Horse model as a vehicle question.

#1 I was just covering somthing in the Private SDK engine forum about how to write a script that will play animations. If you want to use a vehicle you get 4 Threads you can load and play using the playThread command. Say you set him up to be a hover vehicle. You could make an animation of the horse walking forward. His stride would consist of at least all 4 feet moving in a pattern that would basically be able to run in a loop yet your animtion would not be a loop.
You would have 4 animations so your first anim. would be a stand position to be your base animation.
Your next would be a walk forward.
After that you would use walk backward.
Then Run forward (maybe for instance)

Now you would have to check the times of all your animations real close and some adjustment would be needed. Your vehicle script would have to be modifed to adjust the horse in the right position. Then your Movement were ever you decide to put it (by default its in the Default.bind.CS) you would call you specific Thread (using %obj.playThread()) while moving forward. You might have to make some condition that would let the engine know if you are running or walking so you could play the appropriate thread.
Now for all this to work using the playthread you might be talking about some LAG problems if you have to much going on.
Also if you want the horse to be a seperat entity in the scene you might have to set him up as an AI player or bot or NPC or whatever and write the scripts for that.
Here is the thread I was discussing using the play thread and how to use it the way I am talking about above

Hope that gives you some ideas
Matt

#2 I would make a hybrid of the player class, and the vechicle class. This waythe horse would inharet some of the players atributes such as walking/running/jumping and some of the vechicle ones player mount/movement controls.

#3 I see the biggest problem that you have is that the ground is never going to be flat and the horses legs will often be in the ground.

My suggestion would be to do it as a wheeled vehicle where the legs are like the buggy springs.

It still would not be an easy task as you will have to alter the wheeled vehicle class to do this but I think it could be done.

#4 Couldn't you have the horses body rotate with the terrain on one axis to minimalize this happening ?

#5 There is a resource that will allow you to conform the player to the terrain

#6 Yeah I realise that
The problem is that a horse will be quite a large model and we may not be talking just about a slape falling in one direction.

Whatever class you decide to use would require some work