Lollie (Gamedev) @Lollie@mastodon.gamedev.place

Unfortunately, GoldSrc's animation limits are something I can't overcome without direct access to the engine, so my attempt to get GoldenEye animations into Sven-Coop ends here.

It's a bummer, but honestly I'm surprised I got this close. The animations work! Half-Life skeleton rigs can technically use them! The issue is the engine itself.

In my attempt to get a GoldenEye animation in-game, I managed to squeeze one down from 90 frames @ 30 fps, to 18 frames @ 6 fps. For an animation like this, the results were promising.

Differences are plainly visible when placed side-by-side, but the reduced version sticks remarkably close to the original.

Tonight's been a night of unfortunate confirmations.

1) GoldSrc, without a shadow of a doubt, does not allow for framerates to be changed for most animations.

2) In an incredible display of hardcoding things, GoldSrc will speed up animations if they are longer than expected, so that their duration matches its original animations. You cannot cheat their duration in any way.

Award for "Worst Thing In 3D" is now tied between Euler Axis Order and Gimbal Lock

Euler Axis Order might actually be the worst thing in 3D.

What this doesn't get across is that the bones on each rig are oriented differently to each other, and the amount of difference varies wildly.

Like, one GE bone might require each axis to be cycled. So GE's X axis matches HL's Y axis, GE's Y matches HL's Z, etc.

Another GE bone might match the X axis on a HL bone, but Y and Z will be swapped, and Z will need its values inverted.

Basically rules are fake and none of this is worth the end goal (Goldeneye anims in HL), but I'm GONNA DO IT ANYWAY

This is just a glimpse of what I'm dealing with. GoldenEye's 16-bone rig VS Half-Life's 42-bone rig. I've singled out the bones in the HL rig that match up best with the GE rig, but I don't know if I'll ever be able to match that power stance.

Ripping and importing animations from GoldenEye to 3dsMax is easy!

Porting animations from GoldenEye's skeleton to Half-Life's skeleton is DEFINITELY NOT.

So I figured I wasn't going to worry about editing the death animations.

But then I had an idea. A really silly idea. And then I found the tools that will allow me to execute that really silly idea.

This is me testing just how easy it'll be to execute that really silly idea.

A lot of GoldSource is really not well documented, I'm pretty much learning about all its quirks as I go. Which is like, half cool, half "why must it be like this"

Just found out that the game automatically blends the upper half of crouched "armed" animations with the lower half of the crouched "idle" animation, so half of the work I did tonight was actually unnecessary lmao. Oh well, still covered a lot of ground tonight. 🙃

I don't really *mind* super repetitive tasks like this, but lol, it's far from exciting. Once I'm done with this, I'll be able to work on new jump animations.

...technically all the death animations need tweaks too, but like. Nah lmao, I just won't die instead, problem solved.

I still have to do edits for all the crouched weapon draw/shoot/reload animations. There's 118 in total, but they're all single-frame edits for the poses, just to prevent the tail from clipping through the floor. Again, simple but time consuming.

Plowed my way through edits for 86 animations tonight. Added tail movement to Half-Life's crouched idle animation, and then used the crouching and standing idles as the base for all of the aiming animations.

Thankfully, a very simple and painless process. It only required importing the original animations on top of the new tail animation, which filled in the animation for every other bone. Time-consuming af though, and no way to automate the process.

Gotta check if there's a PS1 emulator that can disable textures, I'd love to study these models more closely.

If PS1 hackers could come together & build tools to universally rip clean models from PS1 games, that'd also be very good. Make that happen for me specifically, thanks.

While playing with Xplorer FX's interrupt switch, one detail that I thought was super cool is that Tekken 3's models are selectively smoothed.

Like here, Kazuya's arms, chest, and face feature smooth shading, but his hair, neck, and gloves are flat-shaded. Count those neck tris.

This also inadvertently shows how old and busted my original-model PS1 is, the poor thing struggles with so many games. I really gotta get brave and install PS-IO already.

I recently nabbed an Xplorer FX cart for cheap, and it has the ability to interrupt the PS1 via the cart's physical on/off switch. So here I am, toying with the interrupt switch during Tekken 3's attract mode, and fucking up the graphics in the process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIe6rHaYtlM