Question for Vercingetorix ( or any other animation expert)

[Bwian]

I will begin with what I have found out, to put things in context.

Basically, I am trying to mess about a bit with which skeletons are used for which creature. The end product would be bipedal mounts without the wrong proportions of the horse/camel for this purpose.

Now.. what I noticed, looking through descr_skeleton was that each animation routine has a 'name' as well as the actual animation name. These names are common across all similar skeletons, and are even re-used on the mounts. There are some 'specials' which give me my problem. for example .. ALL skeletons have a 'die backwards' move, named differently for horse, elephant, human etc. but always 'die backwards'. This I assume, is being used by the game engine to link model activity to game code.

When XIDX is used to modify an animation, this aspect is not changed.

I have built up a table of these links, and tested it...so I know this is solid data. You, can, for example, use a human model and fs_dagger for an elephant type mount. This is due to the human melee skeletons having EVERY movement that the elephant requires. You CANNOT, however, use an elephant to replace a horse...there are several special moves that the horse has...jump, turn left/right while rearing, refuse and die refusing. The battle runs ok right up to the point that the game tries to execute one of these moves...then hello desktop!

So...then we have side-effect 2!

When I replace the elephant with the human, the game is happy...except for one thing...it WILL NOT display the riders. They still shoot, but are not displayed. I am assuming this is because they are positioned relative to the elephants equivalent of a 'saddle bone' which is missing in a human skeleton.

As a final annoyance, there seems to be an issue with putting non-missile skeletons on the back of elephants...

So...what do I need to do...

1) Add extra routines to a skeleton, so I could add routines to an elephant skeleton to duplicate the ones unique to a horse

2) Rename a bone to trick the game into placing riders ... assuming I have that correct

3) Find a way of mounting melee troops on the back of an elephant unit type!

I have no knowledge of hex editing, or any such other 'black art' but I really need to get to the bottom of this! There are numerous options this would give me for units that I really need, but which just don;t look right due to the stupid design of horses.... the thigh bones are massively long compared to the lower legs on the front end, and there is a crappy extra bone on the rear end that I don't want. I could bodge around it by completely re-working all the anims...but I am not 100% happy with this approach ...it doesn't achieve what I want ( I have done it and don't like it)

anyone know how I can move this forward?

[Bwian]

Additional ...

I have tried changing the bone name in Max, and this has NOT helped any. THe name does appear to import and expor tOK, but there is more to it than that.

Also...I seem to be stuck with arrows that are fired from very high up in the air....

[Sundjata Keita]

I don't think there is any such thing as an animation expert but don't start changing the names of bones. The system is more complicated than just a name being assigned, if we could change the names of the bones we should be able to make totally new skeletons, which we can't. Sorry I can't help more with your problem, all I can suggest is putting a small watchtower model on top of the elephant

Regards,

Sundjata

[wlesmana]

I'm no animation expert but here are what I've learned so far:

1) That, I'm afraid, is not possible. I have no idea how to edit the .evt (or "events" as I call it) files. Those are the trigger to use the animation and they seem to be hardcoded into the skeleton, just like the number and position of bones.

2) Only elephant, camel and horse have "mont" property. I have no idea where this is located but it's certainly not the bone. You cannot rename bones, btw. Your animation .cas files only list rotations of existing bones so renaming or adding bones will not be exported or read.

3) This is pretty impossible too, I'd think. The .evt in elephant riders are fixed and last I checked, they only got missile attacks, except for the first rider who uses the elephant rider animations (and .evts). I pondered hard how to emulate melee attack once and thought of testing changing the shooting animation to slashing while having an invisible missile with minimum distance. It'd look sorta weird, I know, but might work under some circumstances.

Basically here it what I've come to terms with: if you want to use the event triggers, then you MUST use that skeleton, for good or for ill (mostly for ill).

[Bwian]

As far as the 'mount' property goes....that MUST be in the skeleton. If it's in the skeleton...where is it, and how do we edit it. ! want to be able to add the mount option to a human skeleton.

I know this...because I have done a lot of trial and error messing about. It is quite possible to have a human fs_dagger or similar skeleton used for ...say...an elephant. I have tabled teh events, so I know that skeleton has ALL the same events that the elephant has.

There has to be a trigger in the skeleton file that says 'add a rider positioned relative to the root'. If I can add that...then I have what I need

[wlesmana]

You forgot that the importer may not import everything. There might be some sort of script in each skeleton specifying what is used as a mount point. You can't make anything except elephant, horse and camel skeletons to be mounts. I've spent weeks working on that trying all types of skeletons.

We can't even add a new bone to the skeleton. The exporter only export rotations and coordinate of the scene root. We can't even change that fact although there has to be a control where scene root is allowed coordinate change. Until someone or CA releases a tool to really dissect a skeleton and modify EVERYTHING in it, I think we're sh*t out of luck. And I have a feeling that those are hardcoded, since the game engine needs to call up events. Since that is locked, I'm afraid the event triggers in skeleton is locked too.