Idea: THN animation editor with 3D display.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

@adoxa

Thanks. I’ll take a look.

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?

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 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?

i’d rather suggest some plugin to convert animations done with C4D, 3ds max or LightWave than an entirely new rendering program. because what we have there pretty much is doing what we write in thn’s, so only thing is to read out the format, convert it to the thn format and save it up as a thn file.

After seeing everything else it can do… anyone ever thought of Blender?? It WOULD take a ton of scripting… but with the right params in the right places it could well be used for the visual part…

Just have to work out how to crosstalk between THN’s and Python… but its about the most versatile platform i can think of… & no… i have no idea how you’d do it… It’s just a theory based on the fact Blender is fast becoming the tool for mostly everything else (via Python scripting) in other games.

So what you’d need is…

A THN/Python converter/re-converter <-this would be the “magic”
All FL’s tga/dds’s extracted from the FX files (for consistency)
& way! Too much time on your hands… 8-)

Best of luck… be nice to stop doing all this in my head and have a tool for the task… (like Doom3’s particle ed… yay… that saved me weeks)

i think, the effects conversion is not even necessary, as particle effects and beam effects are supported by blender and the conversion would not translate effects but only names and reference names, so the visual of effects or the models are unnecessary, only dimensions, positions, motions.