New animation

It only seems to work on the smallest stations.

Eh LS the starflier only has baydoor animations in the CMP

Oops, my bad then, I know its one of the light fighters that has it, I flew out of the station in Dresden and the wings folded out. It was over a year ago, guess that memory got overwritten

There are only 2 ships with a wing animation, they are -

br_elite - Sc_extend wing
rh_elite - Sc_extend wing

Most vanilla player flyable ships have a baydoor animation, the five BIG capships have a docking bay animation, of the smaller capships only the li_cruiser has an animation node, and that’s for the recoil from it’s main gun. There are a couple of baydoor/docking bay animations in the utility ships, along with one or two special animations for clamps, drill arms etc.

no…the defender got it too…just need 2 find it

here ya go:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3opK9ukMe0

u see? the defender got them

Wolfie I’ve been through every CMP & 3DB in the game studying the animation in an attempt at making my own, believe me when I say that the defender (li_elite) only has baydoor animation in the CMP.

Just out of interest, is that video one of the early (pre beta) promo vids

awww…i like the defender one ;D

now how did u do this?

and yes…im curios about this aswell

ohh and…i experimented a little with no results…just usual FL

Definately beta. For a start the Omega 13 system is in the video which wasn’t used, some of the other nebulas don’t exist and that planet texture is also not used that you can see. The depot model still has letters on it as well. Planetscape backgrounds were different, and wtf is with the FL disco? I don’t even think Juni was Juni back then either. Shame they removed some of the good stuff and left us with half a game, but there you go

i did…just didnt work

EDIT: typing mistake

yes…i know…i did it on valkyrie but it didnt work…because of typing mistake

i had sv instead of sc

btw…do some1 know how to make the CMP animations?

well ive a basic idea of how it does work…. i cant go into details as i never did it before and dont have the time to do tests atm

but from what i see the animations are pretty simple
via UTF you can definy which objects should interact
parent = root
child = component
for every wing you have 2 nodes which describe their starting state and the end state
so in the end you need to create a ship with 2 components and 4 animation nodes

animations are being run in a simple way by setting different coodinates describing which “path” the animation should go

to draw a simple picture of how it does/might work:
take 2 needles… stick them in a piece of wood… connect them with a cord… and now take one needle and stick it into a different place on the wood
et voila an animation -> the cord was your moving component (wing)

hope you get the picture… thats how animations work
simple, effective, not that much time consuming, a bit primitive (imho)

Now all it needs is some further thinking and we are getting close to baydoors on custom ships

First off you need to add a Joint to the CMP, no Joint = no animation, you then need to attach it to it’s “Parent” and assign the “Child”, this is the component in the CMP you want to animate, yes we are talking multiple component CMPs something most of you don’t want to know about. After that you have to get the Joints orientation right, then set it’s rotation coordinates, this sets the plane that joint will work in, then you have to set how far the joint will “open” during the animation.
None of this can be done in Milkshape as the CMP exporter doesn’t export joints, so your left with UTF_Edit, I think v3 will allow you to edit the rev & pris data nodes. This leaves you with 2 nodes still to add, they are the “header” & “frames”, this is where custom animations fall flat, as I have no idea how to replicate the data in these nodes, I know roughly whats in them, just not how their coded. Frames is just that “frames”, a bit like frames in a movie, for a smoothish animation you need 25 frames for each second of the animation, the “header” is the instuctions on how to join it all together.

This is the rev data for br_elite, the “origin” is the location on the model that the joint is attached to, the “Rotation Matrix” is how you set the rotation coordinates, don’t ask how to work that out as it was a lot of trial & error on my part (I suck at maths), “Axis Rotate” is the orientation of the joint, and “Angle(Radians)” is how far the joint “opens”.

PS that’s v4 of UTF_Edit, I think it’s still classed as a beta, meaning I doubt if it’s publicly available for general use yet, :-[ sorry for teasing everyone with it