2010-04-20, 10:48 AM
I think I understand pretty much everything about the skeleton style animation (haven't looked at the gumby animation yet) however the encoding of the actual data is so wacky it may take me a while to sort out all of the bits.
I'm assuming I will figure it out eventually after much experimentation. But I'm thinking it might be more generous to go ahead and slap something together that would let people could start customizing some MDL files (I also noticed the SFX folder has many mdl files for magic explosions etc)
Basically I know enough so to swap out one graphic in the MDL file for another. So you could say take a skeleton MDL file and give it a new weapon, or replace its head, or totally swap out all its parts for a new kind of monster. But you'd be stuck with the same animations (which includes the distances from one joint to the next)
I can also make inanimate MDL files from scratch (and of course export the graphics)
I'm assuming I will figure it out eventually after much experimentation. But I'm thinking it might be more generous to go ahead and slap something together that would let people could start customizing some MDL files (I also noticed the SFX folder has many mdl files for magic explosions etc)
Basically I know enough so to swap out one graphic in the MDL file for another. So you could say take a skeleton MDL file and give it a new weapon, or replace its head, or totally swap out all its parts for a new kind of monster. But you'd be stuck with the same animations (which includes the distances from one joint to the next)
I can also make inanimate MDL files from scratch (and of course export the graphics)