Fighter Effects?

[achilleszero]

Where or how is the the animation for when a figher is set on a patrol or intercept mission? It doesnt seem to be a normal kf file with all the normal fighter animations. None of those actually move the fighter in real space, they just make it bob up and down in place. There also doesnt seem to be anything in the vanilla FPKs effects/attachables, like there are for bomber runs. So what exactly makes a fighter do its little circular holding pattern?

 

[General Tso]

I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for, but there are several fields in GlobalDefines.xml that look like they might do what you want. The ones that I noticed start with "AIR_IDLE" or "AIR_PATROL".

 

[achilleszero]

Thanks for the reply, but thats not quite what Im looking for. But its definately going in the right direction. What I am actually looking for whatever file (attachable/effect/Kf animation) that makes the fighter do that circular pattern above a city. For the bomber runs there are actuall nifs and animation files that control it in the assets/effects folder. As well as pretty much evry special effect that the units have. But I cant seem to find anything for the fighter????

 

[The_Coyote]

but exactly for this there are values in the xml (irrc there is the patrol radius, at which level the fighter shall fly [the z value], etc) - never saw another file controlling this so far - so if you find one, it would be really interesting - how they are handled by the game - - but could be in the dll or the exe [but this would be a question for the coders]

 

[General Tso]

Yeah, you can only control the height, speed and radius of the patrol with the GlobalDefines file. If you want to do something else, you will probably have to look elsewhere.

 

[achilleszero]

Hmmm, thats strange that whatever controlls it is so hidden. In the effects folders there all sorts of nifs/kfs that control those special animations like bomber runs, galley arrows, sub torpedos,etc. I would have thought it would have been just as easy for Firaxis to make a Kf that made a fighter fly in a circle than hide it in the coding.

Im not really interested in tweaking how the animation looks in game. I am making an opening screen for a mod, and want to make a plane fly around in a holding pattern. As I have it now the plane does the same thing that the birds do in the BtS main screen. Fly straight across the screen from left to right, and then a little while later reappear and do it again.

 

[The_Coyote]

not sure if it works for screens, but you could try to add a bone to the screen and add a rotation to this bone in the kf and attach the plane to this bone

 

[achilleszero]

Yeah that would work, as I have other bones in there that I have attatched transform controllers to. I was just trying to avoid the extra work of trying to get the rotation to look right at the scale of the screen. I just thought that since the fighter already has a nice clean animation where it flies in a circle, it would be way better if I could use it somehow. But I cant seem to find any references anywhere in the game files to what controls this or any of the fighter specials like intercepting other fighters, etc.