Pixel Perfect

Haha ... I could kiss you flachdrache ( but I won't ). The tool you suggested worked and I can now load it in UU3D and it animates correctly. Have tried a quick export to Leadwerks and apart from loosing the smoothing groups it works (I can sort that out later). It's enough to get me started with a known animated head and get the coding done to drive it. Many thanks!

Thanks for the heads up Mac, that did work but the resultant gmf file is just 92 bytes!!! Guess it didn't like what it found in the file Thanks for the offer Dan, I might need some help on the modelling side for sure If I can't set this up myself. Interesting that you are experiencing similar issues paramecij. I already have a model with facial animation working in Leadwerks but it just emulates speech movement; its not sophisticated enough to drive proper speech but demos that bone driven facial animation definitely works (as it should). That however is a single mesh. I believe the model I using is also available in the demo download of Dark Voices from The Game Creators, which is what I am trying to implement in Leadwerks. I've bought the full package (not expensive) to play around with it. It's basically a Lip Sync animation package which should work fine in Leadwerks once I've written the code for it. It relies on having a 3D head model animated with 9 specific phonemes for the speech part. You can then use their converter software to convert single channel wav files containing your speech to a sequenced and time stamped list of phonemes used to drive the animation. It looks pretty cool and quite acceptable for games. The mouth movements are simply interpolated between each phoneme. The package contains the original MAX model and rigs as well as the .x file. As previous stated I've managed to extract the animated rig and can combine that with the extracted meshes in Fragmotion, its just all of the weighting data has been lost. I'll have a play around with it today if I get a chance and see if I can at least get some movement going and successfully export it to Leadwerks. If it's the separate meshes that are causing the problem then I'll try it with the meshes combined into a single mesh. I think the separate meshes are to allow for individual eye and teeth movements allowing for things like smiling etc which would be hard to do if the teeth were fused to the lips.

Josh described the two options well. The above option was the one I used and it does work well. I simply coded a series of classes to support a generic approach to this with each breakable object type having a config file detailing the parameters and model parts. The forces needed to trigger a break could be configured along with whether the objects were explodable and or flammable and parameters set to control the propagation distances so flames and explosions could spread to adjacent objects. It worked pretty well although when the numbers of objects got large I did experience some issues with instability in the physics engine. All of the broken parts were dynamic physics objects in their own right.

Thanks for the input guys. The meshes appear to be separate meshes and consist of the head, the eyes (2 off) and the lower and upper teeth and yes, the animation is skeletal. There is a rig consisting of about 20 bones and this and the animation appears to be working it's just, as Dan suggested, the vertex weightings seem to have got corrupted in the import. If I can get anything to load it successfully along with the correct vertex weightings then I will have to redo it in Fragmotion which will no doubt be a tedious process as I've not have a lot of experience in this but if I want to apply the rig to any other models then I would need to do this anyway!

Hmmm, I can't even get the 2.5 version of 3dsx2gmf to work without it coming up with a 'User lib not found' error!

Hi Mac, I must admit I assumed that's what the meshconv.exe was calling to do the conversion but I'll give it a try on its own

I am trying to open a .X format model file which contains a facially animated head so I can convert it to gmf format and failing miserably to do so! It contains a series of 5 separate meshes plus the animation data. It opens and animates perfectly in the Microsoft DirectX viewer app, so I know inherently it works, however I can either open it in apps with importers that don't support x file animation in which case I get the 5 meshes correct or in apps which do support x file animation in which case I always get the face severely distorted and it fails to animate correctly! Apps or converters tried so far: meshconv.exe (Leadwerks Engine tool) - fails to export the animation - meshes are ok UU3D - Imports it all but head mesh is screwed up Fragmotion - Imports it all but head mesh is screwed up Milkshape - Imports the mesh ok but no animation (does not support animation import for x files) trueSpace7.6 - Does not even support x file import Deep Exploration v3.5 - Imports the mesh ok but no animation 3D Object Converter - Imports the mesh ok but no animation Blender 2.61 - Does not support x file format import (I believe 2.5 did but not multiple meshes) DeleD - Imports the mesh ok but no animation I believe the file was originally created in 3DS Max and exported using the PolyTrans geometry converter from Okino Computer Graphics. It would seem likely that head mesh is being deformed by the incorrect import of the animation data; as when the animation data is ignored by importers they get the head mesh correct. Clearly the microsoft app gets this correct. Does anyone else know of an application which can import animated multi-mesh x format files and subsequently export to other formats; other than those that I've tried?

I don't think its critical in any way but I dare say Josh will elaborate.

Basic destruction functionality isn't too hard to code yourself. Here is a link to a video I made years ago featuring breakable objects in LE2 (barrels in this case but it can be anything) which works along the lines you are suggesting: STRANDED - The Game: Exploding barrels . I seem to remember that wh1sp3r did some destructible stuff with buildings in the past too (possibly on the old forum). It would be nice to have some integrated destruction feature though; as Josh wetted our apatites for this some time back by posting a link to a video demoing destruction capability within Newton. I don't know what ever came of that!

I didn't realise you were making First Person Shooters Vickie !

That is phase 2 of the project, code is written and tested to do this at the moment as I demoed in the last video : Leadwerks-Eki One Integration Pipeline but required some additional code to control the animation information passed between Eki One and Leadwerks. As most people are now aware Artificial Technology have gone through some pretty major changes in the last two months and kind of dropped off the radar for a while whilst those changes went through. They are now comunicating with me again and we are working on completing this last phase. Code will be released to illustrate the basics of integrating their AI engine with a simple Leadwerks framework to show how a deployed EKI One project can then be used to control animation and movement within a demo level. People can then take this foundation code and adapt it to their needs.

I have Character Shop and have used it on a few other models including a dexsoft model but found I was unable to rig the model well enough just using Character Shop and had to bring in Fragmotion to finish the job. Also, there are no facilities for scaling the models to fit the skeleton within Character Shop so it's a little tedious. The animations provided are very nice (all FPS based and missing a few crucial ones like lying and firing) but the skeleton provided is very weird and non standard making it hard to use in other animation packages if you want to extend the animation set yourself. All in all an interesting package with a good set of FPS animations but not very flexible or adaptable. The only usage limitation as far as I am aware is the restriction on not using the provided RANGER model in a commercial game, you are free to use the skeleton and animations. Pic of skeleton provided applied to a dexsoft model (not as visually displayed in CS): I shared a similar vision to Clackdor many years ago and for all the reasons stated previously in this thread pretty much gave up on it as being simply 'just not feasible'. You really can waste ridiculous amounts of time pursuing this lost endeavour! Better to find a good provider of character models with a standard skeleton and have them develop the animations you need.

Nadolig Llawen (in Welsh)

I like it ... really nice work as usual Aily

If I understand this correctly he's not asking for the angle to the target as a straight line, which is what your suggestion would give but rather the vertical angle the projectile would need to be fired at given an x,y target position and a velocity to ensure the projectile hits it. Presumably this is a parabola flight path.

The comment was not aimed at you Rick or the basic premise of having community content or re-usable code, but more a response to what Ken was hinting at, that there are those who no matter what you do it will never be enough because they basically don't want to code but on the other hand don't want to team up with a coder. Sure we all rely on other peoples code, Leadwerks itself relies on the OpenGL Libraries and Newton Physics Libs, that's not the issue. If people want to get together and produce shareable code then that's great and admirable, but no-one can expect that as a basic right. If it happens it happens, if it doesn't it doesn't. That's life! That was all I was saying really.

I couldn't agree more, that sums it up nicely. The only thing I would add is the developer can aid this process greatly by providing things like a plug-in architecture for the engine tools, something that tends to act as a catalyst and encourages community development. I have to say I do have sympathy with Ken's point of view, which basically boils down to ... those who can do, those who cant b_i_t_c_h until someone else does it for them Too many people want it handed to them on a silver platter these days and as Ken points out (and I've previously stated) you learn little to nothing from that; assuming anyone is generous enough to do it for you in the first place!

You can use models in the Microsoft DirectX .X format, or the quake .md3 format. Not sure what the MIDI format is, other than the popular 'Musical Instrument Digital Interface' format !!!

Great advice Lupin, many thanks for that

I love the artwork on this, very nice indeed!

Nothing wrong with the bump mapping on the fairy though

The context in which the quote was taken was very much the context of designing one's own engine and coding it in order to fully understand it and be able to refine and alter it with ease. Sure its not necessary to code the component parts, but what happens then when you need to alter something. It's a different approach that's all. We all compromise somewhere, I have not attempted to write any of the rendering code preferring to leave that to Josh's expertise, but then I'm totally dependent on that functionality and cannot easily change it. I'm not sitting in judgement of anyone here or of differing approaches or techniques. But I have seen these same suggestions time and time again in many forums and they rarely succeed unless the vendor provides the framework for this themselves, unity being a classic example. In that I'm in total agreement with you Rick.

Its been an interesting read so far from Ricks original 'ask the question' to Clackdor's response which highlighted some key points to Rolands suggestions for a common DLL interface (almost DBPro style). In my case, my decision to design my own game engine framework and components rather than go down some common framework type route has been for the learning exercise. If you really want to learn the art of game engine design then it's almost a prerequisite to read up on the current techniques, design your own component parts and write your own engine. Not because this is necessary ... it is possible to have a common framework and plug and play type functionality, but simply because to be a good games programmer in the future and get the most from your current engine you really do need to understand the concepts underlying the component parts and how to code that functionality. It gives you a foundation that is invaluable and allows you to interface with others on a level you would not otherwise be able to do. There is nothing wrong with having a common framework and interface, in fact its almost essential for people not in a position to build their own. But it takes a lot of work to develop such systems successfully and people should be prepared to pay people for providing this. Open source software and the expectations it brings has to some extent degraded modern programmers into people who are almost expected to provide for others the things they are not prepared to do for themselves or prepared to pay for. I know of no other situation in life where people have such an expectancy of getting something for nothing. I'm not against a common framework and component interface, but it will always have its limitations and the providers need to be suitably motivated to put the work in to produce it. It would undoubtedly bring about a much more productive community in terms of game output though.

廃止された

The link is Heat haze and water and the interesting thing is that no combination of water, heat and or haze returns this link using the search facility. This makes searching for items without placing them in containers more of a challenge. I do like Roland's suggestions for a more practical form of grouping, that makes a lot of sence. Anything not falling into those containers could go into a Miscellaneous one.