Cerez

That's fine, but they still need to be scriptable. SET_FACEAUX, SET_FACEFROWN and SET_FACEBLINK are not enough! >.<'

Here's a little something I've put together as an illustration of what I'm talking about:

The default JK animation scripts only allow a frown/angry and empty "blink" expression, but these other animations are there, just no-one has bothered to make them scriptable -- or so it seems.

I would really appreciate some help with getting these animations scriptable. It would add so much to the JK experience, and allow me to resume with my work.

Okay, I'm really stuck, and I need this awfully bad for my projects.

Could I ask a serious coder to help me out with this?

The animation I'm looking to apply are so called "head anims". They seem to be applied by the game in a random script -- would be good to know which -- by default on all cinematic stationary characters. The game does this somehow, it calls upon them, and I'd like to be able to do the same.

For cinematic projects it is crucial that the characters can express scripted emotions beyond the default set of frown and blink.

Their exact scripted names are the following:

FACE_ALERT

FACE_SMILE

FACE_FROWN

FACE_DEAD

FACE_TALK0

FACE_TALK1

FACE_TALK2

FACE_TALK3

FACE_TALK4

There is also a smirk animation somewhere used by the same default "stationary behaviour" character script. What I want to be able to do is to paste these head/face animations on top of an active body animation.

Could someone dig into the source and find out where this "stationary" character script is located, please? That would give us a clue how to apply the head animations.

Oh, and he did a fantastic review of the original Star Wars saga. Let me see if I can find it...

EDIT: My Internet's stuffing up, but I think this is it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2WFzMEU6rM

Anyone ever see this on Youtube? I found it by accident several days ago and can't stop watching these episodes.

I like James' episodes. Some of them are hilarious. And other just go a bit too far… 

He's bringing out a movie sometime this year.

To everyone who's been waiting on this, it's finished. I have uploaded the first version of the Ahsoka JK model package here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/m5zt9ndhkugoaqo/ahsoka.pk3

There are still certain issues that need to be resolved with the model, so I'm also posting the source files here as well, and I ask in return that all progress with this model be contributed back to this thread share-alike to everyone's benefit:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/bjkrrdsyojdb8ei/ahsoka-source.zip

@Asgarath83 has put a great effort into this, and I'm grateful to him sincerely for trying his best, and for sharing his source.

Credits:

Model adaptation, Skin files, Shaders - Asgarath83

Sound sampling, Bot, NPC - yours truly

(I've left some extra sounds in there for your customisation needs.)

And finally, because we all love screenshots:

If anyone is interested in fixing the remaining problems, or giving their own go at this, you have my (and Asgarath's) full support, and we'd love to see your work.

About breaking up the model, I remember a discussion of this years back when some serious modellers in the community were thinking of raising the level of quality for their JKA work, but back then we didn't have today's graphics performance and certainly no source code.

It would certainly be heavy on the performance, but I wonder with today's graphics cards if something like this would be plausible and actually work well in JK.

Are we talking tweaking, or a complete rewrite?

Well, the format itself imposes no limit, but JA will refuse to load anything with more than the aforementioned 1k verts.

Would there be any way to circumvent this restriction? Or is this absolutely the maximum the Quake 3 engine can handle in terms of detail?

That's not a bad solution, but I can't see a SET_FACESMILE, for example, but there is a FACE_SMILE animation for it...

No, it's actually a good one, that has proper rigging. I've also tried to load the Jan model in its place into NPC_spawner and I got the same result with Jan. Could it be that these talk animations are expecting a sound file to work?

But my bigger worry is about the facial animations. I would like to get them working on the character's face without forcing the model to go into a "T" pose.

Animate in some external Tool like Blender, export as ROFF, play using

camera ( /*@CAMERA_COMMANDS*/ PATH, "my/roff/file" );

That's it! Thanks Mrwonko!

I'm working on JK in-game cinematics/scripting, though, not photography/filming…

Has anyone found a way to add ease to the camera movement in the JK engine? The camera controls are quite flexible and neat, but they are often too sudden in starting and ending. I'm looking for a way to slow them through the script so that they appear to behave more like movie cameras in the real world.

Okay, I've started diving deeper into Icarus scripting, and I've come across something that left me a little baffled.

Using the "SET_ANIM_" set fields is clear enough when it comes to full featured animations (starting with "BOTH_"), but what about the smaller facial animations (the ones starting with "FACE_")?

If I try to apply any of these with the "SET_ANIM_UPPER" set field, I end up with the model stretching out into a factory default "T". Is there any way to preserve the existing body animation and overlay the facial animation on top of it?

Additionally, with an NPC_spawner entity the mouth of the model will not move when a "BOTH_TALK" is applied with "SET_ANIM_BOTH". What's up with that?

If anyone can shed light on either of these enigmas, I would really appreciate it.

Oh, I getcha! There is an item called the NPC_spawner in the NPC list, and this can be assigned to any custom NPC by name (by adding the NPC_type key-value pair).

Thanks, Mrwonko.

Use English language.

... care to elaborate? :/

Looks and sounds intriguing.

As far as book covers go, this is neat and does a nice enough job to stand out and catch the reader's interest -- which is what a book cover's purpose is, really. Omicron has some interesting creative ideas above that could benefit the design, but I think it's great work either way.

Graphics-wise my only gripe is with the white outline around the TOR logo... Either add a small white glow to it, or find a cleaner source image.

I'm sure this question has been asked a million times, but how does one load a custom (third party) NPC into a map with GTKRadiant? The only options I see are the default NPCs and the player's character from the game.

Wow, this is great, Captain!

Keep making music like this. I love it!

It feels like a mystery that's happening on Coruscant, maybe involving some secret information archives? 

Make music and I'll write stories to it!

Thanks, Bacon.

They would override the base files, which not everyone would want. It'll also prevent you from connecting to base servers which have the pure setting enabled.

 

Graphics drivers are tricky things. It can work in some cases, but if you use it in ways which wasn't tested very well then you can get bizarre looking problems like in your screenshot. It's very rarely a problem with the chip/card itself. You would get even worse artifacts than what you see if it was the chip (something like this http://forums.techguy.org/attachments/153841d1248621800/corrupt-display.jpg)

So, then the OpenJK folder is loaded by the user if they want to play an OpenJK based game? I guess in a practical sense this works much like japlus and MBII, right? Is there a way to tell if a server is running OpenJK and not the retail game in the server list?

I'm ready to give up with trying to make it work on my Linux computer. It's a great little laptop, but it just can't handle games. If someone reading this has a similar problem and they are desperately trying to make it work, I suppose the thing to do would be to install a different driver for the 3D graphics card, and see if that driver handles the game's visual effects better.

EDIT: Also, this is purely for cosmetic reasons, but is there any way to hide a mod/folder from the SP mod loading list?

That looks pretty bad lol. I'd still lean towards it being a driver issue. Like I said, the Windows and Linux Intel drivers aren't comparable in being up to date, or quality.

For reference, the graphics card in my Sony Vaio Linux laptop is: Mobile Intel GM45 Express Chipset

Gnome doesn't seem to have a problem with the graphics driver, so I guess this is a compatibility issue between this graphics card and JKA, then?

The OpenJK folder contains the 'mod' part of OpenJK, rather than the engine (which is a replacement for jamp.exe and jasp.exe). It's mainly a fixed up version of base and very little else.

Why are these files not in base? Can they be moved? I'd like to hide the OpenJK folder from the mod list somehow, since it isn't a conversion mod, and it makes little sense for it to be showing up there.

I'm pretty sure you define a target for the NPC through the script in a similar way as when an NPC looks at another NPC:

affect ( "Anders", /*@AFFECT_TYPE*/ FLUSH )
{
    set ( /*@SET_TYPES*/ "SET_LOOK_TARGET", "Castle" );
}

Though what the actual command is still eludes me.