floating units

[Dol Guldur]

Sometimes when new animations are introduced into the game they take a while to settle and can appear to float a little when first playing them. This usually resolves itself. This tends to occur with unusual units - such as elephants - rather than human units.

Recently I have had an elephant unit with a new animation floating again (generally when it moves it floats, when its still it is on the ground where any sensible elephant should be). The weird thing is that the animation for it has not been changed recently and it has been working fine until about a week ago.

Has anyone ever had this happen and, if so, how was it resolved? Thx.

p.s. I tried another skeleton and it still happened, so I think it is something else.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

I'll ask our guys to see if they've heard of this.

[wlesmana]

It also appears to happen only to mount units and not regular soldiers. It's like the engine is confused which Scene Root belongs to which model.

[Aymar de Bois Mauri]

Sorry, Dol Guldur. I wish I could be more helpfull, but we haven't had any trouble in regard to mount animations in EB.

However, this does not mean we sorted out any possible mistake. It just means that the animations we've changed concern only soldiers, so the problem never arose.

[Aymar de Bois Mauri]

It also appears to happen only to mount units and not regular soldiers. It's like the engine is confused which Scene Root belongs to which model.I think you may be correct.

Might be an incorrect scene root assignement when saving in MAX or a save error when exporting the animation. :inquisitive:

[Dol Guldur]

Thx for the feedback.

Sorry - should have explained beyond the basics.

The animation cas files have been working up until recently and so this is not an export problem. I doubt the problem is to do with the cas files directly. I swapped them for the old working files and they also floated (and yes I did test over different sessions to make sure not was not the normal float effect caused by mounts when the game is first run). Yet these latter files had been working for months. I also grabbed the original modded files again and tried these. Same problem. I find it hard to believe they all indepedently corrupted. A constant of course is the packer but it cannot be that as others have packed the files too and same problem.

My feeling is that it is related to something else that has indirectly affected them - perhaps some change to the animation files (although we have not changed any elephant ones). Vanilla all work fine.

I should have noted it earlier, but one cannot test everything when changes are made; especially when there is no sense to them.

It is a big mystery - but one that needs resolving.

[wlesmana]

It is possible that the whole thing started because of a re-shuffle in the file list, resulting from a re-packing. Had you done any animation repacking at all from before all this happened?

How about replacing the entire animation files (the packed ones) from an earlier build?

[Dol Guldur]

Yes, I had repacked recently - I think I'm going to have to start over or something :(

[Dol Guldur]

I have now put some sessions of several hours over several days into this and I cannot get it to work.

As most of you know, I'm a coder and do not even have a 3d modelling program - so animations are not something I can fully deal with :(

I'm at a loss and any help would be appeciated. I am making the files available here in the hope that someone can spot something as yet unseen:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=413N57HL