Animators: read this! And a complaint against CA.

**Duke John** · 03-08-2006, 12:19

There is a bug in the importer/exporter that will cause your units to not form up correctly when you have exported the march loop animation.

I am animating for NTW2 and I am using the LID_03 March loop.cas file to animate the infantry. I had completely edited the set only to discover while testing a square formation that units are not forming up correctly.

This is what should happen:

A group formation has been edited to make 4 units form square. 3 units reach their destination all right while a fourth is partly not formed up right:

Not quite right, but acceptable as a few seconds later the 4th unit reforms and a perfect square is formed.

Now the only change I make is importing LID_03 March loop.cas and exporting it again without any edits. Then I pack the animations and restart the game. The unit now fails to reach their destination and an unit on its own remain a mess. On top of this units also do not form up correctly when drawing them out in a line or just moving them.

It probably is already known by all animators, but to be safe; turning animations cannot be touched as it causes the soldiers to get into a loop of constantly turning.

Perhaps Vercingetorix will make a fix for this. But the bottomline is that CA should have had the decency to release their model/animation exporter if they advertise their game as moddeable. They haven't released even a single tool, besides the battle editor that was locked for the public in previous versions.

And I would strongly advise anyone who has big plans for modding M2:TW to wait till CA has released a model/animation exporter.

CA,

If any of you are reading this I would ask you to release the model/animation exporter you used for R:TW. We are wasting alot of time trying to figure things out and are still facing problems with animation and models. Problems that would not exist if we had an official tool.

If you no longer have this, then I would ask you to keep this request in mind for M2:TW. The modding community has given TW loads of free advertisements in the form of dozens of modification reviews and we would love to do that for M2:TW but we do need the very basis of creating mods and that is a model/animation exporter.

Cheers,
Duke John

**Lord Adherbal** · 03-08-2006, 14:16

can't add much other then: I agree

if it wasn't for Vercingetorix we'd still be stuck with skin mods. So much for that "if RTW had a middlename, it would be moddable".

**wlesmana** · 03-08-2006, 18:41

Most animators are already clamoring about this ever since the flipping bug days. Other bugs are death animation corpse placement and the 45 degrees turn animations.

**SigniferOne** · 03-12-2006, 19:54

Duke John, yes this problem is well known. From what I have found, the script does not properly work on the Walk loops, Run loops, and animation that go to and from walk/run loops (e.g. idle to walk). So we're just waiting for Verc to fix that.

The flipping bug has already been fixed, looks great.

**Vercingetorix** · 03-14-2006, 08:39

The animations have always had problems from day one... It's something I need to fix, but I haven't gotten around to it. I don't think there's much point in continuing to beat CA over the head about modding this game. Yes, CA failed to deliver the level of moddability that we had hoped for, but by now I think they know we were all disappointed. No need to continue to spite CA at every chance we can; we should try to build a relationship that promotes understanding between CA and us. We need to get CA on our side

**wlesmana** · 03-14-2006, 09:47

Vercingetorix> while we're on the subject, in case no one has reported this bug: there is a bug with 0.79 exporter where exporting the death animation of an elephant will start off with the wrong vertical height of the scene root, thus they will start dying and stay dead floating in the air. This bug does not appear in 0.69, although in 0.69, the final resting spot of the corpse is slightly to the left of the death animation (a scene root problem too I guess). I can provide the exported files of both if that could be of help.

Thanks!

**fallen851** · 03-15-2006, 19:47

Originally Posted by Vercingetorix

The animations have always had problems from day one... It's something I need to fix, but I haven't gotten around to it. I don't think there's much point in continuing to beat CA over the head about modding this game. Yes, CA failed to deliver the level of moddability that we had hoped for, but by now I think they know we were all disappointed. No need to continue to spite CA at every chance we can; we should try to build a relationship that promotes understanding between CA and us. We need to get CA on our side

It is pretty sad that we have to "promote understanding" between CA and us. CA should have been on "our side" from the beginning, in fact, there shouldn't have ever been another side, we paid for this game. This isn't a relationship between two people, this game is buisness for them.

Thus the only thing we can do is not buy MTW-II, that will "promote understanding" that when CA disappoints, it doesn't get money, because if we didn't pay for their games based on their disappointments, they would change the way they support them, or fail as a buisness.