Models with moving parts

[RingoW]

:yahoo: Remodelling (splitting and regrouping model meshes) most ships for a minor nonrelevant feature.:yahoo:

Okay, most, if not all of my ships have an already modelled in cargo bay and baydoors. This could be made working rather easily.
Moving parts like wings or other stuff folding and unfolding needs too much work in my opinion and we must ask ourself, do we really need those kinds of cosmetics?
The animations of vanilla ships do work, iff enabled, like folding wings of Defender or swiveling wings of Valkyrie, as well as an recoil effect of vanilla gunboat forward guns. Why DA have not enabled them for the game then? Any issues probably?
Next point is. How does the animation affect the hitbox?

AoM

[Jinx]

activating animated parts on ships that already have them ( kusari fighter folding solar panels, liberty bird wings folding and unfolding in cruise / docking, rheinland wings in cruise mode and attack mode, .... hm.. i think bretonia hasn t got moving parts ) - can be a long term goal.

on custom models, such complex animations are really hard to do - unless you re really good at it and know much more about modelling than many of us do.

a rotating satelite dish or baydoors appear to be possible. - and about gameplay.

visual art and eye candy does have a great impact on the gameplay indeed. - don t underestimate little details. - a ship with a rotating grav deck improves its quality by a lot compared to a ship with a non moving grav deck. - a research vessel ( or for that matter - the spyglass ) with moving sensor parts looks 500% more convincing than one without for sure. - and being "convincing" is part of gameplay, especially on a RP server.

it certaily won t be a priority to achieve - but animating ships would be neat.

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Shipdesigns made for DiscoveryGC

[MarvinCZ]

SilentAssassin looked into reactivating ship animations on vanilla ships.
His conclusion was, we can't have folding wings without Flhook coding. Having them fold in cruise would be probably the best option and the one intended by DA.

Bretonia has moving parts. I'm not sure about the Cavalier, but Crusader's wings fold.

[RingoW]

The Procyon Dedicated Freelancer mod has enabled wing animations.

What i know about animations from making custom guns and turrets is, DA have programmed general animations. Then the naming of modelparts like *_base and *_barrel for weapons and the position of pivot points in 3d program coordinates, later trigger the animation ingame.
The same way turrets can be made an antenna dish, which rotates and swivels with playercamera can be made also. The Solaris cap turrets already have a dish on one side and the barrels on the other.

However, there must have been issues ingame with alteration of ship profile. Probably in combination with hitboxes. Don't forget, DA had their own tools to do all this. We have free programs made by fans. They do the job for custom work, but are much inferior to the DA tools.

However, if those animations can be enabled without causing an issue, why not.
But please, don't do it, because it looks nice and at the end we have to deal a lot with fixing relevant issues.

AoM

[Dashiell]

small things would be nice, but let`s not overdo it. focus on the more important things.

good example would be the old (star wars) BHG dessie. it had 2 radar dishes. if they wuld have a rotation animation that would look very nice indeed, without too much programming hassle.

but transformer like spacecraft and spacestations that morph into a hotdogstand, let`s not do that.

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[Jamez]

defender can do that even now, rheinalnd ships move their wings up and down etc...its one of the dormant codes that can be activated trough some coding. Some of our codders were able to animate defenders wings into folding when entering the cruise. ATM this is only in early experimental stage.

:shok:

I'd love to get my hands on that code to try it out in OpenSP... *prod*

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Andrew Skye
Starflier thrill-seeker

Evangeline Knight
Seasoned fighter pilot

Shinji Takeda
Renzu Corp ex-COO

[Corsair]

Something that has come to mind lately is having small projectiles that revolve around ships. Like power generators. I could see some kind of deep-space vessel, like the Barge, or Harvesters, having large power generators like that.

And they'd look badass.

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[Turkish]

Custom animations are possible, but they're extremely work intensive. Consider having to assign your own animation coding via the UTF editor, and causing potential crashes if you coordinate your integers wrongly.

Tricky, but possible.

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I have a fetish for all things Norse.

[Cellulanus]

Just a note, but if we activated the folding wings some way they would fold when docking, (as per the orrigenal design), Save for the Valkyrie which would do it in reverse, since her wings are already in the folded position.