-= Gametoast.com =-

ok i got 2 questions

1. is it possible in space maps to have the battle ships (the ones you spawn in) move around the map? kinda like how you can make the frigates move around the map in space felucia?

2. can you have a time lapse in a land map? like make it go from day to night in say 10 minutes, then go from night to day in another 10 mins, then continue the day cycle process throughout the entire map by some sort of coding in the lua? or is it not possible?

1. Totally possible. Whether you'd want to is another question. I'm thinking of ZE animations. A side-effect is that while the ship moves, you don't. It slides under you until you hit a wall.

And BTW, frigates move on all space maps with them. Mostly.

2. Not sure. Someone asked about loading random skydomes....but those skydomes are static. Perhaps if you made a skydome mesh with a scrolling texture, then it'd be possible.

the first is seen in some of the campaign space maps especially with the cis frigates the thing is you have to animate the turrets on them as well not that hard to do but still annoying the second is pretty hard to do not sure it's possible

Yankfan, for the first point, he's talking about cap ships with hangers, not frigates.

o woops yea then you'll just slide under them

off topic if you're standing on say an animated platform will you go up when the platform goes up and kinda down if the platform goes down slow enough?

If the platform goes up or down too fast, you glitch through it. If it goes up faster than jump rate, you go up with it but are unable to jump until it stops. If it goes down faster than fall rate, you fall. If it goes down slower than fall rate, you bounce.

The first is actually impossible, since you cannot animate groups of objects, only one at a time, so your cap ship would be in pieces by the time it was done

computergeek wrote:The first is actually impossible, since you cannot animate groups of objects, only one at a time, so your cap ship would be in pieces by the time it was done

You're right, but for the wrong reasons. The only way you can animate things are by animation groups (although usually they are just "groups" of one). Assuming all their orientations are the same way, you can animate everything in the same group, but even if they aren't, you can still create a number of animation groups that play at the same time and sync up.

However you find problems when you have to worry about moving things like paths and regions, which cannot be animated.

Yeah, that was my first thought too. You can only animate objects, so it doesn't matter if you can move the ships because the regions and spawn paths don't move.

is it possible to turn nodes of??? like say i made spawn nodes all along the path of the moving cruiser if i timed it exactly could i turn off certain nodes with a code in the lua? that way only the nodes allowed would be allowed to be active? or is that impossible as well?

Nope, not without extremely complex lua coding, and even then probably not. It's certainly not worth the hundred+ hours just to make the capital ships move.

Teancum wrote:Yeah, that was my first thought too. You can only animate objects, so it doesn't matter if you can move the ships because the regions and spawn paths don't move.

Hold on. What if you had a capital ship with no CP on it? Then, in place of a CP, you have something like an AT-TE. Those things you can spawn from, and they move. I've never tried putting ZE anims on one, but I don't see why it shouldn't work.

Of course, somewhere else you'd still need a stationary CP.

Fiodis wrote:

Teancum wrote:Yeah, that was my first thought too. You can only animate objects, so it doesn't matter if you can move the ships because the regions and spawn paths don't move.

Hold on. What if you had a capital ship with no CP on it? Then, in place of a CP, you have something like an AT-TE. Those things you can spawn from, and they move. I've never tried putting ZE anims on one, but I don't see why it shouldn't work.

Of course, somewhere else you'd still need a stationary CP.

You can't use procedural animation on vehicles. And you still can't animate regions.

Someone will correct me if I am wrong but... if a frigate is "remade" as vehicle with weapon sections and is given a spline, it would save a lot of ZE work but will give you more XSI and exporting boredom.

Too bad you can't just give those frigates some interiors, I recall the large vehicles in Battlefield 1942, even if you could freely move inside them (like in a helicopter) you still had no friction over them.