Nexus Modding > Mod Development / Released Mods
Adding custom animations
Mularac:
Guys, I'm loosing my mind here. I don't know what the hell I'm doing wrong but the effect will just not play right! I know it's not the coding, and since my photoshop skills are pretty much non-existent (I even used gimp instead of ps). So, would it be too much to ask for a hand with it? If anyone is willing to help I can upload the big tga file withouth the alpha channel...
jstubbles:
Sure thing man, I can take a peek at it.
Mularac:
ok, great! thanks!
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=P2C6XT4L
jstubbles:
This is a warp effect? Hmm. I haven't messed around with those myself, but the animation itself plays fine. I just replaced my flak explosion with your warp texture, to get this:
All of the frames of animation play just fine, though the texture itself is a bit fudgy (haloed). My mod_ani looks like this:
--- Code: ---Ani 42 "fxwarp" #BL_ADD #APM_ONCE 64 8 8
--- End code ---
Arparso:
Seems I made a stupid mistake in my "tutorial": , the last number you enter in your animation's line in the mod_ani.efx, isn't the number of rows with animation frames, but the total number of rows fitting into the texture. In this example it should be 8, because 8 rows of 256x256 frames fit into a single 2048x2048 texture, although you're only filling 6 rows with actual animation frames.
I've tried the version without alpha using additive blending and while it looked better than on jstubbles screenshot the effect doesn't really look great at the edges yet:
--- Code: ---ANI 47 "fxwarp2" #BL_ADD #APM_ONCE 45 8 8
--- End code ---
--- Code: ---PARTICLE "Warp2"
// 45 frames / 25 fps = 1.8 seconds playtime
duration 1.8
SEQUENCE
type 47
fps 25
startframe 0
size 50 // no need for size adjustments, opening/closing of the wormhole/subspace/whatever is done in the texture
END
END
--- End code ---
Another (future) issue could be the fixed nature of the effect itself, depending on what you're going to do with it. It'll be hard to adjust the playing time of the warp effect without recreating the texture each time you need more frames. For the Freespace mod I had the luxury to create a looping warp effect, which allows me to keep the wormhole open for as long as I wish to. The opening and closing animation is done completely by a simple size adjustment in the particle effect definition (see first post). The texture in question would look like this:
--- Code: ---ANI 40 "fxwarp" #BL_ADD #APM_LOOP 15 4 4
--- End code ---
This gives you the advantage of just having to edit the particle effect to change the duration of the open wormhole or you could also create multiple different particle effects with different lengths all using the same texture. You're also not limited by texture size as much as before: a 2048x2048 texture can hold a maximum of 64 textures the size of 256x256... with the default playback speed of 25fps, this limits you to a maximum of 2.56 seconds of playback time. You can slow down the effect and gain some playback time by altering the fps-setting in the particle effect, but the lower you go, the less fluid the animation will look... and that's a very bad idea for big animations such as wormholes or warp effects. If you make it into a looping effect you won't have these issues, since the animation constantly repeats itself and you don't have to worry about opening/closing animation frames taking up valuable space. For example, the warp effect texture for the Freespace mod uses 512x512-sized animation frames, which give them just enough detail to look good even when being very close to the camera.
Only real disadvantage of a looping animation is, if you're going to need to have a visually complex startup or ending effect, which can't be done using size, rotation, color or speed adjustments in the particle definition in Nexus.
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