I wanted to know if there was a way to make walking animations for vehicles in Bf1942. I've been making mechs and stuff, but no matter how hard you work at it, you can't get it looking just right using rotational bundles. so how would I do this with real animations?? Thanks!
ApacheThunder has done animations on PCOs before, but they were a set of flags for one of his boats for his BF Heroes mod. It is pretty sweet, but they seem to be merely for looks and not movement. If you want animated legs, they most likely won't move a collision mesh, but I could be wrong! Animations are not my strong suit. Kind of like the horse in FHSW and the mechs in the Parallel World mod. They use rotational bundles.
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Look at the AT-AT walker from the Star Wars mod. That thing has some sweet movement. If I remember correctly, it uses like 42 rotational bundles, and took around 2 years to develop.
A picture is worth a thousand words, but takes up three thousand times the memory.
Animated Meshes are doable on PCOs. But the issue is, collision meshes won't follow the animation.
But the bigger problem is the fact that you can't "control" the animations at all. The game ignores input commands even if they are specified in the animation states for the meshes used on the vehicle. You can get the legs to animate, but you wouldn't get them to only walk when the player drives the vehicle.
There may still be a way to fool the game into allowing it. I could revisit this in another round of experimenting to see if I can find a solution.
What if you had one bundle with the walking animation and one bundle with the standing mesh, and then you used a BIIIIIG rotational bundle on each that when you press the throttle, it rotates the standing one 90 degrees down, and the walking one 90 degrees up. (very quick) with a radius of about 99999 meters.
I don't think that would work very well. Though one idea I had is having the animated bundles tied to a lodObject that's tied to a dummy plane engine. I've noticed how the game can switch between a 3D prop and a 2D prop blur on throttle (max/minrotation/maxSpeed settings defines when this will occur). I bet something like this can be employed to switch to a idle mesh to a animated walking mesh. Though you still wouldn't be able to control the speed of the animation. But that might only be a minor issue if you can get it to animate on cue in the first place.
The tricky part is preventing the mesh from rotating. I think that's what would normally occur if you tried to use this via the engine prop coding.
