Dynamic Meshes and Skins Update

As someone including me has problem with seeing the body of this resource, I decided to rewrite it. The previous one was really long as I wrote down every codes in it. But this time, I decided to upload every related codes onto my web server. Hope to I can managed to maintain that web server without an end.

Show/hiding meshes and dynamic material change are inherent in T3D. I decided to make use
of these features to give my game players a little pleasure when they are watching
their actors' appearance change.

Show/hiding meshes and dynamic material change are inherent in T3D. I decided to make use
of these features to give my game players a little pleasure when they are watching
their actors' appearance change.

As mesh show/hiding is rather simple to implement on script side, I'm not going to add
any special comments.

Disclamour: This is not a Drag & Drop and ready to go resource. It is because we
have completely different player models with completely different textures on
them.
The gui images you can download are not identical to mine. I made a little change from mine
as I have to use the original in my own game. It will not be difficult for you to understand
what I'm doing even with the changed images.
This is a single player version. The multiplayer version will be released very soon.

This resource is made of three parts. The first one is camera. It has thease features.
1. Rotate around the target
2. Go up and down
3. Zoom in/out
4. Reset
The camera system is simple too. When the customization gui awakes, it finds its
initial position with the player eye vector's reverse vector. And then, everything
is done by some math. If you need to move its initial position higher, you will need to
change this part in function GameConnection::viewFront(%this, %camDistance).

%camAngle = %eyeRotationAngle + mDegToRad(180);    //Opposite direction

Next part is mesh show/hide. But I'm going to skip this part.

The last part is material change. At first, we need very simple engine code change.
It is just to save indices. If you're feel comfortable with many global variables,
you don't need this. I just have a tendency not to use global variables too many.
In guiBitmapButtonCtrl.h, add these variables and methods just after

public:                      
      GuiBitmapButtonCtrl();

//<HONG> For Cutomization
	  S32  mCurrentIndex;
	  S32  mMaxIndex;

	  inline void setCurrentIndex(S32 idx){mCurrentIndex = idx;}
	  inline void setMaxIndex(S32 idx){mMaxIndex = idx;}
	  inline S32  getCurrentIndex(){ return mCurrentIndex;}
	  inline S32  getMaxIndex() { return mMaxIndex;}
	  //<@--

In GuiBitmapButtonCtrl::GuiBitmapButtonCtrl(), add this.

//<HONG> For Cutomization
   mCurrentIndex   = 0;
   mMaxIndex       = 0;
   //<@--

Finally, somewhere in the guiBitmapButtonCtrl.cpp, add this.

//<HONG>
ConsoleMethod( GuiBitmapButtonCtrl, setCurrentIndex, void, 3, 3, "(S32 index) - save the current index")
{
	S32 index = dAtoi(argv[2]);
	object->setCurrentIndex(index);
}

ConsoleMethod( GuiBitmapButtonCtrl, setMaxIndex, void, 3, 3, "(S32 index) - save the max index")
{
	S32 index = dAtoi(argv[2]);
	object->setMaxIndex(index);
}

ConsoleMethod( GuiBitmapButtonCtrl, getCurrentIndex, S32, 2, 2, "return current index")
{
	return object->getCurrentIndex();
}

ConsoleMethod( GuiBitmapButtonCtrl, getMaxIndex, S32, 2, 2, "return max index")
{
	return object->getMaxIndex();
}
//<@--

Now, download all the related files from here and execute all of them.
Also, download the related gui images from here, and locate them in the art directory. In gui directory, you can find the demo video too.

In these files, server decides what material should be assigned to the clients when it is requested. To do it, server
has four script Objects. In these script objects, neccessary textures and mesh names are saved as strings.
To make it easier to understand, let's suppose a client requests the server to change its mesh from A to B.
When being asked, server tries to find out the mesh B in the meshObjectArray. When it finds it, the server changes every
textures from those of A to B. Now, if clients ask the server to change their texture, server can update them with the
changed texture data.


When doing the material change things, we have to pay special attention to naming convention.
We have to talk to the artists about this too. When we have proper, concisive and coherent naming
convention, we can make this customization process easier.

Maybe you'll wonder why I include 'c0' file so many places like in FirstMarkArray0 = "c0 f11";.
It is a kind of placeholder. It is very small image which is commonly used in many places.
It is because we have undesirable result when we try to insert image in a slot when there are
any empty slots with lower indices. In other words, if we want to add images in slot 3, the slot 0
to 2 must have any images.
Finally, you can test this resource by calling showCustomGui(true);.

Here is some test video.
Enjoy.