Animation in a room's mdl not playing

[Stanlej95]

I modified one of the rooms in my custom module ph1 i cloned from 106per. I extracted the harbinger model from another modules room mdl grabbed it's textures and placed it outside the peragus hangar. I removed ebon hawk from the hangar patched up the walkmesh and fixed the lightmaps. Cleared the minimap of ebon hawk silhouette. I also added a shuttle from telos module and animated it in blender with kotor addon. The animation doesnt play in game but when i open the rooms mdl file in mdleditor it shows the animation. I tried variety of names for Kotor Animation input in blender: animloop01, scriptloop01, default etc.

The shuttle  correctly spawns on the first keyframe but it refuses to move. I also copied different shuttle with it's already existing vanilla animations and it to refused to move even though it did in original module.

I tried forcing the animation with onEnter script: 

PlayRoomAnimation("scriptloop01", 1); and variations with animation constant SCRIPTLOOP01 (even though it's just an int that equals "1")

I inserted all keyframes on the dummy node conatining shuttle meshes.  The node is a child directly to a 106PER01 node (The module is cloned with  Holocron  so the rooms  prefixes stayed vanilla instead of "ph1".

The shuttle refuses to move no matter what I do. Also I don't know if this is related to this issue but Holocron Module Designer still shows the Ebon Hawk even though it is removed from the mdl completely and doesn't appear in the game.

[DarthParametric]

12 minutes ago, Stanlej95 said:

PlayRoomAnimation("scriptloop01", 1)

Your arguments are wrong. The function is

void PlayRoomAnimation(string sRoom, int nAnimation);

So, for example, in my K1 Taris Upper City Cantina mod where I have monitors change their screen display based on your progression through the fight ladder, I have commands like

PlayRoomAnimation("m02ae_03a", nDPAnim);

Where m02ae_03a is the specific room model (the one with the Hutt) and nDPAnim is an int that is determined by GetGlobalNumber / GetGlobalBoolean lookups. The model has scriptloop01 through to 10.

Additionally, all keyframed objects must be children of the "A" node. That is, the dummy with the room name with "a" appended to the end. You can see an example in your MDLEdit pic on the right:

[Stanlej95]

@DarthParametric Thanks for the quick reply. I made mistake in the topic the function i used in onEnter script was PlayRoomAnimation("106per01", ANIMATION_ROOM_SCRIPTLOOP01);

Does this "a" suffix is just a cosmetic, arbitrary convention thing or is it actually a flag that the game engine specifically looks for to play the animation?

Do you maybe have a thought on this ohter issue of Holocron Designer displaying removed mesh of the Ebon Hawk and not displaying added models like the Harbinger and the shuttle? Is it cache related issue or does my room somehowe connects to the vanilla 106PER module and confuses the assets?

Edited 1 hour ago by Stanlej95

[DarthParametric]

53 minutes ago, Stanlej95 said:

Does this "a" suffix is just a cosmetic, arbitrary convention thing

No. Like I said, all keyframed objects are required to be under the A node in a room model.

54 minutes ago, Stanlej95 said:

Holocron Designer

Never used it, and would never use it. I do any model adjustments in KMax or KBlender as appropriate.

[Stanlej95]

And what about GIT editing, as in placing utp, utc, utw files on the map? You use KBlender for this too or just edit object instances via GFF editor and manually enter the coordinates, rotation etc.? Genuine question.

I use Holocron for about a month now - as I gradually get to know  the basics of Kotor modding - specifically because of this instant visual feedback while placing objects, changing them and so on. I already see it's lacking in many areas and causes crashes and I'd like to learn the proper workflow and start to root out the Holocron Completely and stop relying on it.

(sorry for the offtop)

[DarthParametric]

37 minutes ago, Stanlej95 said:

what about GIT editing

I use KGFF for actual GIT (or other GFF) editing aside from DLGs for which I use DLGEditor (mostly), but Holocron Toolset's layout editor (if you open a module and double click on a GIT) is a very useful visualisation aid. It can be handy for quickly repositioning things and grabbing their co-ords, or editing trigger boundaries and getting the offsets, but I don't use it to actually save files because historically it had problems with adding spurious data. For cutscenes, I do framing/camera positioning and NPC/location placement in Max, and in the past I did all my GIT co-ord determination there as well, alongside a few helper scripts I have made over the years. I should probably talk to someone about adding equivalents of those to KBlender. Scripting I do in Notepad++ in conjunction with the NWScript language definitions.

Vriff has created a new "Neo" line of tools though, so possibly I will work some of them into my workflow when I eventually get back into modding KOTOR.

[Stanlej95]

Thanks for the help with the animation, I give it a shot as soon as I can. If it works I'll come back with the confirmation for future modders with the same problem. 

As for Holocron - adding instances in Designer, saving and  editing files like .dlg, .are. ifo .utc and  saving through it  caused my module to eventually crash on exit, whether I load another module from a save or leave through transition. It crashes on loading new module always about 10%  of  the progress bar done. When I launch the game I can change modules as much as I want but visiting my cloned module  just once causes the next module - no matter what it is - to crash during loading screen.

If I enter my module then exit to main menu I can enter any module once again. I suspect Holocron because the problem started to occur after adding placeables, creatures and waypoints.

Edited 2 minutes ago by Stanlej95