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Understanding Ghost/NonGhost separation and animations

by Johan Janssen · in Torque Game Engine · 02/01/2008 (4:09 am) · 1 replies

I'm having a bit of a problem with disabling bone animations. What I'm trying to do is to directly take control over the bone rotations from script.

I defined the following functions on the player object to be called from script:

ConsoleMethod( Player, directBoneControl, void, 3, 3, "directBoneControl(boneName)") {
    object->freeHeadRotation("bla");
}

ConsoleMethod( Player, disableDirectBoneControl, void, 2, 2, "disableDirectBoneControl()") {
    object->lockHeadRotation();
}

And what these do is:
void Player::freeHeadRotation( const char* boneName )
{
    TSShape * shape = mShapeInstance->getShape();

// TODO JJ: get bone id by name
    for (U32 i=0;i<shape->nodes.size();i++){
        mShapeInstance->setNodeAnimationState(i, mShapeInstance->MaskNodeHandsOff);
    }
}

However, what happens is that the bones are still animated. After staring at the code for two days I finally figured it out:

The object called and updated from script is: ghosted
The object that is animated in the animation loop is: non-ghosted

The question is, how can I get the non-ghosted object from script? Or, how can I get the non-ghosted object in C++ when I do have the ghosted object?

thanks in advance!
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Associate Fyodor -bank- Osokin
Dedicated Logic
#1
02/01/2008 (4:24 am)
I can assume that: animation is performed on client-side, modifications - on server side. You need to either:
#. After "disabling" animations on server, to tell the client to disable it too
#. Try to disable it directly on client-side.
I'm not sure if the second is correct, but first is "correct" one (IMHO).
For debug/testing purposes I would recommend doing something like this:

$temp::directBoneControl = true;
and in sources do the check:
if (Con::getBoolVariable("$temp::directBoneControl", false))
{
   // do the stuff
}
else
{
   // do another stuff
}
And, if you change the state of this flag on server, do commandToClient, so client will know about it too:
client-side:
function clientCmdDBoneControl(%newFlag)
{
   $temp::directBoneControl = %newFlag;
}
And on server:
function setBoneControl(%flag)
{
   $temp::directBoneControl = %newFlag;
   for(%i=0; %i < ClientGroup.getCount(); %i++)
   {
      %client = ClientGroup.getObject(%i);
      commandToClient(%client, 'DBoneControl', %flag);
   }
}

P.S. This code is written by hands directly in browser, so I can't promise it will work as expected :)
well... at least some hints are presented!

P.P.S. Of course in final it would be good to implement ghosting the value together with the rest stuff, and per-object (player), just add code to the packUpdate / unpackUpdate.