Spring RTS Engine

well ive been thinking of this thing about 3 months or what it would be great uber animations and just super easy for modders to animate so i think its a great idea

You Mean Skeletons for units?

hmm not really you can add bones in milkshape, 3ds max and most of modelling programs then you can make real good meches

This has been suggested before. Also: Blender is the only free modelling program I know of that supports animations

LOL, bones, anyways sounds good, I guess....

After I learn how to animate normally I'll see if bones are better

The skeleton system would be awesome, now at least people could create some good looking walk cycles for human units.

Anything that doesn't confine us to 1997 modelling and animation techniques is a good thing.

Felix the Cat wrote:Anything that doesn't confine us to 1997 modelling and animation techniques is a good thing.

Segmented models? Try 1993. Boned models with weighted vertices would work nicely with COB scripts since you could just have the script control bones instead of parts.

Muse wrote:The skeleton system would be awesome, now at least people could create some good looking walk cycles for human units.

AATA has a nice running one for their infantry.

There's supposed to be a trick for converting bone based animation into spring's animation script style. It involves alot of number copying... but still, it's alot more intuitive animating something with a skeletal structure then something without.

That's not really bone based though, what is requested are weighted vertices like Pxtl said.
I can say that it has crossed my mind already, but the unit model system has to be abstracted/cleaned up first and that is a nasty job.

We've been asking for skeletal animation for a while, as the current animation system is slow and frustrating, and is definitely holding back the progression, and aesthetics of mods.

After the GUI, I'd say that's the most important 'next step' for Spring.

(Other then the cross-platform stuff, which only interests me for the possibility of gaining new devs)

This would plug rather nicely into the existing system, let each bone act as a piece as well (only for scripting purposes, no segmenting models) and add a play-animation (and a stop-animation) keyword that uses an animation file, reads which bones are affected and animates those. All animation values would be relative to the script-given values so if e.g. the spine is twisted 90° by the aiming function the animation is added on top of that twist instead of overriding it.