Animations

[dvlenk6]

<Animations>...</Animations>

Does that work on ships too?

[Fossaman]

Fossaman sincerely hopes it does...

I suppose you would have to animate the bitmask, too...

[dvlenk6]

Well, I was thinking of a big blimp floating along with my screenname plastered onto the side, flashing in gaudy neon lights...

From looking at the xml of the Corporate Hierarchy, the animations look to be image overlays w/ independent masks, so I believe that if the outline of the overlayed portion exceeds the edges of the station (and hopefully ship), that you would have to animate the mask in sync.

Could be wrong about that, and the animation might be limited to being within the bounds of the original station image.

[BlackPheonix]

animations on ships would be really cool....

[Yugi]

Well, animations can already be done on stations (think trading post). I don't see why it wouldn't work on ships.

[dvlenk6]

Because a station is one stationary image, ships are twenty images that are constantly replacing one another as the ship rotates.

The animation placement looks to be similar to the way exhaust images are placed. If that is so, they should be able to work.

[OddBob]

You can already animate the entire ship graphic.

It's done the same way as the explosion and other animations you just have to do it twenty times.
The facings are in up/down columns, and the animation frames are in left-right rows.

[george moromisato]

Unfortunately, the <Animations> tag does not work for ships right now.

But I believe OddBob is right: You can animate the entire ship graphic (though I've never tried it nor have I ever heard anyone else trying it).

[OddBob]

I've done it a few times for mods, but admittedly only with a ship animiation that was the same for every facing.

[dvlenk6]

O.K. How is the xml for that?

Code: Select all

<Image imageID="&rsShip;" imageX="0" imageY="0" imageWidth="80" imageHeight="80" imageFrameCount="0" imageTicksPerFrame="0"/>

imageFrameCount="number of animation frames?
imageTicksPerFrame="pause between animation frames"?

Does the animation reset to the first frame when you rotate your ship?

[Psycholis]

Sorry to thread hijack, but those ship graphics are *beautiful*, dvlenk6. It took me a few hours just to make one ship, so I can appreciate the effort that went into making all those.

[enno]

wahahaha, cool graphs on the dragoon and angel ships dvlenk6, and i love that xeno base graph. ooohhh.. dont forget about the nadesico.... awesome....

but i had an input if i may ( ) how a bout a line of babylon 5 ships graphics.

anyway, back t the topic, how do you code the five frame of the sapphire yatch rotating on one spot, coz that would make each of the 20 frame added four columns, so far i seen code of either rotation only or animation only ( coorporate trading post advertisement)

[Yugi]

but i had an input if i may ( ) how a bout a line of babylon 5 ships graphics.

Damn, I was going to ask for that

[FAD]

O.K. How is the xml for that?

Code: Select all

<Image imageID="&rsShip;" imageX="0" imageY="0" imageWidth="80" imageHeight="80" imageFrameCount="0" imageTicksPerFrame="0"/>

imageFrameCount="number of animation frames?
imageTicksPerFrame="pause between animation frames"?

Does the animation reset to the first frame when you rotate your ship?

Animation works with ships, I just made a UFO mod with revolving lights and it doesn't matter with the ship rotation, it works in any direction-and if you sync the images correctly, the animation will be flawless. For each rotation of the ship, the animation starts with the first image section in that row on through to the last and if you maintain that position, the animation will repeat continuously.
The animation looks purty darn'd kewl too!

All you need in the code for it to work is; imageFrameCount="X" (where X is the number of images that produce the animation) and imageTicksPerFrame="X" (where X is the rate at which the animation cycles. 0 being the fastest)
The beef of the animation is the image file and its mask. Huge files BTW! The BMP mask for my UFO is 2MB.
As Oddbob previously stated, "The facings (ship rotations) are in up/down columns (like all standard ship images), and the animation frames are in left-right rows." And it can be done all in one image file. So in essence, I have 4 ship images all in one, since I used 4 animation sequences.

I'd like to upload my UFO mod in the new mod site but the site errors out and won't upload it.... Must be too big of a file.

[Yugi]

I'd like to upload my UFO mod in the new mod site but the site errors out and won't upload it.... Must be too big of a file.

Yeah, the file limit is 500Kb.