Hey folks,
ever wondered how you can get animations on specific limbs to work?
I did ever since the October 2010 update, which patched DarkGDK to the same version as DBPro 7.5. According to the
DBPro release changelog this functionality was added to the Basic 3D set of commands.
Since then the
SET OBJECT FRAME command (DBP) has an additional parameter to specify a limb ID on which to set the new animation frame. For example this gives us the ability to play a walking animation on the lower part of a human model while playing different upper body animations such as firing a gun or reloading. Imagine how much valuable authoring time it would cost to manually create all possible combinations of animations in an external modelling/animation tool!
Unfortunatly this command never made it into the most recent update which is already about a year old. Luckily for us DarkGDK users the functionality is still there!
All you have to do is add this line to the DarkGDK headers:
void SetFrameEx( int iID, int iLimbID, float fFrame, int iEnableOverride );
Or just download the attached file (which is just the original "
DarkSDKBasic3D.h" header with the mentioned line added) and put it into your "
Dark GDK\Include\" folder overwriting the old one.
You can then just call this command instead of
dbSetObjectFrame(). The last parameter tells the function whether it should overwrite the already playing object animation or not. Also I noticed that the command changes the frame of the specified limb only and not of its child limbs! This means you have to set the frame for every limb that should be affected by the animation.
I wonder why they didn't include the overloaded version of
dbSetObjectFrame() in the October 2010 update or why they didn't expand this functionality to the other animation commands such as
dbPlayObject() or
dbLoopObject().
I hope TGC will put a little more effort into their next attempt of patching the DarkGDK.
But anyways, I hope it helps someone!
