Okay... great info. Smiff, thanks!
I understand what you mean about the nested .b3d file. I was just toying with ideas on how to make a "level" that had all the animated objects along with the static scene itself, and then just being about to use the heirarchy to find the particular child, and possible include "entity" data in there that the program could use to decide what to do with the child objects that have animation. For a level where there are ambient animations like leaves blowing in the wind, screen doors flapping, curtains rustling, etc., it could be nice to just have the program find children that have these animations and run them randomly from time-to-time... or that sort of thing. ;-)
The issue I see with any sort of level animation is how to make a lightmapped level look good with real-time-lit objects in it. It seems to me like the RTL objects would appear "out of sorts", lacking shadows cast on them by the static parts of the level, or generally looking lit right. But those are other issues...
I've been looking at the .b3d file format spec. and it's not clear to me how I'd go about creating a .b3d file with multiple children each with their own animation(s). The examples are a bit sparse... ;-) Know of any more thorough docs than the one in the B3D official place?
Is there a command in B3D that will tell you how many "sequences" are available for a particular entity, and how many animation frames are in a particular sequence? It seems like you might have to read the .b3d file directly to determine these...
How would I logically structure a .b3d file to describe a scene with a parent object (cube1) and two child objects (cube2 and cube3) where cube2/3 have an animation, but it doesn't include cube1 (so they can be played independently)?
Thanks,
Ed
p.s. I've been trying to get gameSpace to produce .b3d files for animated objects (with not-so-great results) and it seems to produce a hierachy of bones and such (at least), but I'm not sure whether it has the capability to export separate child animations (since I don't have any objects that have that sort of thing). I did get it to load into PaceMaker, but it's obvious that gameSpace is doing something wrong with the joints.
See http://udel.edu/~ed/gs/asabeph.zip
I understand what you mean about the nested .b3d file. I was just toying with ideas on how to make a "level" that had all the animated objects along with the static scene itself, and then just being about to use the heirarchy to find the particular child, and possible include "entity" data in there that the program could use to decide what to do with the child objects that have animation. For a level where there are ambient animations like leaves blowing in the wind, screen doors flapping, curtains rustling, etc., it could be nice to just have the program find children that have these animations and run them randomly from time-to-time... or that sort of thing. ;-)
The issue I see with any sort of level animation is how to make a lightmapped level look good with real-time-lit objects in it. It seems to me like the RTL objects would appear "out of sorts", lacking shadows cast on them by the static parts of the level, or generally looking lit right. But those are other issues...
I've been looking at the .b3d file format spec. and it's not clear to me how I'd go about creating a .b3d file with multiple children each with their own animation(s). The examples are a bit sparse... ;-) Know of any more thorough docs than the one in the B3D official place?
Is there a command in B3D that will tell you how many "sequences" are available for a particular entity, and how many animation frames are in a particular sequence? It seems like you might have to read the .b3d file directly to determine these...
How would I logically structure a .b3d file to describe a scene with a parent object (cube1) and two child objects (cube2 and cube3) where cube2/3 have an animation, but it doesn't include cube1 (so they can be played independently)?
Thanks,
Ed
p.s. I've been trying to get gameSpace to produce .b3d files for animated objects (with not-so-great results) and it seems to produce a hierachy of bones and such (at least), but I'm not sure whether it has the capability to export separate child animations (since I don't have any objects that have that sort of thing). I did get it to load into PaceMaker, but it's obvious that gameSpace is doing something wrong with the joints.
See http://udel.edu/~ed/gs/asabeph.zip