[Nuke]

anyone who has done any descent 2 modding should know about how descent 2 handelsanimation of robots. it used a bunch of different positions for each subobject of the model. when the robot changed behavior (for example attack or getting hit) the objects would intrepolate to the position associated with that behavior. i think that we could accomplish the same thing in freespace except instead of trigering the object changes by ai behavior, it would instead be trigered by certain events (like swithcing to a certain weapon bank or firing afterburners). through this we could accomplish things like gun ports opening  and afterburner irises. posibly even have thruster flames that pivit when you turn your ship.

also if you had gunpoints on your wings and your wings fold up, the gunpoints go with the wing. or if you had guns on rotating ship sections.

[Solatar]

That would be cool for a gatling gun. the barrels would rotate. You could make an X-wing also. witht eh S-Foils opening and closing

[penguin]

Look at some of the design sketches in the credits (forget if it's FS1 or FS2 -- probably FS1)  The GTB Medusa, for example, has bomb racks that tuck under when not in use; I think a few other sketches have "opens in combat" indicated on them as well...

[Nuke]

i wated my valkyrie mk2 to have folding wings. the ship has four nacel style engines blended into its wings with the guns blended into it. each wing would have had 2 sets of joints on the inside of each engine and joints and another set on each winglet. i was thinking that everything would fold out as you got closer to max speed.

another example, klingon bird of prey. i thought about modeling one, but i never got around to it.

[Raven2001]

I would really need that kind of model animations for CIM... specially the barrels rotating when fired...

[vyper]

well, by the by, another concept sketch shows the Lilith or Cain actually "opening" its forward arms when in battle... or something like that

[Mehrunes]

I-War 2 uses Lightwave scene files to handle model animation, among other things. Models are parented to animation channels that describe their motion. Several of these channels are called by the game for some basic animations, such as the 'heading' and 'elevation' channels for turrets. Any of them can be called by script for whatever purpose deemed necessary. The channels themselves can control translation, rotation and scale.

 With this already available to some extent in Descent it should be somewhat easier. One important thing to consider is what events should trigger which animations. On weapon fire could handle rotating gun barrels, or even barrels that recoil when fired. What would trigger folding wings on the Valkyrie MkII, keypress to sexp?

[Nico]

I think descent uses key positions, and the game just calculates the transition between the key positions.

[Fry_Day]

I believe it's called 'keyframe interpolation,' and from my little peeps into the code, FS2 has functions taht could be used for keyframe interpolation

[Nuke]

i think that there is room for sexp executed movement scripts. especilly for cap ships (such as the sathanas). you would also have built in events for stuff that is used frequently if its on a by position basis you can place a movement list in the ship table entry. it would look something like this.

$position:  1               ;name of position (referenced by built in movements and sexps)
+sobj:         wing01    ;name of subobject
+translate: 1 -10 0.5  ;movement (relative to original position)
+rotate:      15 30 45  ;rotation (relative to original)
+sobj:         wing02    ;you can specify entries for multiple subobjects
+translate: 1 -10 0.5
+rotate:      15 30 45

for model reoreintation to work correctly the modeler must make certain that subobject's center is where the subobject should pivot. if the subobject is child to a moving parent then that subobject's original origin and orentation should always be relative to the parent. absolute movements should be avoided.

Built in movements should be worked to perfection, and should not allow for any errors. sexp triggered movements should not be allowed to co-exist with built in movements unless they do not reference the same subobjects, this could invite error (if a sexp opens a docking bay door, then a built-in movement should not be allowed to open the door, although docking bay dors would be better off if they were triggerd by built in events). there should also be a sexp that restors a model's original positions.

for gunpoints to traslate with objects you should be able to specify which gunpoints will translate with which subobject. the $transpoints tag specifies which points are linked to which object.  it's format would reference subobject and a series of numbers that specify particular gunpoints. (0 for gun, 1 for missile), bank number (0-3), and point number 0-whatever number of firing points there are in the mentioned bank. it would look like:

$transpoints: leftwing, 1,2,3 ;gunpoing 3 in the second missile bank will translate with a subobject called leftwing.

a -1 means all points in that section will move so this:
$transpoint: rightwing, 0,-1,-1
will translate all gunpoints with the rightwing.
several would bee needed if wou had several moving gunpoints.