7 replies to this topic

[temnix]

Some creatures of mine have no avatars or invisible avatars but play animations over themselves, looped, with the 215 effect, of course. One variety of these is going to be trees - I think I'll make a spell for growing trees in areas. Now, being a tree, it must always be there, but visual effects reset to nothing when the party leaves a place and comes back to it. The creatures could be scripted to play them OnCreation(), but that only comes in if a game is loaded. If the party simply travels somewhere and returns, all of the trees will be gone. Any ideas for how to make the animations stick or renew?

[Miloch]

Well, make them actual area-embedded actors would be one solution.

[Creepin]

I wonder if it would work to assign your tree visual as corpse frame of a creature's animation and mark the creatures so that the corpse would not vanish for the game duration?

[Avenger_teambg]

I wonder if it would work to assign your tree visual as corpse frame of a creature's animation and mark the creatures so that the corpse would not vanish for the game duration?

 

Dead creatures don't have personal space, if that's ok, then this is a good solution.

[temnix]

I guess it's a possibility. I certainly haven't considered adding a new animation just for this purpose. My current plan is to use a ground icon without a highlight. They can be of huge size, and setting the pick-up-point (center) coordinates far out of the frame should make the item pretty much unpickable. For example, a 100 x 300 icon with the pick-up-point at -500.-500.

[Miloch]

It's set by the "can_lie_down=0" option in the animation INI file, but it doesn't work for all animation blocks.

Someone has taught me something about something I codesigned myself (animation INI files). Part of getting old, I guess. Though I'm not sure I'd call seated animations "dead." But in any case, yeah, you can change personal space via various INI settings (which are hardcoded to the animation slots in the legacy games).

 

I guess it's a possibility. I certainly haven't considered adding a new animation just for this purpose. My current plan is to use a ground icon without a highlight. They can be of huge size, and setting the pick-up-point (center) coordinates far out of the frame should make the item pretty much unpickable. For example, a 100 x 300 icon with the pick-up-point at -500.-500.

Make sure you don't break something via hackery in the process. The vanilla game generally handles icons up to 256 pixels, though I'm pretty sure EE extended that (and perhaps even vanilla PS:T). You can do it however you like of course, but I usually recommend the solution that requires the least amount of hackery.

[temnix]

That would be the solution to do nothing... Don't worry about icon sizes, they can be enormous. There are still limitations, and I take back my idea to move the pick-up point out of the dimensions frame - that creates visual glitches. Still, in combination with invisible creatures of unusual size and no circle they can accomplish something new. This engine hasn't been taken anywhere near its limits, and its language is not dead, even if it's old. Here, have this tank for illustration. Summon it in the game with the console - CreateCreature("tank"). It can take a crew of four and comes with a machine gun pivot!

Attached Files

•  TANK.rar   9.12K   97 downloads

Edited by temnix, 27 February 2018 - 06:17 PM.