Nagas (Lamia)

Civitar said:

Nomad, I've gotten animations looking good in Granny. So far. If he ever is finished I suggest making him very, very big to account for his slowness in falling when dying.

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Nexus is where the men are separated from the boys. Granny is just the inflatable dinosaur kiddie pool; the adults are all swimming in Nexus. Almost every problematic import I have done looks great in the Granny Viewer and then promptly turns into a soup sandwich once I view it in Nexus .

Nomad or What said:

That is a good question and my initial answer is that I don't believe so. They would just import in the wrong orientation - which would be kinda cool if you wanted slithering sidewinder nagas, but wouldn't solve the fire arrow issue.

Perhaps you could just delete the following animation graph from the .fxsxml file:

<AnimGraph file="ATTACK_CITY_TO_RUN_CHARGE_SHUFFLE.dge"/>

Combat units have this attribute, but workers (for example) don't. My guess is that if you do this, one of four things will happen:

1. It creates an error
2. Nothing
3. It doesn't allow the unit to attack a city
4. It works

Duh, a lot of help I am!

But, if you are curious you can give it a shot.

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Whoward69, nevermind this; I tried it and it doesn't change anything. I did notice that the fire arrows are unpredictable though, they come from varying directions regardless of the unit's orientation, sometimes (I suppose fortunately) from behind the unit. Back to square zero...

Oh I know. I've had that happen too many times to count. Still, getting into Granny is one step closer than having a soup sandwich in Granny. If I have trouble for too long, maybe I'll do a WIP thread like bernie14 is doing for his Hitler leaderhead.

Nomad or What said:

the fire arrows are unpredictable

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I can't make the 3D stuff work for me, but if I understood some of the threads I've read, the particle/projectile effects like fire arrows have to originate from a certain defined bone (which is defined in fx_triggers, I believe). If that bone isn't defined, the game doesn't know where to make the effect come from.

EDIT: See hugojackson18's MacTruck for an example of re-using an existing effect with a different unit.

Nomad, I finished converting dragon animations and drew up an fxsxml! A Nexus screenshot is in the spoiler...

Civitar said:

Nomad, I finished converting dragon animations and drew up an fxsxml! A Nexus screenshot is in the spoiler...

Spoiler :

As for the animations, I can't tell you what they looked like. I wasn't sure whether it was a demented dancing hedghog or a wounded slug running on five legs.

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I told you what to expect - just how deep into the rabbit hole do you wish to go?

Nutty said:

I can't make the 3D stuff work for me, but if I understood some of the threads I've read, the particle/projectile effects like fire arrows have to originate from a certain defined bone (which is defined in fx_triggers, I believe). If that bone isn't defined, the game doesn't know where to make the effect come from.

EDIT: See hugojackson18's MacTruck for an example of re-using an existing effect with a different unit.

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whoward69, I think you found the "any graphics experts" you were looking for...

Nutty, you are correct - from what I now understand from hugojackson18's thread I have successfully edited the nagas to make the effects work correctly.

whoward69, replace the .fxsxml file for each naga and add the .ftsxml file from the attachment and they will work correctly; I will update the download files and post a correction.

Thanks Nutty for leading me in the right direction to the solution!

bouncymischa said:

I dunno, between the scorpions and these, I'm reeeeeally tempted to make a fantasy desert kingdom civ now. I wonder if I could make spellcasting animations work with these...

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I believe so; as I have recently learned, you can assign bones to effects using the .ftsxml file. I have edited the download recently to default to warrior effects (more specifically, the city attack effects) so you may wish to download the updated version. Here is the relevant "trigger" information from the .fxsxml file:



and following is one of the lines from the .ftsxml file assigning the bone to a particular effect based on a specific "trigger" action:



If you need the list of bones that are used for this mesh in order to assign effects to particular bones, just let me know.

Nomad or What said:

whoward69, I think you found the "any graphics experts" you were looking for...

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Many thanks to all concerned

I'll give these new files a go in the next couple of days

Can I get one of these?

Civitar said:

Can I get one of these?

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OK, here ya go

ONE THING, however, and it's a biggie. I am learning a lot about custom units, particularly with regard to their event effects (i.e., "triggers"). Thanks to whoward69's request to correct the city animation effects for the Nagas, I have discovered that there are a few things that must be done when importing custom units. Otherwise, the effects will never work properly.

One of those problems is scale. Fortunately, the Nagas scale correctly (i.e., they import at roughly human scale so I use the same scale as a Civ V unit). The centaur, on the other hand, was about 1/10 human scale when imported so I scaled it 10x in the ArtDefines. This is fine for appearance in game; however, when using special effects, the effects are ALSO scaled at whatever multiplier is used. This created some GIGANTIC fire arrow, sword, and dust trail effects once I applied .ftsxml triggers to the centaur. Perfectionist that I am, I went back and re-scaled the original unit and every animation to get it to appear correctly.

There are some tricks to doing this, as it is not completely straightforward. Fortunately I had already discovered most of these tricks with all the grief I had converting the scorpion unit. Also, it may very well be possible to scale down the effects somehow in the .ftsxml file so that it offsets the unit scale multiplier. If there is, I haven't figured it out yet.

So just a warning before you go through all of the trouble of converting the dragon, only to discover that you will need to re-scale it later on down the road - along with 41 animations...

Thanks for the warning! Fortunately, the dragon is about human size too (in Blender and Granny at least) so all flames from his mouth should be the right size (for a Godzilla that is).
If I'm having trouble with the ftsxml, should I talk to you or Nutty, in your opinion?

Civitar said:

Thanks for the warning! Fortunately, the dragon is about human size too (in Blender and Granny at least) so all flames from his mouth should be the right size (for a Godzilla that is).
If I'm having trouble with the ftsxml, should I talk to you or Nutty, in your opinion?

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You can talk to me; I pretty much have a decent understanding of how they work now. My post here will probably explain everything you need to know.

Civitar said:

Can I get one of these?

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Only if you start a Dragon thread

Malheureusement, I'm still getting texture issues...but those are a lot easier to fix than animation issues.

Double post, I know, but....