Torroes_Prime

Hey, even super heroes have to pay bills. And the city sure doesn't pay 'em for busting crime.

anyone remember this?

DOH! sorry Longboard, I finished that project. I managed to get enough people to get it done. You can check out the finished product here:

City of Heroes: A Legacy of Sin

Well no. The Answer I was hoping for was something to the effect of "Its a mechanical apparatus that is strapped to the armor. While it draws power from the armor, it's fully removable"

But like I said, the answers I got don't derail my plans so I'll go with it. with a little luck, you'll see the finish result later this month.

Wow, it's even the Classic Enterprise too. Not the rebooted version. Who'd have thought that Kirk would order a bombing run?


Return!

Like I said, it happens. No Worries.

it happens Lousy. Just roll with it. I mean Lady Judgement just ignored my return with her submission. So what? It's just dumb stupid fun.

and the sick part is my account expires on the third and I don't dont if I can renew it right away.

if you can find objects in the game that are already in the possition and location you want a character in, it's a simple matter to replace the object with the intended character. lets say I wanted to replace the Miss Liberty contact npc with Lord Recluse.

You find the line of the demo that references the object for Ms Liberty:

0 128 NPC miss_liberty

and replace the model with that for lord recluse:

0 128 NPC signature_model_lord_recluse.

And there ya go. You now have a demo of Lord Recluse standing where Ms. Liberty stands.

Real simply. it's a little bit more involved when you want to use a player created character, but same basic concept.

It becomes tricky when you get into movement of multiple objects. If you look at the first three frames of the two pages I posted, I'll explain.

That was a demo of 8 characters walking a straight line past the camera in a sewer. Since there's no place in the game where this happens automatically (At least no place I can think of), I had to create a demo of it.

Getting the map data was easy enough. Then I marked out the starting location for the characters walking (11.54822 0.0 110.212692) and then marked the ending location 20 feet further down the sewer (30.745584 0.14 118.745584). But if I just set an beginning and end the characters don't move, they just blink. First they're at the one location then they're at the other. So I have to step it out, small incriments of change in the location data spread over a period of time. I figured that 40 seconds from start to finish would be sufficiently slow enough to show that the group wasn't running, but fast enough to show that they are a single group. And then I figure that it will take 10 steps per second to give a nice smooth transition of location.

So, the distance the character traverses: 20 feet, over a period of 40 seconds at 10 steps per second. so 400 steps at a change in position of 0.05 feet per step.

So I have to make a demo file of a character moving from:

11.54822 0.0 110.212692
to
30.745584 0.14 118.745584 and going through a series of 400 changes.

so that goes like so:
0 128 POS 11.54822 0.0 110.212692
100 128 POS 12.44822 0.0 111.212792
100 128 POS 12.64822 0.0 110.712792
100 128 POS 12.94822 0.0 110.712792
100 128 POS 13.04822 0.0 110.712792
100 128 POS 13.24822 0.0 110.713492
...

all the way till the first character reaches that ending point of the walk.

and then I had to that 7 more times for the other 7 toons in the demo.

Like I said, I know demo editing. I know how to accomplish it and I know how to trouble shoot problems in it when they arise. The reason I can't use a simple model substitution in this instance is because there are no locations with people/replaceable objects in it that matches the setting I'm using. And since I'm dealing with toons of differing heights, I'll need to deal with orientation angles, which are a little counter-intuitive due to how the game engine handles them.

It's kind of like dealing with CGI in movies. Since the dinosaurs/giant robot/alien monster isn't actually there when they shoot the film they have to give some sort of reference point for actors to look at. So you have stage hands running around with Card board cut outs and big head on top of their heads and all. It gives the actors something to look at so they have an eye line to where the thing will be when they edit it in later. Same problem here. If I want to look at the face of a character that isn't actually there, I need something for reference. Hence why I want toons that are approximately the same height of the characters they're standing in for. If I have someone who's 5 feet tall standing in for a crab spider, who is 8 feet tall, and I look at the head of the character that is 5 feet tall, and then replace that character with the model for the crab spider, I won't be looking at the head of the Crab spider. I'll be looking at it's stomach.

So I want stand ins that are about the same height of the character that will be in the final comic.