Subject: Re: Animated LW meshes in realtime games
From: [email-masked] (Saiyad Abdul)
To: Multiple recipients of list <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 Dec 1995 02:34:24 -0500

> 1) build the chunks of a guy in modeller
> 2) group chunks into a guy, and animate in Layout
> 3) save animated chunks/guy as sequential separate objects or preferrably
>    one new sequential object(eg guywalk01.lwo, guywalk02.lwo)

>>Here is a question for you:  are you saving a different object for each
>>different frame of an action?  If you are, the shear amount of storage
>>makes that horribly inefficient.

Yes that was the plan....We are working on a "Quake" type game. We were 
thinking that using the frames would utlimately result in  a
better framerate due to fewer calculations...We realized that there would 
be a substantial penalty in memory and flexibility but it seemed the best 
compromise at the time...

>>I'd push the programers to learn how to load LW scene files (actually,
>>I'd force them too or I'd quit).  That way you could simply animate your
>>characters as normal, save the one action (walking cycle, kick, ect.) in
>>a normal LW scene, and they read it in, load the objects, and animate it
>>as LW does.  It will result in a MUCH smaller game and will generally be
>>be better for you and them.

As I said earlier we thought that method would suck a lot more "juice",
but we did realize it was more efficient and flexible..Where can we get the
scene file format? We checked the Newtek FTP site last night but it seemed to 
be down...The programmer is willing to write a simple plugin but does not
have the necessary info(He already wrote a .lwo object importer). At this point
in time it would also seem to be useful to get on plugin developers list. Can 
someone please tell me the address and subscription process.

>>At least, that's how we do it on the game I'm working on...

What kind of game are you guys working on? 

-- Joe

Sai