Animated textures not working in tse

#1 We (BraveTree) have IFL animation working in TSE. I *thought* this fix had already been checked in. Are you using the latest HEAD? If not then we can see about getting the fix in sometime soon.

#2 When you say "this fix", are you saying there *was* a problem with UV animations not working, and it's supposed to be fixed? Or were you only talking about IFL animations? If you're talking about IFL animation, then it may be that it's working fine. I never tried it. I was just wondering if it worked because the animated UV stuff isn't working.

#3 Sorry...let me clarify. I don't know what the status is on animated UV's that are baked into the model (if I had to guess I would say that they are broken). You *can* animate the UV's via the material system though (as shown in the demo). The "fix" I was referring to was for IFL's.

#4 Ah, ok. Thanks for the info. It would be nice if the UV stuff was working again by the time TSE is done. I will look into using the material system for now. I know there is a shader for scrolling the texture, but it seems much more limiting to me. I'd rather have the scrolling behavior in the hands of the artists than the programmer. Especially since I'm the programmer. :-)

Thanks again!

#5 @Justin

In TSE all textures use the material system. How exactly were you trying to animate UVs if you are not using materials?

#6 Peter,

By animating the texture. Not using the shader to manipulate it, think the small lights on the floor in the first TSE demo.. they are animated, I think.. while the cube is animated via UVW's. Hope it makes sense.

#7 @Stefan

Not really sure I get it. I though Justin was trying to do UV animations, which can be done using the material system. Texture animation would be like a movie playing on a surface and wouldn't alter the UV values of that texture in any way.

I think I'm just not understanding what is supposed to be broken. Textures are handled differently in TSE than in TGE. In TSE a texture maps to a material and it is the material properties that determine how that texture looks on the model, be that bump mapped, animated, normal mapped etc. etc.

#8 I was thinking of his last question "Also, will .IFL animation work in TSE?" and responded to it :)

I can't answer for the UV animations, but I think they should work as the demo demonstrates it.

#9 Hi guys. First off, thanks for all the input. All I was trying to get at was that the UV animation stuff that was working in TGE doesn't work in TSE. It may be that the material/shader system can do roughly equivalent animation, but it means that I (the programmer) have to perform the mapping and set up the material parameters, when it seems like previously the artists could set this up in Max by animating the UV's and they didn't require "programmer intervention". :-)

By the way, the actual .dts we were using to test this came from here (I think):

www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=27596

The very last post in that thread has a link to the file (created by Joe Maruschak). It works great in TGE, but doesn't work in TSE.

I'm not an artist and I don't fully understand the terminology, so I hope this makes sense :-) but I'm wondering if you can get equivalent UV animation from the material system. For instance, if you want the UVs animated to go back and forth (instead of only in one direction) can the material system duplicate this? It seems like you can only set up the material params to scroll the texture in one direction, and you don't have any control over it from that point on (turning off the scrolling, changing direction, etc.). Is there a way to do those kinds of things?

This actually kind of relates to a question I (and other people) have asked before about Materials; is there a way to turn effects on/off? For example, if you want something to glow you can use the glow shader, but if you only want it to glow at certain times, how do you do that? I haven't seen a satisfactory answer to that yet (and deleting the object and swapping it out for another object with a different shader isn't "satisfactory" to me). :-) For some effects there are probably shader variables I could update but I don't think any of it is documented. Maybe there have been posts answering this but if there are I've missed them.

#10 @Justin

I myself have asked about swapping materials i.e. shaders for object on the fly. It shouldn't actually be difficult to program as shaders are loaded up to the graphics card by the engine so its not a graphics card limitation. You could (if you wanted to) swap shaders for every single object rendered in a scene.

I may knock up a material changer myself if the GG team are not planning on supporting this. The only limitation I can see is that shaders would not be swapped during the render process i.e. only before bucket sorting of materials to meshes would a material swap take place.

#11 Well graphics programming is largely a mystery to me, so if you ever get that working and want to make the code publicly available I won't complain. :-)

Thanks!

#12 .IFLs are working in TSE. I guess the UV animations aren't working in TSE? I'll add it to the bug list.

You could animate something that glows by using an IFL, or a Material animation. See the demo and the TSEDoc.chm for more info on the animation flags.