Animations

[GrumpyOldMan]

Hi KE

@All
Tried GOM's experiment: Here's the flying dwarves.

For some reason they are flailing a lot when they should just be walking
on air. Finally found a good use for convertcastotxt and converttxttocas.
Converted the walk anim to ASCII and just modified the bone_pelvis y values
and then converted back to binary .cas format and rebuilt the packs.

Could this be a clash with the bounding spheres, does it look anything like the infamous spider archers ? I banged the side of the animation utilities and gave it a stern talking to but the convert text to cas option stubbornly remains grayed out.

Anyway, long story short. The captain stayed on the ground and the moment the lines met the dwarves descended and started fighting. Not definative because of the captain issue but it appears the game is 2D in collision detection; not 3D. Haven't tried the same thing against
a city wall but maybe tomorrow.

Another way to tell is if they zig and zag while passing over a friendly unit, ie if the collision system is finding a path through a ground unit even though the other unit is above it.

Will try to post a version 1.1 of the animationutilities before I take off. User's Guide and Tutorial is done, just need to make some neat graphics of the dwarves and tailed armored_sergeants for cover art and the gee whiz factor.

As always, will look forward to your documentation.

Thoughts on 2d flying units - having the units as 2d takes care of one problem - what to do about mid air collisions and fighting, not realistic for two dragons to meet in mid air and immediately go to ground to fight. There is only one fight sequence available. Disadvantages, can not fly over an unfriendly unit, can not fly over city walls. Advantages - faster than normal mounts, useful on flanks or rear.

Suggestions - have all flying anims at a standard height, bit higher than an elephant so that air to ground and air to air combat will look realistic. Don't have the flying units land, just hover in 'idle', other wise when the mount goes into default it will land and wait while the riders duke it out, and then take off again, will also take care of any collision issues with large wings?

Just a few rambling thoughts.

Edit - @@@@KE - downloaded your latest utilities package but I got the following error when I tried to convert text to cas -



Edit2 - got it working, wouldn't convert text made by an earlier version

Just repeated the flying leap running experiment and yes the collision system is definitely 2d, flying creatures can't overfly enemy units, the collisions happen at ground level. Interesting what happens to the anims though, may play around with the bounding sphere and see what happens.

Cheers

GrumpyOldMan

[Bwian]

This pretty much mirrors what the situation was with RTW in terms of collision. The units there were 2D, and had no awareness of how high up they were. They reacted to walls in the same was as ground troops, and could only walk through open gates.

Combat animations were triggered when the units ran into each other, and whichever animation routines were normal for the unit would being.

I am not sure how M2TW would react if you fired arrows at a model translated up that way .... but if it uses the bounding sphere for that, then it may not actually be possible to hit the airborne unit at all... I suspect the bounding sphere has not gone 'up' with the model! Whilst the game may be able to cope with hills .... I think only the terrain is used to modify the height of the unit.

[zxiang1983]

Is it possible now to bring wagon fort to life? Is there any hardcode limit to prevent people doing so?

I think using this wagon fort may be relatively a little easier:


Let the crossbowmen push this wagon as a ram. When using this wagon in battle, first let crossbwmen step on to it--this must be the most difficult part.
After that, they can use the normal crossbowmen animation.

About the stepping_onto_wagon animation, maybe we can use the climbing ladders animation? Also we need a stepping_off_wagon animation.

[Bwian]

I don't hink mounting and dismounting would be possible. They are outside the scope of the game mechanics when it comes to anything other than siege equipment.

You could make the unit move as a 'mount' with a crew on board. The elephant, for example, could probably be replaced by the cart mesh, and the descr_skeleton entries replaced with animations from the cart to make it roll if movement were needed. The 'crew' would be the elephant riders.

The crew would have a nasty tendancy to shoot through the wood of the wall... which is a bit naughty but unavoidable... and the AI behaviour of the unit would be a little 'bizarre' but there is no reason something couldn't be done.

[zxiang1983]

Thank you, Bwian!

So I suppose it would be better to make the wagon fort unmovable? because otherwise we need additional units to push it, which would be difficult to implement. And some thing more is that when in battle, we need to roll the wagon by 90 degrees to let its side face the enemy, which would be difficult as well.

[GrumpyOldMan]

Hi Zxiang

Thank you, Bwian!

So I suppose it would be better to make the wagon fort unmovable? because otherwise we need additional units to push it, which would be difficult to implement. And some thing more is that when in battle, we need to roll the wagon by 90 degrees to let its side face the enemy, which would be difficult as well.

No it wouldn't be feasible to have this sort of setup but I do remember that somebody here or at twcenter had got the warwagons in game using another siege engines skeletons.

Edit:- Have a look at http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=82549 now we have the mesh converters and more information on skeletons and anims we may be able to come up with a more stable fix.

Because I'm interested in eastern European warfare, I've been looking at a horse drawn warwagon as an elephant. Still early days yet.

Cheers

GrumpyOldMan

[KnightErrant]

Hi Guys,

Nothing to post, just wanted to say hi.
Intercepted a quadraillion photons, worked
on my melanomas, ate in restaurants I've never been
to before, in short, a wonderful vacation. I know MT2W
isn't 3D so we can't do the Nazgul and Eagles and other
cool stuff but is there a way to half-assedly (hope I don't
barred for that) try to do flying units? If we make them
just archers can they just do a cantabrian sort of thing and
keep them from interacting with units?

Just wanted to post, I'm really interested.

Back from the wilds of Florida, go Perdido Key! (As if
they had a football team.)

KE

[GrumpyOldMan]

Hi KE

Hi Guys,

Nothing to post, just wanted to say hi.
Intercepted a quadraillion photons, worked
on my melanomas, ate in restaurants I've never been
to before, in short, a wonderful vacation. I know MT2W
isn't 3D so we can't do the Nazgul and Eagles and other
cool stuff but is there a way to half-assedly (hope I don't
barred for that) try to do flying units? If we make them
just archers can they just do a cantabrian sort of thing and
keep them from interacting with units?

Just wanted to post, I'm really interested.

Back from the wilds of Florida, go Perdido Key! (As if
they had a football team.)

KE

Welcome back from your vacation, hope you had a great time.

As regards the flying stuff, look at my post up above where I put in a few rambling thoughts. The main problem is going to be interaction with stuff on the ground, enemies or friends, and how to treat combat, air based or ground based? If you want flying based combatants then I think the low flying option is the best. Or you could come with me and look at programming languages to make a 3d based combat engine .

I saw on the Milkshape forum http://www.chumba.ch/chumbalum-soft/...84&postcount=1 where somebody has posted a Python plugin for Milkshape. Haven't looked at it yet but it might be useful for you.

Just off to look at dx9 hlsl mesh skinning and see what language/engine supports it .

Cheers

GrumpyOldMan

[KnightErrant]

@GOM,

Well I am interested in the Python plug-in; have to
check that out. Read up some good stuff on Python a bit on the
vacation (hid the book behind a novel so it looked like
I wasn't having fun). Other book was on 3D modeling
with the Torque engine. I don't know, pseudo-C++ scripting
language? Blitz3D looks better to me, Got to get the animals
back from the kennels and settle back in, then back to
the joying of messin' with stuff.

[Bwian]

I made some very low-flying units for RTW for my 'Metal Mayhem' mod. I made a new animation set that had a rotating set of rotor blades, then hung a small droid thing underneath the rotors. The blades were both the 'flight' mechanism and the weapon

They flew just about head height, so the enemy attacks looked natural. Anything higher, and the attacking melee weapons are aimed in the wrong place. I kept them small, so that the creatures did not look out of place hovering at that height. Make the thing big..like...say...a Pegasus.. and at that height they do not look like they have bothered to fly! Make them small...like a small imp or devil, and they look much better. Presumably, increasing the horizontal component of the animation would help too. Make them move faster than a galloping horse and you also increase the illusion of flight. I did that too for my hovering drones.

You also need to be careful with the death animations as well You need to make sure they actually hit the ground properly!

[KnightErrant]

Absolutely cool , post some pics if you get a chance!
Sorry, must have a form of vacationitis, now I'm getting
the ole' animations are cool feeling again. When you're
happy with your models could I get a copy; I'd love something
to play with for flying.

[SigniferOne]

Hi KE, I was playing around with the animations tonight, trying to speed up the turn animations on the campaign map (way too slow, slowing everything down). Tried to animmerge with an ms3d general's file, like you said. Here's the error message I got in the DOS box:



Here's the debug log:

MS3D000000, version number 4
Number of vertices = 2098
Number of triangle = 2128
Number of groups = 5
Number of materials = 2
fAnimationFPS = 10.0
fCurrentTime  = 1.0
iTotalFrames  = 1
Number of joints = 23
bone_pelvis from 
bone_RThigh from bone_pelvis
bone_Rlowerleg from bone_RThigh
bone_Rfoot from bone_Rlowerleg
bone_abs from bone_pelvis
bone_torso from bone_abs
bone_head from bone_torso
bone_jaw from bone_head
bone_eyebrow from bone_head
bone_Rclavical from bone_torso
bone_Rupperarm from bone_Rclavical
bone_Relbow from bone_Rupperarm
bone_Rhand from bone_Relbow
bone_Lclavical from bone_torso
bone_Lupperarm from bone_Lclavical
bone_Lelbow from bone_Lupperarm
bone_Lhand from bone_Lelbow
bone_LThigh from bone_pelvis
bone_Llowerleg from bone_LThigh
bone_Lfoot from bone_Llowerleg
bone_weapon_weapon01 from bone_Rhand
bone_weapon02 from bone_Rhand
bone_weapon03_shield_shield01 from bone_Lhand
First subversion number = 1
Number of group comments = 5
Number of material comments = 0
Number of joint comments = 0
Number of model comments = 1
Second subversion number = 2