Jerking animations?

[rabid_psyduck]

This game is so sensitive, seriously, especially with animations. If you don't include enough frames with some animations, it will jerk around. This is especially true when you have an object rotating on 1 axis.

I found this out through trial & error, would've been nice to know ahead of time. At the time, I was trying to get big spheres to rotate correctly.

[titi]

What do you mean?

As far as I know, too many frames are a problem for glest. For an animation you better choose a little number of frames.
For example 8 or 16 frames for the whole animation. You have to slow down the animation speed in the xml-file to get a good result.

By this your animation is small( the g3d-file)  and the playback is not too cpu-intensive .

[encoish]

I mean, if an animation has like, 5 frames, then it should jerk around, especially if it was a walking animation. On the other hand, animations for something standing should do fine with 5 frames. What animations are jerking around for you and how many frames did you include?

[jbr]

Doesn't it depend on the number of frames per second of the animation?

[encoish]

Frames per second? Isn't that how fast the animation (or video) is executed? That depends on your system and the glest engine, right?

[rabid_psyduck]

Well that's interesting, less frames...  I should've said the game is sensitive with rotations.

For example: I was trying to get a cone to rotate around its true y-axis. With 20 frames, it will load up fine, but when you view it. It looks like a blob actually, and changes its shape.

If you want to see for yourselves, behold: http://http://www.mediamax.com/iljthefirst/Hosted/messedanim.zip Download this model & then fire-up the G3D Viewer.

[titi]

The glest animationsystem is not made for animations with 20 Frames per second! Try to reduce your Animation to 3 Frames per second and reduce the animation speed ( in glest). You'll see it's still looking good in glest.

[rabid_psyduck]

I wonder where I wrote 20 frames per second? I can't see that anywhere. It must be a 3DS Max issue because I just tested it again and you're so very wrong. Did you even look at the demo I provided?

And again, I've been talking about rotating a sphere. I tried 3 frames, 5 frames, & 10 frames. The less frames you use, the less it moves. The test sphere wasn't even rotating with 3-10 frames.

I'm about to blow your mind right now. The only way to get a sphere to rotate & display correctly is to use 200 frames. If the object isn't displaying correctly in the G3D Viewer, it won't in the game either.

Download the updated model: http://http://www.mediamax.com/iljthefirst/Hosted/messedanim.zip

[titi]

now i had a deep look at your work:

I made g2xml with your models to get a xml of it.
In it you can see the coordinates of the vertices for every animation.
What I found in your animation 1 is, that
It only has 4 animated frames followed by 16 with no movement!
( always the same numbers in the block of every frame )
That's exactly what you see, when you include the model in the game.
I think you made an error when exporting your model.
You exported 20 frames, but you animations length is only 4 frames.
Probabaly it's a 3dsmax problem . I dont know 3dsmax because I'm on linux, so I couldn't help you here.

[rabid_psyduck]

Oh duh, it all makes sense now. The plug-in is designed for 3DS Max 7, and I'm using it on 3DS Max 8. So that difference in version must be why my spheres & cones are exporting that way.

When you click on export, 1 dialog box pops up. It asks for the number of key frames, a tick-box if you want to generate a log file, and also the scale of the model.

OMG, this sucks real hard. I've been trying to avoid having to use blender, ugh... I happen to have Max 7, so I guess I'll try that out. I hope it will work correctly. If I stay stubborn, I won't be any different than those Microsoft dolts.

[nebuchadnezzar]

Hey Titi I posted in another topic but it was old so I didn't think you'd see it. I have a couple questions.
        Okay, i hope i'm up to date with Glest and all that, but I downloaded the glexemel win32 thingy, and I went to DOS box emulator and mounted the drive or folder whatever. After that I press c: and then dir. It shows me the directory and then I press g2xml.exe ufo.xml ufo.g3d. Is this correct? It ends up saying this "program cannot be run in DOS mode". Do you have ANY idea what's wrong? If so, please show me exactly what I should type in? Thanks a bunch for listening.

[jbr]

OK, first g2xml is the wrong program. It converts g3d [/i]to xml. You want the other way around, so use the other program in the directory.

[nebuchadnezzar]

Ok thanks for that but I tried both. Now I downloaded the GUI version, but when my model was transferred to g3d, I opened up g3d viewer and my model was sideways, had no texture, and had 3/4 of it missing.  

[nebuchadnezzar]

ANd how do you create a tga image? it says only uncompressed images are supported when I try to fire up Glest.

[jbr]

Ok, I don't know about images, but, assuming you're using blender, to make the whole model come out, you need to select every mesh, rotate it so it's sideways, and apply transformations before exporting. There are more detailed instructions in other posts.

[nebuchadnezzar]

Ok thanks a bunch! I appreciate the help.

[titi]

some hints for your problem "model was sideways, had no texture, and had 3/4 of it missing"

- only triangles are allowed in glest, you have to call "quads to treeangels" otherwise the quads are missing.
- If your units are are lying sideways, you shoul use a newer exporter ( www.titusgames.de)
- If the units have no texture, you probably forgot to add an Material to your texture. UV-Mapping is not enough.


See the commenst in the blender exportscript. and have a look at the glest wiki ( blendermodelling )