Sittable Chairs

[Wynna]

AL/Cipher, any word on what sittable chairs we'll be having officially? I'm building with this package: http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NW ... tail&id=43

I can remove it if it turns out to not be the answer, but for right now it seems to be working fine--at least for a university of magic. The one quirk that others might find disconcerting (or might not?) is that when a small PC sits on a large chair or vice versa, the chair destroys and replaces itself with the right size for the PC. The incredible shrinking/expanding smart chair!

Let me know if anybody out there has a better chair package.

Thanks!

[ç i p h é r]

Unfortunately, I haven't made any decisions about that yet, Wynna. I know it's an issue so I'm not opposed to adopting a system off the vault if it gets the job done. You can certainly use these scripts if you wish, but be sure to invoke them from the acf_plc_* scripts (if you don't know what I mean, I can illustrate for you) so that it'll be easy to remove should we build our own solution or integrate an alternative one that you would like to use.

I should note that Thangorn had been working on a system to handle this a little while back. A comparison by those in the know would be helpful.

Thanks.

[indio]

That's the same one I use Wynna.

[Thangorn]

the way to do it as I see it is to override the smaller toons sitting animations by designing new sitting animations for them that put them at the right height for your average normal-sized chair. Then add sitting on small chairs as a new animation for both the small and large PCs.

This is because on investigation, there's very little you can do with pure scripting to fix the sitting issue as there is no way to move/spawn anything along a z-axis. The sitting animation always "plays" with the character with its feet on the walkmesh.

the granny 3d animation plug-in is in now and if I was conversant with 3d animation or modelling, I'd work on it. Anyone else got these kind of skillz?

[Wynna]

Good to hear you're testing with it, too, Indio. At least my areas will work in the short term in your overall build.

Cipher, I don't call anything myself, per se. All I did was import the erf. I now just place a prescripted chair wherever I need. I think that's easier to remove than actually adding their script to our alf_plc script, should this prove to be a dead end in the future. If you'd rather I invoke them through our scripts, I have to ask for help in how to do that. No worries, though, if that's what you prefer.

Thangs, if I could help with 3d animation or modelling, I would, but I'm afraid I'm skill-less there.

[ç i p h é r]

It's really up to you, Wynna. Whatever you think is easier for you to manage.

Thangorn, if you can't create an object at a specific point along the Z-axis, can you scale an invisible object beneath the chair to the proper height? Those functions are available in 1.06.

[Thangorn]

I tried that.. the animation is keyed to the walkmesh it seems.. I experimented with spawning walkmesh placeables at the appropriate spot & height but because they weren't baked.. the toolset doesnt recognise them..

thats the problem in a nutshell you see, it wont matter if you spawn something at the right height unless it is walkable in the TRX file.. unless the devs hardcode something to do the job..

I can make prefab "big" chair's that allow little people to sit on them at the right height the only problem there is the big people sit a few inches off the chair.. not very immersive really unless you are in a wild magic zone

From investigating it, I'd say we need to add a hak with the correct anims, it should be an easy process (but will involve a fair bit of testing) for someone who is 3ds max conversant to change the sit anims height on the z-axis, even add kicking/swinging, hanging legs and feet for the little halflings and gnomes on the big chairs if they want to be really tricky. The real work would be in adding the anims to a hak & 2da format.