Quote: "No offense, but I have been feeling a little lack of politeness to your paying customers, on your part, on this and other threads. Maybe the stress."
More the attitudes presented. If someone wants to address me personally (hey, there's the bold tag) then they can receive my personal opinion back. Not once was a mention of "what other programs can we use" or "we need this specific information" was posted in the message to which I replied. Had it been so, a totally different response would have been given, because it would have turned from an accusation into a question.
Give a little, receive a little.
And in that light, considering your post was actually polite
I'll answer your questions:
1 - If the enemy weilds a weapon (read: an entity weapon, with its own properties, not just an extension of the model itself) you need a single firespot. Firespot is the name you give to a zero sized polygon limb embedded where you want your character holding their weapon (so typically in their hand). It will attach the CENTRE of the weapon to that location. If you are making a character that doesn't have a weapon, you don't need this.
2 - No, you do not need to have a certain bone structure. Any structure at all will do. You can model an amorphous blob creature if you wish (sans legs). FPS Creator will analyse the model when loaded to figure out the BOTTOM-MOST part of the object and align that with the floor level.
3 - There is no real list of animations, they can be whatever you want them to be. Let me explain - in the characters FPE file there is a section (at the bottom) called ;animationinfo
The first value is animmax. This relates to the highest animation sequence index. Sounds complex, but really isn't!
To help explain, open the manual and look at page 88 (PDF page 44)
You will see a list of animations, from spawn (index 0) through to "weapon freeform move" (index 91).
The numbers on the LEFT are the ANIMATION INDEXES. You will notice there are "gaps" (it jumps from 71 right to 81 for example), this is because there were animation sequences that were reserved for future use (i.e. for rolling, or sniping anims).
So now let's say we're animating a model that has just 4 sequences: 1) Idle 2) Climb 3) Impact Front and 4) Crouched Idle. You find the corresponding animation index from the list and note it down, so it'd be 1, 10, 11 and 31.
From this you can work out what the animmax value should be. In this example animmax should = 32. Basically take the HIGHEST animation index value you're using, and add 1 to it (this is because the indexes are zero based, people who've coded arrays will know what I mean).
You could set the animmax to = 100 if you wish, FPS Creator will not mind, but it will fill in all the other missing values (0, 2, 3, etc) with random crap that it knows to ignore.
We urge you (strongly) to use the same animation indexes that we've used. So for example animation index 50 is "weapon spawn", 5 = "move fast", etc. However it is worth mentioning that the "meaning" of the index is tenuous at best. For example if you'd animated a spinning clock you could consider that as being animation index 2 (move slow). As long as you keep a note of which index = which action, you can do whatever you like.
Using this knowledge, say you've animated a model in Fragmotion that has 4 sequences (those mentioned above). You would write down the starting and ending keyframes of EACH sequence and what they do.
Then in your FPE file you add the entries:
anim1 = x,y
anim10 = x,y
anim11 = x,y
anim31 = x,y
Where each x,y block are the start/end keyframes relating to each section.
4 - What do all the FPE entries mean? Well we're covering animation here, so I have covered all the entries you need to actually know to handle animation. You can ignore the lines:
;bodypartslimbinfo (1=head/2=body/3+4=armslr/5+6=legslr)
limbmax = 0
They are legacy and not actually used. The rest of the values (spawnmax, offx, coneheight, etc) are all relatively self-explanatory, especially if you've got the Properties panel open at the time. But if you want to know what one is, ask me.
Other nuggets of info? Ok...
There is no limit on the number of frames per animation sequence. The technical limit is something like 22 million, but you will hit a memory issue well before that. There IS a limit on animmax, but I don't recall what it is off the top of my head, I think it's 256 but I can get Mike to check. Put it this way - it's high enough to not really be an issue for even the most ardent Pixar fan.
You don't *have* to use our animation indexes. If you want you could start at 200 and just keep going on up. But as mentioned we would urge you to stick to those we've defined in the manual, even if the actual on-screen representation of that doesn't even come close to the description.
DirectX models should be saved as Binary Compressed X files.
That's about all I can think of for now. Post if you have more (friendly) specifics.
Cheers,
Rich
People don't quit playing because they grow old.
They grow old because they quit playing.
