The Great Apple said:
Ah right - I didn't remember the blue bits. Maybe they're treated specially in the DoW engine (team colour most likely).
If animation importing is possible that that would be just brilliant. The trouble would be that they animation overlaps might have to be different from the DoW ones, which could cause some glitches.
I'm sure Rabbit will know.
Rabbit is wise. Rabbit always knows.
Just kidding. There are basically three issues with animations that I see as possible obstacles to converting them to Civ4 animation. (Keep in mind that I'm not deeply knowledgeable with animation, so I could be just talking nonsense
)
First - Their frame numbers could be significantly larger, or just different. For example, if Civ4 walk cycle is 20 frames but in WH it's 100, and then attack cycle in Civ4 is 240 frames, but in WH it's 68, and so on. In such a case it might not be possible to simply automatically recalculate the frames, and they'd have to be redone manually.
Second - The number of bones they use. Civ4 is pretty conservative with bones, and if DoW has many more of them then once again, just removing the extra will not work (removing fingers is trivial, removing an extra spine bone or two can't be done without re-animating the unit). Now, of course you could export them with all the bones if it's only few more, but if they have for example facial bones then you might be looking at three, four times more bones than in Civ4, which of course will not be viable for many players.
Third - Animation blending. In Civ4 the animation in max are completely discrete and if there's any blending then it happens during the game. It's possible however, that in DoW, there is some work done on blending in max. Whether it's adding some properties to bones, or actually setting up the animations with some blending already, or something else. All these could basically mean that Civ4 will not properly understand what's going on.
The third issue is actually unlikely, since both games use the same engine they probably also do animations the same way. Of course, the first two issues, while very possible, should be easy to check and know right away if it's something to worry about or not. Ploep, can you tell us something on that account?
In any case, I'm gonna get DoW either this week or the next, and hopefully we'll be able to produce some nice content for WH.
