Posted: Sun Apr 12, 2009 4:07 am Post subject:
(**) Tiberium Twinkle
Subject description: Recommended Single Player Only
Just copied this tutorial I wrote over from TibWeb
This tutorial is rated 2 star **
Important note
Due to certain issues twinkling tiberium can only be used for single player mods/maps -See Known Issues
Tiberium Twinkle (Single Player Only) **
As minor as it maybe, simple effects like Tiberium twinkle add great eyecandy to any game, as seen in RA2 and RA1
For some reason this effect was excluded from TS by default by like many other things the leftover animations are still left in the conquer.mix from RA1
Step 1
Firstly convert the TWNK1 TWNK2 and TWNK3 .shp's to the anim.pal.
Step 2
Then add them to the animations list in the rules.ini e.g.
I assigned TWNK2 to TIB02, TWNK3 to TIB03, TWNK1 to TIB04 etc
Step 4
Now we need to add the code for these animations to the art.ini
With some playing around with the loop delays and what not I came up with this code for best effect
Known Issues!
Heres the catch people, because there are so many animations taking place constantly, TS doesnt seem to be able to handle syncronization in multiplayer games and a re-connection error will happen around 2mins into the game.
Final Note
Experiment, I played around with this a long time ago and there maybe work arounds... maybe try adding the anim to only 3 or 1 types of tiberium and/or add longer loopdelays
Thats all for now and I hope someone will find this tutorial intruiging if nothing else
Update!
DeeZire wrote:
Theres another bug with this (actually a bug that Westwood left in the game with the Veinhole monster).
Any overlay or tile that is animated like this - whether it be by CellAnim or otherwsie - will always appear black on the radar.
Theres another bug with this (actually a bug that Westwood left in the game with the Veinhole monster).
Any overlay or tile that is animated like this - whether it be by CellAnim or otherwsie - will always appear black on the radar. So if you edit the radar colours of Tiberium like a lot of mods have done to make sure it shows on the radar in the right colour, it will still only show black if you add the CellAnim.
The compromise I made was only to employ this effect in single player maps where there was an Ion Storm and so you cannot have radar anyways. Twinkling Tiberium looks better on those maps as nice effect of it being in an Ion Storm QUICK_EDIT
Doesnt work. Look at the Veinhole Monster as an example, it has correct radar colors in it's file but still appears black on the radar because it is animated. QUICK_EDIT
'scuse the bump but after 3 years I finally found the time to try it myself and it does work
As mentioned, the hack should be applied to the twinkle anim's SHP (so the SHP of the animation that's specified after CellAnim=), although the downside is that it can then only show a single radar color for all tiberium stages (instead of 12 different colors for every one of the 12 tiberium stages).
Now to figure out how to get these cell anims to not desync multiplayer games... _________________ QUICK_EDIT
After several tests with Bittah online, we narrowed down the problem to RandomLoopDelay. Only if this key is present, a desync happens.
Otherwise CellAnim works fine!
RandomRate should be avoided too, as it causes noticeable lag, without giving you any big visual effect in the first place. _________________ SHP Artist of Twisted Insurrection: Nod buildings
Well, if you'd add gaps in the cell anim you could sort of emulate RandomLoopDelay, but as mentioned it would be laggy when used on all green tiberium. Adding it to just 1-3 tiberium overlays might not be so bad however (I haven't tested it yet though). _________________ QUICK_EDIT
gaps in the anim would even more make you aware of the looped anim, because all tiberium patches with the same cellanim show the gap at the same time. Something that can be noticed even if all 12 tiberium patches would have a different timed cellanim.
It might be better to use CellAnim only on one patch.
-make the cellanim itself invisible
-add a traileranim of a art.ini debris to the cellanim
-let the debris fly a short distance and show a twinkle anim as ExpireAnim
Due to the random spawn direction and distance of the debris, you get a more convincing twinkle, than one that is only played above some certain patches.
\Some more infos about our tests for the other modders.
We tested CellAnim on every of the 12 tiberiumpatches. (which means about 200-400 tiberiumpatches and cellanims all over the map)
Even with RandomLoopDelay on the anim, it still took about 5 min before we had the desync.
This might also explain the rare and random desyncs of vanilla TS. Because TS uses RandomLoopDelay on the refinery for the fire ball and since you barely have 20-40 refineries at the same time, the duration until the desync occurs could be also about 10 times longer (so something about 50min ingame)
So i would suggest every mod to remove the RandomLoopDelay key from every anim! _________________ SHP Artist of Twisted Insurrection: Nod buildings
Can't overlay have the same flags that make Tiberium Trees play their spawn animation after a random delay? I thought I saw some under BTIB, can't remember what they were. _________________
I think you mistake the bigblue terraintype with the btib overlaytype.
I'm pretty sure the terraintype keys for tiberiumspawning don't work on overlaytypes. _________________ SHP Artist of Twisted Insurrection: Nod buildings
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