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Posted: Sun Jan 24, 2010 3:31 am
by LactoseTolerant
*dusts himself off*

Anirk.

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Posted: Wed Jan 27, 2010 9:24 am
by LactoseTolerant
POW

Mid WIP. x3 Speed.

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After some trial and error, i've made the cannon so that it can burrow through and disintegrate the target after it's been cored. Battleships as large as the Cronus just "goes away", along with most of my previous ships' sections in 1 shot. In short, it's the Mythbusters' Cement Truck Solution :lol:

Posted: Wed Jan 27, 2010 11:09 am
by Corporal Jomn
Wow, nice transformation there. I didn't quite get your explanation, could you show a pic of what you mean?

Posted: Wed Jan 27, 2010 12:04 pm
by Danny420Dale
Nice triggers, but I have two burning requests: I want to know what kind of gun it is, and I want to see it shoot.

Posted: Wed Jan 27, 2010 12:42 pm
by Squishy
Smooth out some of the sudden movements with the smaller pieces.

It's looking great so far.

Posted: Wed Jan 27, 2010 1:14 pm
by Rodgun
Ok, just a nooby question here. How do you get to record GIFs of the trigger effects?

Posted: Wed Jan 27, 2010 1:25 pm
by LactoseTolerant
Corporal Jomn wrote:Wow, nice transformation there. I didn't quite get your explanation, could you show a pic of what you mean?
Danny420Dale wrote:Nice triggers, but I have two burning requests: I want to know what kind of gun it is, and I want to see it shoot.
I'm still working on perfecting the Tac Nuke Lancer. The premise is that you can shoot through the enemy (to a certain degree) like a Railgun, but also that it will spread damage to surrounding areas. The current version has a few Tac Nuke launchers triggering each other so that one fires "slightly" after the other.

There's alot of triggers to be had yet, this is only mid-stage.

*Kinda* like this.

http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/723/hellionfire.jpg

Quite lethal at this stage, but sometimes all the rounds detonate at once, and end up just shearing off one section.
Smooth out some of the sudden movements with the smaller pieces.

It's looking great so far.
I had to compress the .gif to a reasonable size, that's why the little tidbits on the cannon "jerk out" :? .
Ok, just a nooby question here. How do you get to record GIFs of the trigger effects?
/slaps stickies on Rodgun.

Use Shift+F9 in preview mode, set up the frames captured and skip rate, start it and activate your trigger.

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It now has a name: Hellion!

Trigger setup so far.

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Back is slightly asymmetrical :wink: .

Posted: Fri Jan 29, 2010 10:51 am
by LactoseTolerant
It is done. Bump.

The Hellion.

I've sliced up the animated parts so that it's easier to load, and won't bog down your computer on this page. It's runtime is 475 frames between reloads.

The Hellion in it's loaded form.

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It's main battle cannon. (x2 Speed)

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It's side accelerators, used to accelerate the round at hypersonic speeds. (x2 Speed)

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It's round reloading system.

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It's round ejecting system.

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Posted: Fri Jan 29, 2010 6:36 pm
by Imaillusion
My only issue with the animations of the main cannon firing is that when the cannon expends a used shell, it seems to come out too slowly. If you could speed the shell casing animation, and maybe change it slightly so that it comes out rotating a bit, it would look a lot more realistic.

Apart from that, no problems with the ship or its weapon animations.

Posted: Fri Jan 29, 2010 11:07 pm
by Bentusi
looks great, but i need to see it on the battleground :D

Posted: Sat Jan 30, 2010 1:05 am
by jwa8402
This is great LT. Its a beautiful use of triggers, and even more rare for pushing to their full potential. The doodads look great and the loading and ejection system is brilliant! I admire the dedication to get something like that working. I agree with Bentusi however, that now I have the slightly irrational urge to see it flinging hypersonic nuclear rounds at my ship :lol:

Posted: Sat Jan 30, 2010 3:27 am
by LactoseTolerant
Imaillusion wrote:My only issue with the animations of the main cannon firing is that when the cannon expends a used shell, it seems to come out too slowly. If you could speed the shell casing animation, and maybe change it slightly so that it comes out rotating a bit, it would look a lot more realistic.

Apart from that, no problems with the ship or its weapon animations.
Yeah, i've been working on a system for that, but the only problem is that the triggers cannot activate alpha shading, movement, and rotation at the same time. Would be awesome tho. The current remedy I have for this is an asymmetrical mirrored system, where the "casing" is parented to a small sprite on the opposite side, which moves to flings the projectile out. However, rotating it is a whole another problem, as the rotated section has be be directly underneath that round, or it'll be just swinging it around. I've comtemplated making a 0 size sprite, but once I set it... I can't fix it without deleting it's parent sprite :| . And it can't fade away either :| . If anyone has suggestions, i'll gladly implement it, as it irks me too.
jwa8402 wrote:This is great LT. Its a beautiful use of triggers, and even more rare for pushing to their full potential. The doodads look great and the loading and ejection system is brilliant! I admire the dedication to get something like that working. I agree with Bentusi however, that now I have the slightly irrational urge to see it flinging hypersonic nuclear rounds at my ship

Bentusi wrote:looks great, but i need to see it on the battleground
Thanks for the comments and praise guys :D . I'm working on ironing out the kinks in the firing system so it gives the "lancing" effect i've described, as well as making sure the sprites are in the proper directories when I release it. Partially because the weapons sprites on my previous fleet release had bad sprite directories...Sorry Arcalane!

Posted: Sat Jan 30, 2010 5:27 am
by Bad Boy
Your problem with the rotating section can be easily fixed using one of three methods.
1) Colour the section black and make it really tiny small. It won't be perfect but at that size it doesn't matter much.
2) Make it size 0, then open the sb4 with notepad and change its size for selecting. I have no idea if it works, and I don't really recommend it anyway.
3) Use eri's method for fin fannels. Make a sprite that you can recognize easily and name it something (eg. rotatrix). Then make a sprite that's completely black and give it another name (eg. rotatrix2). Then drag in rotatrix to act as the placeholder and finish the ship. When you're done, go into custom sprites and swap their names, so the black one becomes rotatrix and the other one becomes rotatrix2. Or you can simply get his knights of the baseline ships and sprites, there's less chance of me being wrong if you use his sections.

On another note, since you like working with triggers, you should probably check out eri's fin fannels, they're pretty simple to reverse engineer and understand once you realize the trick with the invisible section cognull (which took me a while - should have read through his post fully), and very impressive, but they take bloody forever to put together since clone group doesn't save triggers and each reopening in sm forgets some.

Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2010 3:22 am
by LactoseTolerant
Bad Boy wrote: 3) Use eri's method for fin fannels. Make a sprite that you can recognize easily and name it something (eg. rotatrix). Then make a sprite that's completely black and give it another name (eg. rotatrix2). Then drag in rotatrix to act as the placeholder and finish the ship. When you're done, go into custom sprites and swap their names, so the black one becomes rotatrix and the other one becomes rotatrix2. Or you can simply get his knights of the baseline ships and sprites, there's less chance of me being wrong if you use his sections.

On another note, since you like working with triggers, you should probably check out eri's fin fannels, they're pretty simple to reverse engineer and understand once you realize the trick with the invisible section cognull (which took me a while - should have read through his post fully), and very impressive, but they take bloody forever to put together since clone group doesn't save triggers and each reopening in sm forgets some.
Ah, thanks for the help! I've used Eri's system of swapping out sprites and it works well. Eri's system of Fin Fannels however, still stump me :| .

Here's the revised ejection!
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And the download! Sprite dump included.
http://filesmelt.com/dl/Hellion.zip

The Hellion operates as a long-range artillery, so it has minimal PD and close-range weaponry.

Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2010 12:55 pm
by Bad Boy
I'm glad it worked out, and it looks a lot better. It might also look good if you prolong the animation and have the thing spin a couple of full circles, but I suppose that'd make it more vulnerable.

The fin fannels aren't that hard to figure out once you replace the invisible sections with ones you can see. It's just a matter of moving things around until they're in order, then figuring how they connect.
Expanding on it though, is a lot more difficult. To do that, you have to actually understand it, and be able to make it better.
I tried, but gave up when the movement wasn't getting any more natural then the originals.