Change steering animation linearity | Gear shift sounds

Author Topic: Change steering animation linearity | Gear shift sounds  (Read 3602 times)

Something I found strange about Blockland vehicles is steering animations, or rather their linearity. While steering controls in Blockland are linear, the player and steering wheel animations aren’t. Steering animations slow down drastically towards the center, and sometimes it tends to throw me off when driving at times, also sometimes leading to overcorrection in steering when driving in first person. I was wondering if this was something that could be changeable, so that I could make it 1:1 or more linear to match the actual steering.

I was also wondering if it was possible to do gear shift sounds to pair with Support_EngineSounds. Would make things sound a tiny bit better, or if you want to play a turbo BOV every time you shift depending on the vehicle. It’s probably already possible through code (where you just tell it so that when different speed values are reached it triggers it (with the speed values matching the gear speed values in the ES config), as well as adding a delay so that gear shift sounds can’t overlap each other, and also defining what sound file is used from the preloaded audio database that gets played and what audio channel it’s on) by editing the vehicle data file, but I don’t know a whole lot about programming to do something like that myself, and if someone could figure it out it’d be much appreciated.

Speaking of which, how many audio channels can entities have maximum? Like 3?

the animation nonlinearity is most likely a model animation issue - the animator has to use linear interpolation for it to line up perfectly but that's not commonly known. this requirement is also needed for alignment of looking up/down animations for standard players too.

there are 4 audio channels in the game, and sounds automatically take up one channel when played. if all four channels are occupied and another sound plays, it overrides/is ignored based on the range of the other sounds.
playing music and sounds on objects has a maximum of 4 slots, like images.

Is there a way to manually adjust the animation, then? Whether through some kind of text file, an editor, whatever?

no, you would have to import the model and animation, edit the animation, then reexport. editing the file manually would require going through the file using the dts format specification, an example of which can be found here https://github.com/LuisAntonRebollo/Torque-3D-Wiki-Test/wiki/Dts-format-%7Bdocumentation-artist-guide-formats%7D (iirc the dts format version used in blockland has complete documentation somewhere)

Oof.

Well why haven't Filipe and NightHawk and stuff used linear?

Probably cause nobody noticed nor told them to

because blender by default uses a curved interpolation. honestly an easy mistake a lot of people make.