New animation

<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>

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.

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.

Surely this could be possible by client hooking (the way I made cloaking and dynamic economy).

But would that work in single player? We should consider that, too.

MK

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.

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 lol

Perhaps 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.

I haven’t read through all 6 pages yet, so I dunno if this was mentioned, but for fun you can use an InternalFX item to force the animation to play. Look at the “smallstation_animate1” item in select_equip.ini for an example. However, the problem is that it’ll loop the animation, causing the wings on the Valkyrie to flap up and down instead of just lowering and locking, which looks rather amusing.

@Ruppetthemuppet:

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.

hmm…yea im in

@ Mk Note ‘anim, bay_door_anim, and open_anim’ are put in the shiparch, you simply put in the animation name that is declared inside of the cmp for it to activate.

@zaxx:

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.

Quietly the guys over at the Procyon server implemented just that (along some other nice features)!

http://procyonserver.com/index.php?page=procyonhook

any final conclusion on how to do this? ive had aot of researching lately on this

Has anybody tried to put two animations in a row?

Like this:

bay_door_anim = Sc_open baydoor, Sc_extend wings

This should fix the problem with how to activate the anim.

are u absolutely sure that will work? ive tried

bay_door_anim = Sc_open baydoor
bay_door_anim = Sc_extend wings

but that did no goodm ill just try what u put up on the table

I’m not sure i am in process.

nope didnt work, nothing happened at all

EDIT: About that liberty cruise Sc_fire, where to implent it? i thougt thru this and couldnt find a location making sense, also didnt work when i tried those locations not making sense

Have no idea.

I think that the only ini after the shiparch to edit anims is the equip_select.ini

P.S. The liberty cruiser has two anims:
Sc_end anim
Sc_fire gun

Offcourse, You can put an anim when it dies.

Wolfie crawls back to his lovely cute files ;D

no wait i forgot, we’re not looking for replacement for Sc_extend wings

we’re looking for replacement for bay_door_anim, which i haven’t found yet

Yeah, it ain’t working.

gotta admit im pretty much out of ideas

Wolfie throws the files out of his dungeon

AND NEVER COME BACK!