Scripted animations not overriden by "movement"

#1 Whether or not an animations "blends" is set in the 3d editor's sequence helper. I don't believe you can take an already compiled animation and make it a blend animation. :-(

#2 A blended sequence is a little different than what Joshua is talking about. Blends are designed so that one can layer animations on top of each other. Joshua is referring to what the Torque calls 'transitions'.

You can see the effect of transitions by opening up the appropriate editor in the showtool and change the transition time to see what kinds of effects you get during transitions.

Transitioning does not require any editing of the 3d objects sequence information.

There is transtioning going on in the game, but the transiton time is really short. I am not sure if the transition time can be set to different lengths for different animations without adding that functionality into the engine. I know it is possible, but I don't know if there is anything already in the engine to make it easy to accomplish.

#3 My problem is this, my game requires alot of swordplay.

I was wondering if the sword animations called from the script, is there a way to have the running animation blend/transition with it. So a player can run and swing at the same time.

#4 Josh, my game also uses sword fighting and the only way I have found to date to play a sword animation which does not stop the instant you start moving is to use the recoil thread to play the animation. The torque engine uses 4 threads of animation and evidently all of them get overridden by the run thread, except for the recoil thread. Basically I gave my player a second weapon in his sword hand which is invisible. This gun has unlimited ammo, but fires no projectiles. When I press my sword swing button, this gun goes off and the recoil thread plays, which is my swing animation. I know it's somewhat of a hack, but it's the only help I can offer. There are 3 levels of recoil built in the engine and it's not too difficult to add more, so you should be able to use it for several different types of attack if that is what your game calls for.

A small matter of note, make sure that your swing animation moves as few nodes as possible. It seems that any nodes animated in the recoil thread do not move for other animations, whether recoil is playing or not. Kind of weird, but it seems to be how it works.

#5 I did the exact same thing for the RW elf sorceress for her 'spell casting /firing animation. The recoil is a blend aniamtion and should play on top of the running animation without any problem. Note that the look animation should work as well, and is by default bound to mouselook.

Joe

#6 Hey Robert,

I don't know if you've seen it yet but I've fixed the animate on server problem. The code is in my thread "animate on server", just thought you might want to know.

#7 It's funny you should mention that, because I solved the problem too and I was about to post that when I noticed that you already had. It's funny how many of the issues I've had with making my game boil down to commenting out a single line of code.