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FS2004 Long animations

arno

arno

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Hi all,

I am currently looking how I can make it easier to use long animations in FS2004. As you might know, at the moment you need to tweak the ASM code to get more than 1024 frames. But I think I can add some tool support for that tweaking.

But to decide how to make the tool, I would like to have your input. What length of animation do you think you would use in general? The amount of tweaking differs quite a bit between an animation of 4000 frames or 60000 frames. So what frame length would you use?
 
Thank You Arno for the Offer.

How long will be 60000 Frames ?

If we said 1024 Frames are roundabout 55 Seconds,
than 60000 roundabout 50 Minutes.

That right ?

If so - than 60000 I need.
 
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Hi,

The absolute maximum would be 65535 frames. Which is just over one hour of animation. But I never tried if you run into other problems with such an animation :). I can imagine they can become a bit hard on the performance.
 
Yes, I might do that. But the longer the animation becomes, the more complex the code to tweak is. So I am trying to define what the boundary of my tool should become :).
 
Yes, I think thats will be the Best.

And we will see the steady progress of that. :)
 
I think the animation for 5-10 mins is long enough already. Longer than that you can loop the animation. People cannot remember the first shot of 5-10 min animation anyway.
 
Ich think this would be quite useful for car traffic moving around a whole airport.
But that shouldn't take more than 15mins.
I can't really imagine an animation that would require 60mins of time :confused:
Anyways, thats a cool idea arno, I would greatly appreciate such a tool!
Btw. what about FSX? I'm quite new to it.
Are animations still limited?
 
I agree that 10-15 min should be plenty long enough... who needs an hour????? especially if it requires more writing to affect a tweek...

"Never lift what you can scoot!"
 
Hi,

Once I code this logic into ModelConverterX the more tweaking is invisible to the user of course, but it mainly affects me :). I guess I should try to do some performance tests.

About FSX, no it does not have the limitation on the amount of frames. So the workflow will become animate the object and export as FSX MDL. Then import it in the tool to convert it to a long FS2004 animation.

Any additional suggestions and ideas are welcome!
 
I did long animation once by looping them. There were two trains, the first one stopped at the begining of the second one. So they were visible as a continuous animation.

The problem was, it kicked out a wide area of autogen. If you can do NO Autogen Suppression with the long animation, it would be good.
 
Hi,

That's a good point.. I should check if some of the autogen tweaks would also work for this.
 
Dear Arno,
I think that although working on FSX with animation has no limited with 1024. But I have to keep doing just only 1024 since I have to convert to FS9. If I do that longer than 1024, the whole things should be done again for FS9.

Are there any possibility to convert animation in FSX to be FS9 by this tool?
Thanks,
Tic
 
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Hi Tic,

I am working on such a tool now. It will convert the long FSX animation to the FS2004 format and apply the right tweaks so that it will work in FS2004.
 
Wow, nice to hear that.
Looking forward to such a tool!
Thanks. All of us in flight sim community appreciate you help making such a wonderful tools.
 
Thanks a lot! That will make scenery-conversion from FSX to FS9 much easier.

One question concerning animation conditions:
Is adding them possible for FSX-style animations? I have in mind that its only possible with CAT which means FS9-style animations only.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
 
Hi Lars,

As I said on my blog, the Animation Tweaker can only export FS2004 style MDL files. Since that's the only animations that can be tweaked.
 
Can animations be doubled? By that I mean instead of 1024 frames per minute (or whatever the ratio is), make it 2048 for smoother performance. Thinking of those jerky auto movements.
 
Hi,

No, the FS2004 animation timer runs at 18 Hz. So you are stick to that.

There are a few other timer variables in FS2004 as well, but I am not sure at which rate they run. Should be interesting to check.
 
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