AI death animation

#1 No one?

#2 It's a scripting error that'll be fixed in the next release.

#3 Add this funtion in your AI file.

function AIPlayer::playDeathAnimation(%this)
{
   %this.setActionThread("Death" @ getRandom(1, 11));
}

#4 That's techinically a more elegant solution than a previous suggestion on a another thread to add a client/notClient check to the existing playDeathAnimation() function.

#5 I just tried to keep it similar to Player::playDeathAnimation

#6 One could actually replace the innards of Player::playDeathAnimation() with what Jonathon posted...

The original playDeathAnimation for Torque was slightly busted and only used one death animation despite the coding for the client index. When I fixed that we had temporarily disabled AI so it didn't occur to me that I had overlooked animations for bots. At the time I had almost decided to make it into a random function (I do in my own projects) but went with fixing existing code as a guideline instead.

#7 Awesome thanks!

#8 Be great if ::playDeathAnimation(), took the Damage data and location to make it's determination of which 'death' animation to play based upon hit location when moving into 'Destroyed' state; just like in TribesII.

Anyway to put something together like that? The script from TribesII had a nice routine inside that function to choose which sequence to playback...I've hacked around with it[some time ago], got it semi-working...

#9 I was never sure that the T3D damage location works correctly. If someone could confirm this and maybe explain how it works exactly, then I could try to set up a function to do that.

#10 It's actually rather simple to get the Tribes style dealthAnimation selection to work in Torque, just have to move the playDeathAnimation() call out of PlayerData::onDisabled() into GameConnection::onClientKilled() since it can process the information you'll need and onDisabled() can't by default.

getDamageLocation() works by processing a percentage of damage coverage on the 3 different body regions (head, torso, legs) and quadrants (right_front, left_back, etc, etc) and returning the *probable* location that was hit -- which is not always correct! Then you just check the location and call the animation sequence that seems to fit with a series of if statements (or switch/case).

However, these sequences actually vary from project to project so it's not a general purpose solution. I have this working in a project of mine and it shouldn't take much to figure out which of Gideon's animations are appropriate to play for each location and I can post it as a Resource Example if anyone is interested. But, in the spirit of the thread topic, since my game is mulitplayer I never bothered to make it work for the AI.

#11 If you post it, I could fix it up to make it work with AI.

#12 Just to note that the lack of AI death animations has been fixed for the next release by doing the isObject(%client) check for players and simply picks an animation at random for AI players.

Oh, and I actually remembered to post a Improved playDeathAnimation() Resource. It uses the method I outlined above just like how Tribes used to do it and it works for the AI too. No more boring incremented lists or sometimes stupid random selection :)

#13 That's it Michael, especially the function which extracts the location and ties to the Player Global variables! Thanks! This is 'how it should be'...imho. My approach was fairly heavy-handed (with some help from a friend), got it working for the most part. Excellent Resource.