Animation Utilities: Version 1.1

[alpaca]

@alpaca
I'd be most appreciative. Had a quick look in the
.world file for ne_village. Looks like a .mesh file with
some odd data blocks at the top. After that it looks like tri groups
with some granny strings in between, then vertices, and then some texture
paths. If Caliban could provide clues like sample .xml files as he did
with the .mesh format it would certainly help sort things out.

Well from what I remember:

The first step is to create so-called blocks. These are parts of buildings and directly modeled (and I guess in mesh format). These blocks are then merged to create buildings (for the tech-tree or ambient buildings) or whole cities (for the walls and fixed buildings) in 3dsmax and exported to the world files.

However, I don't know what the worldpackage exactly consists of, or how the animations are done. The different files in the directories give us some hints:

1. The terrain is probably independent from the actual buildings
2. So is vegetation
3. Animations are somehow store in the animinstances file. The small size of this suggests it's only transition info
4. Pathfinding is also exported to a distinct file
5. Collision information is probably a representation of the actual world file with lower details.

How Caliban described it to me, I believe it could be that the relative positions are stored in these files and not absolute ones. This means you have a lot of blocks (like the towers which are only the highest part of the actual building), give the engine the alignment info and granny puts the pieces together. This would fit with the idea that terrain 3d info is in another file, and buildings are automatically snapped to the ground. It could be that this is determined on "compile-time" though

It's not much, I know

Oh, it also seems these files aren't described in any text file, so for the more generic ones like tech tree buildings or ambient buildings there seems to be some slot-in mechanism (the game seems to scan the whole folders). Some of this info seems to be in the worldpkgdesc, but I'm not 100% sure about that.