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