Draw Distance & Animated Textures

#1 Well, I've sorted the draw distance out.

For any newbies like myself: Open the corrisponding .mis file for the mission and listed will be DrawDistance - change that as high as you need.

#2 textures can animate just like anything else, just change the mapping coordinates all you want, the only thing you cant do is animate a surface with different textures, so you couldnt have like a cartoon or something playing as a texture, but you can modify the cooridantes for a single texture all you want (thats how I do waterfalls)

#3 Actually you can do both. You can animate the UVs or animate the texture via IFLs in MAX and export them to a DTS file.

Here is an example file that shows both being used at the same time. Open it in -show and zoom out.

www.joemaruschak.com/animtex.zip

#4 Martin,

You may also note that you can change the visible distance dynamically within the editor (F11). Select the "Sun" object and change the field "visibleDistance" to the value you require. You should see the changes immediately as well as the change in FPS!

Cheers,

- Melv.

#5 Also, I suppose you can do basic animation by having different frames placed into a single texture and animating the texture coordinates through successive frames? I'm no expert here but it sounds feasable. The only real limitation is the allowed textures sizes in relation to the frames you want to show.

Small animating decals should work though I guess?

- Melv.

#6 It is better to use IFLs (image file lists) for that kind of aniamtion. Animating the UVs adds transform animation to each vertex (bascially a morph) and it makes the files quite large.

#7 Joe,

Told you I wasn't an expert. I'm hoping to pick up a thing or two at IGC regarding modelling etc. My knowledge is pretty poor on the subject when it comes to the Torque.

Got some catching up to do!

- Melv.

#8 Where does the image file list get created, and is this something that only the Max exporter supports?

#9 not sure if only max supports it. An image file list is a text file that has a list of images. Max allows you to load this text file as a texture and it cycles throught the images.

#10 Joe, I tried your animated texture kit, but that white block just sits there, and won't even deign to smirk at me...

#11 I hope I didn't screw up the upload.

The .ifl file and the texture maps have to be in the same directory as the DTS file.

If that does not work, I will have to take a look and see if I screwed up on my end..

#12 IS there a particular object type it needs to be ?

#13 Didn't work for me either so I thought something was wrong with my SDK :)

#14 I just downloaded and opened the file. When looking the shape in -show, it works just fine for me. Not sure what the issue is on your end.

#15 Is there a way to make IFLs outside of 3DS Max? I'm a cheapo user (Milkshape, PSP7, Unwrap3d, etc.)

Thanks,

Ed M.

#16 it works in the showtool but not in the game............

#17 It won't work in the game unless you set it up to animate in the engine. Look for the 'flag' tutorial to see how to set it up so it will run when dropped into the game with the mission editor.

#18 Links bust

#19 Its a 4 year old thread...

There is an IFL tutorial on TDN.