More Titan Projects > Icon

Community Project: Emotes

(1/3) > >>

Codewalker:
Apologies to the folks who have been working on MOV popmenus, but I'm now at the stage where we can begin looking at a better way to handle these.

What we need to build is a list of emotes (preferably with the names listed on the wiki) and map those to sequencer state bits.

Now, I imagine that very, very few people are familiar with what sequencers are or how they work. Long story short, they are the nuts and bolts of how the game looks at your character's state and decides which animation to play (a MOV). Here's some instructions on what needs to be done.


* Find an emote with a known MOV (the popmenu sources are a good reference for this). For this example, we'll pick /em AirGuitar.


* Grab my text dump of the player entry from sequencers.bin here and extract it. Open up the text file and search for the MOV name. It should be a line that looks like
    -------- Move 7688 --------
    Name = EMOTE_AIR_GUITAR_PRE
* Scroll down a bit until you find some lines that say Requires1, Requires2, etc. They'll look like this:
    RequiresCount = 3
    Requires1 = EMOTE (724)
    Requires2 = DANCE (411)
    Requires3 = TEN (699)
    Requires4 = EMPTY (0)
    Requires5 = EMPTY (0)

* The RequresCount line tells you how many are valid (the EMPTY ones are a good sign, too). If this move doesn't have any Requires, then it's probably the wrong one. In this particular case, there are 3 sequencer state bits being set: EMOTE, DANCE, and TEN. These are what I need to build a list of.


* Test your results using the developer preview of Icon here. That copy includes a new command, /seqbits. You can use it to directly set sequencer bits either on yourself or a target. Just put spaces between the bits, like this:
/seqbits EMOTE DANCE TEN
And voila! You'll be doing the air guitar. Success!
Why use state bits instead of MOV names? Simply, state bits can take other factors into account where MOVs can't. A good example is the emotes that animate differently when you're flying. Try /seqbits EMOTE BACKFLIP while on the ground, then try it again in the air and see the difference. A simple /mov can't do that.

Power animations are specified in terms of state bits as well, but I have a good source for those (powers.bin has them).

wyldhunt:
Well, looks like I'll shift course from popmenu tricks to this for now. I'm familiar with sequencer state bits in programming and had come across the difference between emotes and MOVs early on with Icon.

Codewalker, in what format do you want to maintain the list of emotes and their sequencer state bit-mapping and how should we share our contributions?

Codewalker:
Don't need anything real fancy. I threw together a shared google doc real quick, but don't feel obligated to use it if you think of something better.

A popmenu file (even a replacement for quickchat.mnu) is also an option. The /seqbits command will be a permanent part of Icon starting with 1.8 and is a good way to trigger particular animations. Sometimes which MOV is triggered will also vary for the same state bits based on the entity type (skeleton and rig) of the target.

MWRuger:
I'll try and help with this. It's been a while (26 years) since I did any coding, but this just seems like routine work not coding, just reading a dump isn't bad.


To avoid duplication, do you want to hand out a list or do you have some other method? Could just assign them by alphabetically A-C, D-F, etc.

Also when do you need them by? I work best with a schedule.

Codewalker:
Not sure how we'd divide them up since we don't have a good list of who is planning on doing what. You could always post to the thread with a particular range you're working on if you want to batch some.

Glancing at the sheet, I do see a couple of things. We don't really need to catalog the A_* animations, since those are usually redundant with the standard emotes, just with the FLY bit added (which is set by the game engine while you're flying). Same for the shield and weapon stances, etc. What I'm most interested in is the base version without those extra bits.

I don't have a set schedule. The first stage will probably be to make or see if someone puts together a replacement quickchat.mnu with the standard emotes replaced with seqbits commands.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page