Some questions about animated textures and other stuff.

[Cremuss]

Hi there !

I've been toying with some models recently and before texturing them, I was wondering what's up with animated textures

I know that there are tanks animated rolling tracks but I don't know how to do them.
Roughly :
- How can I do animated texture ?
- Can I play an animated texture for a special event (like firing) ?
- I mainly want to do some glow animations and also moving mechanics parts (like spinning gears or something like that), is it possible ?
- What if I have animated textures on every models with an idle animated texture playing in loop, does it have a high impact on performance/fps ?

I'm also wondering what's up with unit script animation. Last time I checked (like 2 years ago), animations were still made using cob/bos and we needed a cob compiler (which was only avaible on windows ).

I think that now you prefer doing units script using Lua so I was wondering if there are any tools to help me to do that ? I saw a blender s3o exporter with a lua animation exporter. Does it works well ?

I also seen that obj's file format have been recently supported too so yeah I don't really know what's the best for me to go now :)

Thanks for helping
Cya

[Master-Athmos]

There are no animated textures - the track animation is just a trick. In order to get that effect multiple planes for the tracks were done and each plane gets a slightly different position in the UV space. As you can hide / show certain parts of a model in Spring what gets done in the code is to switch through those planes by hiding the recently visible one and showing one of the others instead. As that gets done many times per second you don't see a stop-motion thing but a fluid animation...

Considering the animation scripting: Yes you now can use Lua instead of cob/bos. There exist no tools to help you with Lua though but in the end and with the Wiki it's not too big of a deal to understand it (especially with examples of existing scripts). I can't say anything about the blender plug-in. I even didn't know thesleepless already did a Lua version of it - I thought there'd still be just the bos/cob one...

I also seen that obj's file format have been recently supported too so yeah I don't really know what's the best for me to go now :)

Yeah the idea is to just put all the Spring relevant info in an additional Lua file. I'm fine with s3os so I'll stay with them I guess. I also don't know if that obj support already is completed and stable...

[Cremuss]

Ok thank you Master-Athmos