[Blender] New DTS plugin

[portify]

You underestimate how bad I am at this but I thank you for assuming I had some other reason behind it lol.
It's because I have no idea how to call the animations. I work 95% off of looking how other people work, so when I encounter someone naming something ./look.dsq and ./root.dsq and I only have 1 file I really have no idea what to do. I can copy but have no understanding of the underlying mechanism by which blender or torque works. So for good measure, can I ask what I should type instead of sequence0  = "./root.dsq root"; ?

In the sequenceN definitions, the first word is the name of the file, and the second is an optional name to rename the last animation in it to.

If you export look and root to 'my_animations.dsq' and don't need to rename them, you can just do:

sequence0 = "my_animations.dsq";

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[PhantOS]

so if you leave the second part blank, it will just default to the sequence marker names in the model?

[portify]

yes

[PhantOS]

so if i have a dsq with 3 animations, uh, root, look and die, i can just put them on sequence0 and use Player.playthread(0,root,look or die) to play the thread?

[portify]

yes

[PhantOS]

amazing this makes stuff 100x easier

[Heedy]

Are you planning to soon work on:

• Animating using bones instead of empties
• Support for weight painting/vertex groups for bone influences
• Ability to use actions instead of one long animation chain

If any of these are already possible, let me know. I don't want to waste time making a playertype using EMPTIES if bone support is coming (hopefully) soon. I'm stuck between using this and 2.49, but since 2.49 has similar opengl glitches that Blockland was having it makes using it almost impossible.

I also get this annoying error when trying to export "selected objects only". It occurs if you don't select all of the empties while exporting.

[portify]

• Animating using bones instead of empties
• Support for weight painting/vertex groups for bone influences
• Ability to use actions instead of one long animation chain

Those are all on my wishlist. As you probably know, the last two both require support for bones, so that's the biggest thing. If I could support bones with similar feature parity I wouldn't even bother supporting bones, they're just a placeholder. I'd always like to work on bones, it's just a question of knowing how to do it.
Handling the overall structure is trivial, it's a question of getting actually correct data out of it (and whether or not it's even there), as Blender represents nodes entirely differently from Torque. I've had some ideas from time to time so it's not entirely out of the question, but it's nothing I can guarantee.

I also get this annoying error when trying to export "selected objects only". It occurs if you don't select all of the empties while exporting.

Can you try with the latest version from the dev branch (including commit ffb6d07)?

[Heedy]

Those are all on my wishlist. As you probably know, the last two both require support for bones, so that's the biggest thing. If I could support bones with similar feature parity I wouldn't even bother supporting bones, they're just a placeholder. I'd always like to work on bones, it's just a question of knowing how to do it.
Handling the overall structure is trivial, it's a question of getting actually correct data out of it (and whether or not it's even there), as Blender represents nodes entirely differently from Torque. I've had some ideas from time to time so it's not entirely out of the question, but it's nothing I can guarantee.

Understandable. If anything, I would love for the Action Editor to be included. Working with all the markers can get really messy with 40+ animations. If you have any tips from experience, please let me know.

Can you try with the latest version from the dev branch (including commit ffb6d07)?

I will try it out later.

[Barnabas]

Hey Port, can you add support for YXZ Euler animations? Using XYZ Euler animations seem to mess up my animations that would require me to rotate an object along the local Y axis

[portify]

Hey Port, can you add support for YXZ Euler animations? Using XYZ Euler animations seem to mess up my animations that would require me to rotate an object along the local Y axis

The only places the plugin cares about rotation mode after I've changed how the animation exporter gets data is when determining what nodes rotation matters for (and writing into existing curves when importing). I just updated it to try to make sure that it looks at all the rotation modes though (QUATERNION, AXIS_ANGLE, XYZ, XZY, YXZ, YZX, ZXY, ZYX), please try it out.

[Barnabas]

Works like a charm now! Now I can use other rotation modes too

[Rally]

Sometimes when I export to DTS I'll notice it'll jump to random frames like fire:end or reload:end instead of reference and in-game it'll be in whatever forgeted up position corresponds to the frame it jumped to until it animates, the only way I was able to get around it was by renaming the sequences to fire2 and reload2

[portify]

Sometimes when I export to DTS I'll notice it'll jump to random frames like fire:end or reload:end instead of reference

If you're including animations in the DTS then it jumping to the end frame of an animation is intended. It goes to the reference frame beforehand (during the export), but you can't see it.

in-game it'll be in whatever forgeted up position corresponds to the frame it jumped to until it animates

When did you last update the plugin? If recently, send me a .blend.

[Rally]

Another example;

Here's what it looks like in Blender, at the reference marker



Here's what it looks like in-game at the activate state before it's done any animations



There's no actual frame in the entire timeline that corresponds to this. There's never a frame where the cylinder is forward and the spring isn't extended