Quick Question....

#1
Before I ask on HLP, is there any way of packing all the files for a .eff animation into a .VP and referencing them from there? And would I need to add that VP as a second mod until a main campaign VP is put together?

Thanks for any advice :)

#3
Yup, it was option 1 I was sort of hoping for, but I'll see what can be done :) I know there was talk of making an compact format for .eff files, but wasn't sure if it had been implemented yet :)

#4
It will work either way. The .eff and the individual files don't have to be in the same place. They can be in different VPs or in a combination of VP and hard drive locations. It loads each file separately so as long as the file can be found it can be used. Generally it's just easier to put all of the files in the same place though.

The new format, which will be a single file, won't replace EFF. It will be used as a movie type ANI replacement (ie, talking head animations, mainhall doors, cmd briefing animations, etc.) but won't be used for effects. The EFF format is still basic, but it will stay as is and be expanded on later since we are going to add support for easier use of the material system and shaders to it. EFF was intended to work as a virtual file, a group of individual files, and that isn't going to change since it's less useful that way.

#5
Fair enough thanks :)

While I'm on the subject, one last question, were there any thoughts of adding 'bounce' style playing on the .eff files, so rather than playing frame 1-15 then going back to one, it plays the animation forwards and then backwards etc?

I'm just thinking there are some ship light animations I could do which would work with that technique and would take up only half the texture memory :)

#6
There is a lot that I've wanted EFFs to do but just have never had the time to actually code in and figure out the details for. One thing that I've always wanted is virtual frames, so you could have frames 1-10, then frames 11-14, then 1-10 again, then frames 15-20. The second set of 1-10 would be virtual, rather than being a real second set of files, and not use any more memory. This would take 20 frames and give you the effect of 30, for instance. Since EFFs are basically just small tbl files it's possible for us to do much more with them than we do now. Much more within reason of course, it's still basically just a different sort of ANI, and to keep the code even remotely sane there are boundaries that we don't need to cross.

To answer your exact question though, no, we can't do what you want through EFFs. You could do the virtual frame technique I described, when I code that in anyway, but there is not really another option right now. How an EFF is played is handled by the code that plays it, not in the EFF itself.

The virtual frame technique would let you have real frames for 1-15, then you would just specify a map in the EFF to describe the rest of the frames, totalling 29 (not 30 since frame 1 would be used twice, unless that's what you want). So you could do something like (assuming this is how I end up coding it): "$Virtual: 16-29, 15-2". That would make frames 16-29 actually be the same as 15-2. Only frames 1-15 would exist on disk, and though the animation would still be 29 frames to the game, it wouldn't use any more memory than the 15 frame version. The only downside would be that it still takes up the extra bitmap slots.
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