Chariots taking me for a ride!

[Bwian]

Been spending quite a bit of time trying to get to grips with how this can be done, and I have a solid plan that just does not seem to be working for me!

1) Took a selected set of horse animations, and created a dummy 'elephant' to try and get it so that a horse appeared as a horse...but was treated by the game wngine as an elephant. The only reason for doing this is so that I can have more than one rider on the chariot.

Sort of works, but I cannot make the rider actually appear! He is there, he shoots... but he refuses to display.

I thought it might be down to differences in the bone names ( saddle ... platform ) for the root... so I tried changing that in MS3D, and using the export extra bones tool to add an extra 'platform' bone. Exported teh animations OK...but the mesh converter will not convert the new model. Dies partway through.

Next effort will be to take a stock horse, add the crewman as an attachment, and try adding new bones for the chariot. If that still blows up the meshconverter, then I will try re-siting the tail bones to make the chariot wheel location. I would have to re-order the bones to attach the tail directly to the saddle 'root' bone .... more experimentaton needed!

[Bwian]

Update:

Tried with a stock horse, and re-used the tail bones to make a chariot pole.wheel setup. This worked fine, and would be great with a single rider on the chariot.

The stock animations, though, flap the tail around like a crazy thing. I need to have the chariot wheel a seperate bone so I can animate the wheels, or I would just attach the chariot to the root of the model.

Trying to change the animations now, but the animerge only seems to work one way. I can turn the modified MS3D into a mesh fine, using the mesh converter.

What I can't do is get the animations to work. I can merge the MS3D with the cas animation file, and load the result up into Milkshape. Then I tried to remove all the keyframing on the chariot part, so it remained still. This was fine...but I cannot turn this back into a CAS file. The animation utilities just don't do it.

I have not got any NEW bones... just some in new places.

Frustratingly, I have no idea why these things are not working

[Bwian]

Done a few tests to verify ... and animerge works fine with horses/elephants ... but the animation extract does NOT produce a cas file from the MS3D file. I did this with a stock unchanged horse.

This is a pain.... doubly so, since the Max plugin Caliban released does not work with Max as far as I can tell.... or at least, no-one seems to be reporting it as actually working!

[Bwian]

Next Test ... step by step as I do it :

The test model was 'mount_heavy_horse_lod0.mesh'. It was converted into an MS3D file using converter version 1.04, and the resulting MS3D file was opened in milkshape. The bones were 'zeroed' and the file was saved with the bones set at zero rotation.

Next, the skeleton was extracted using the latest release ( 1.1 ) of the utilities. The output in the skeleton file looks like this:

+0.0000000000  +0.0000000000  +0.0000000000    0  bone_H_Saddle
-0.0001452830  -0.0151966996  +0.4446060061    1  bone_Spine
-0.0006578590  -0.0245500989  +0.4198270440    2  bone_Spine1
-0.0008467390  +0.0139799975  +0.5470259190    3  bone_Neck
-0.0071678599  +0.5777239799  +0.4736510515    4  bone_Head
+0.2537220120  -0.2715969980  +0.5931140184    3  bone_RightArm
-0.0000306070  -0.3205270171  +0.0193389654    6  bone_RightForeArm
-0.0000488162  -0.4961239696  +0.0302742720    7  bone_RightHand
-0.0000340939  -0.3660830259  +0.0222389698    8  bone_RightFingerBase
-0.2555060089  -0.2715960145  +0.5923159122    3  bone_LeftArm
-0.0000304878  -0.3205200136  +0.0193104744   10  bone_LeftForeArm
-0.0000469685  -0.4961230159  +0.0303035975   11  bone_LeftHand
-0.0000362992  -0.3660819530  +0.0222394466   12  bone_LeftFingerBase
+0.0002688530  +0.0194744002  -0.2931849957    1  bone_Tail1
+0.0005695900  -0.3195210099  -0.3636940122   14  bone_Tail2
+0.2247990072  -0.2321140021  -0.1584759951    1  bone_RightUpLeg
-0.0000070184  -0.3785619736  +0.0039954484   16  bone_RightLeg
+0.0000009686  -0.4450979829  +0.0000083745   17  bone_RightFoot
-0.0000018179  -0.6024720669  -0.0000081211   18  bone_RightToeBase
-0.2339520007  -0.2229759991  -0.1583569944    1  bone_LeftUpLeg
-0.0000050515  -0.3876999915  +0.0031598955   20  bone_LeftLeg
+0.0000087619  -0.4450979829  +0.0000056773   21  bone_LeftFoot
+0.0000151992  -0.6024720669  -0.0000081062   22  bone_LeftToeBase

Looks fine so far, and this is correct with regard ot my understanding of how the thing should be built up

Next, being completely happy that my base MS3d file is a good one, I run the animmerge, and choose the solid MS3D file and .... for preference ...the 'run' animation for the horse. All animations were given the 20 frames per second option in the dialoge box.

The resulting MS3D file is called 'mount_heavy_horse_lod0_animby_fs_fast_horse_run.ms3d' and opens up fine in milkshape and the animation plays just fine.

Next ... I run animation extract. No actual output is created, but there are error messages in the DOS window.

(hope that has come out clear enough to be helpful)

This was run using a 100% stock model on a completely stock animation, with the latest animation toolset.

When I try to run a similar process for the elephant ... animerge fails and I cannot create an MS3D animation file to look at or convert back. Error in line 525 ... with a 'list index out of range'.

Camels convert to and from CAS file perfectly, though the gallop file I created went from 5Kb to 8Kb in the process. I have not yet tested it in game, but I am just pleased that content has been created.

[uanime5]

I can't help you with the technical details but I have an idea regarding the number of people in the chariot.

You could alter the chariot mesh so that it looks like there is a person controlling the chariot inside the chariot (the controller would be part of the chariot, not a seperate person, but would look like a seperate unit). So long as the controller moved slightly as the chariot moved (to make the controller look less like a fixed object) you'd only need one rider (independent of the chariot) in the chariot.

[KnightErrant]

Hi Bwian,

Bummer on the internet connection being down. This is good,
since no mods you've obviously isolated a conversion problem.
Can't run it tonight, but I'm e-mailing myself at work and can try
it at lunch tomorrow. Glad you're testing mounts, this is the weakest
part of the utilities because they have the most non-standard .cas
formats and this (hopefully) is what you've found.

Regards,

KE