Adoxa,

I notice there is a call to a DACOM DLL.

Do you - or any one - have a way to find the entry point signatures?
I am refering to the function names and their parameter types and uses.
… because I have no idea what is called and what this is doing.

On a side track, is there anyone knowing a Digital Anvil Freelancer developper?

adoxa

That’s the problem with virtual functions - names have to be guessed from context; number and type of parameters and return type can be gleaned from the disassembly. Since a disassembler can’t really interpret a virtual function (something like call [edx+1C] could be anything), I haven’t worried about decoding what I don’t need.

TheDvDMan

Can we please get back to the subject?

fdussault

TheDvDMan wrote:
Can we please get back to the subject?

Sure.

So you want a 3D editor.

This editor should (add to it):

Read or access FL’s files
Read and display objects (in 3D)
Position the objects and cameras
Create the paths
Have a timeline
Write LUA files
Compile and write THN files

This is a big project.

Is there an animation software we may “upgrade” to read/access FL files and write LUA files?