Animated Baydoors

Sun Dec 19, 2004 2:36 am by Manhattan_Guy

I am currently creating a new ship. Now, I noticed the ships have a baydoor animation and drop their shield while they jettison cargo.

I used the same entry in the INI's and made Baydoor-Hardpoints, but still their is no sropping shield and no animation. Now I used the UTF-Editor to get a view on how it is done. I noticed every ship has two extra parts called baydoor1 and baydoor2. It appears you have to include them to get the animation.

Now again the question: How do I add new parts to a ship. I don't think it is possible with the CMPExporter, even with version 0.21. I could try to do it manually using the UTF-Editor, but there seem to be some entries, that other parts don't use, probably for the animation. And everybody seemd very cryptic to me.

Has anybody got some experiance with this?

Sun Dec 19, 2004 12:38 pm by Argh

You can do it, but you'd have to break the ship up into parts, using MeshConverter. And each part would have to be named very carefully prior to exporting to CMP, for this to work properly.

In short, it can be done... it's just not easy

Mon Dec 20, 2004 5:50 am by Manhattan_Guy

Ah...

Now two questions: What exactly is the MeshConverter and what do you mean by "name them carefully"?

Mon Dec 20, 2004 10:12 am by Argh

MeshConverter is a cmd-line program, originally written by RedEye, that "splits" CMP files created with the MS3D CMP Export Plugin into their componant parts.

Essentially, when you build Groups in MS3D, that Group information is still being stored within the resulting CMP, but the CMP Export Plugin "assumes" that that the Groups are all one big model.

MeshConverter can be downloaded here from TLR, and comes with good instructions about how to use it (assuming that you're reasonably familiar with 3D modeling and have a basic understand of the structure of CMPs).

Getting from there to a working set of Bay Doors will be tricky, but possible- you'll have to name the parts according to the conventions you see in FL ships, but after that it should be a relative snap.

Mon Dec 20, 2004 12:29 pm by Manhattan_Guy

Hmm in the CMP's, the groups are usually called like "baydoor01_lod1021102155951.3db".

Do I have to name the respective group "baydoor01_lod1021102155951" in Milkshape? Or how is this implemented?

Same question for the other groups...

Tue Dec 21, 2004 1:08 pm by Argh

Yeah, I'd think you'd have to respect the naming conventions, if they use the same name for every BayDoor object, just like cameras and other things that I've run into. There are a lot've things where you have to give them unique names... and other things that must be named EXACTLY what they're called in the other game objects. Make sure to check more than one ship's CMP out, to make sure that the Bay Doors are named the same things...

Tue Dec 21, 2004 2:09 pm by Manhattan_Guy

Yeah, I will check this...

I wonder if that number is the same in every CMP.

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