Shields not turning off

[BotHunter]

Uploading now....

[BotHunter]

Soda. Is that the key to genius?????

[Vilespring]

I need to invest in some SODA!!

[BotHunter]

Lol! it would boost the coolness of the mod!

[Apache Thunder]

Indeed it is. I don't get much done without it.

[Apache Thunder]

Ok. I might have found why you were having problems. You seemed to have defined the shield PCO more then once. The AX version defines the PCO with the same name. This is bad news because whatever you had set on that PCO overrides all the changes I was trying on the US version. Your AX version does not have the TimeToLiveAfterDeath command specified. So it may have defaulted to 5 or 10 seconds and it was ignoring everything on the US version. I removed it along with the duplicate spawner. I will have the RFA sent back to you shortly. If however you are willing to wait, I could setup an invisible AnimatedMesh for the shield generator so that the dynamicShadows will animate.

It likely won't stay in sync with the visible mesh, but it would certainly would be an improvement. You could make it visible and hide the ones that provide collision, but note that collision meshes can't be animated to move along with the LOD mesh.

EDIT: Confirmed. I was able to get it to vanish immediately on death with the effects no longer lingering around.


EDIT: Done! I renamed the AX version to make it unique and now everything works. I even threw in working shadows for you.



Download Link: Area51_FixedFiles.rar

I included the max file of the skinned meshes (Max 7 compatible) for you to look at if you want.

I only included the files I changed. Mainly the other things I did was improve view distance of the shield effects and added the alphaLodDistance command to the shield bubble geometry used on effect.

[BotHunter]

WOWOWOWOWOW!!! THANK YOU SO MUCH!!

[BotHunter]

how did you keep the animations in sync with the spinners?

[Apache Thunder]

A lot of testing. I tweaking down the animation speed until it matched the visible spinners. I think I ended up trying about 10 different speeds until I got it just right.

I then made the animated Mesh invisible by adding "alphaTestRef 1" to the materials for the RS file. The createInvisible command can't be used since it causes the shadows to stop animating.

It moves at the same speed, but I have noticed it never starts in the same place as the visible geometry. This is because sometimes the object will be out of view distance. With rotational bundles they are active the moment the object is spawned and never stop moving if the continuous rotation command is used. However animated Meshes don't animate when they are out of view distance or otherwise culled out. Thus they will never be 100% in sync with the rotational bundles. But the shadows are 2D and would not be very noticeable at all if the shadow mesh isn't completely in sync. The only important bit is that they rotate at the same speed and that part I got pinned down to a very accurate number.

[BotHunter]

Wow! What if you took out the normal spinners, and made the animated ones visible? would that work?