Also, Goober and I have been revamping the docking animation code,which is rather more awesome now!
This also sounds interesting. Can you elaborate?
Ok well firstly the 'docking' and 'docked' animation triggers now work correctly (turns out they've been broken for years
), as well as 'initial' animations for non-turret submodels. Also both docked and docking type triggers work correctly with ships that either start the mission already docked or arrive already docked. Previously they'd take no notice of whether something was docked or not, and when the ship undocked the animations would reverse, but from their _starting_ locations, basically breaking them completely.
The undocking procedure has been modified so that ships will not physically separate until the 'docked' animation types have all been reversed, meaning docking clamps will work correctly and not look retarded when undocking.
The system also now can handle when a ship with 'docking' or 'docked' animations is the dockee ship rather than the docker ship - meaning you can put animated clamps on cargo containers and they will now work correctly. Goob has also put a load of work into ensuring all contingencies are covered for cases where like, a docked ship explodes, meaning the docker ship must reverse the docking and docked animations etc. We're still working on finalising that stuff but it's close.
Oh and sound effects now partially work as described in the wiki. Submodels can have a starting, looping and end sound assigned as you can hear in the video, but i'm having a bit of trouble getting the location of the looping sound to update with the ship's overall motion. Pretty sure it's to do with a fault in the function in the sound code. :\
Goob also made a SEXP trigger for animations which i'm sure will be ridiculously useful down the track when we have more animation capable ships around. 
Why the SEXP? Can't you use script-eval in-mission to trigger a scripted animation? What does the new SEXP offer? Does it address the fact that, by using script-eval you trigger each and every one of the 'scripted' animations in the model?
I haven't actually been able to test this one just yet, but from reading the code it should allow us to trigger ANY type of submodel animation (including scripted ones), and also allow us to specify a specific subtype and a direction, and even specify whether or not to snap to the end position of that animation. I think it can also trigger all animations of a specific type. Quite useful and flexible indeed!
So, you could set up a list of possible animation scripts (say...type scripted) for each subobject, each with a different subtype. Then using this sexp with the appropriate subtype you could call any specific animation in any direction. Combining it with the logic system of the SEXPs, you could if you were so driven use this to make a mech walk correctly.
Anyway yeah, this is hijacking the thread a bit so I'll leave it there. Once we sort out everything and get it all committed and in an official build I'll write up some guidelines on how to use it all.
