Chariot Development

[Bwian]

KE and my good self have been re-pondering the question of making chariots a reality in M2TW. We have divided up the tasks equally amongst ourselves, with me doing the pestering, and KE doing the clever stuff. Seems fair (ahem )

In between, we have done much tinkering, and there has been much quoting of the dead parrot sketch, discussions on Australian Tablewines, cheese, and the liklihood of me actually wishing to purchase a talking slug. Yes indeed ...

And now for something completely different!

First off, there was a need to make a chariot. Easy. KE has given us the tools to make new meshes for a mount, and also the ways to add extra bones and port that across to existing animations sets. Brilliant stuff.
So..I considered th epossibility of simply taking a stock horse, and tacking on some extra bones at the back to make a chariot pole, platom and axles which could then be animated to fit with the stock horse moves. After a few early tests, it became clear that I also had to phsically move the horse relative to the 'root' bone ( h_saddle for a horse )or else the thing would pivot around the root and the chariot would appear to drag itself sideways in a bizarre way when it turned. n short...I came up with this:


Now...I extracted a skeleton, and then applied that to the mesh to create a new animation set 'fs_chariot'.The new bones were indexed as '1', '2' and '3' in accordance with their position relative to the root. I manually edited the 'skeleton' file to do this, changoing them from 99. Ran it in game, and I noticed something VERY bizarre.In order to properly show it, here is a picture of the beast after animerge was run on the 'walk' animation.

Note..there are actually 2 horses side by side, but rigged to the same central skeleton. I tried it like this AND with just one horse. Made no difference

The vertices are all correctly assigned, and all definitely seems to be fine in the model department too. I also noticed in game that the chariot platform was messed up too. All that was visible was the front edsge of it. The rest appeared to vanish!

Now...I have been swapping PM's with KE and pondering this deeply. Today, I have run another batch of tests. We could not figure out if the problem lay with the horse/mount mesh converter, or if it was related to the extra bones which had not really been tested with anything other than human skeletons.

So...what I did was to re-run the whole process, moving the horse in EXACTLY the same way, but NOT adding the extra bones for the platform.

This was the starting point. The exact same process was done, and the thing WORKS.

Looks to me as though it was something to do with the extra bones mixed with the mesh converter that has hiccupped here. Ready to test more