anyone have ridable horse or anything animal?

#1 There was a resource floating around somewhere involving creating ridable animals. Basically what you would need to do is create a new vehicle type in the engine which would allow the player to mount it, but doesn't come with the wheel physics stuff that the car type has. The animation would depend on how realistic you want it. You could probably get away with a ridable animal that just loops a run or walk animation, but you could also tie in IK and actually have it run like most recent games with ridable animals. It all depends on how much work your willing to do as I don't know where that old resource went to, and there's little to nothing in the engine now for doing such things.

#2 It would be nice to see a updated pack on GG with all the new shaders and SFX, GFX shaders and updates. Becuase T3d has alot of changes, simply popping in the old horse pack from 3diggers, isnt a option anymore. The model is obsolete, the code is in need of updating. Its on my list of request packs right next to some AI packs

#3 Ridable horses is quite high on my needed list :)

They would need to be quite interactive though, reactions to the
players inputs, with various animations (idle, walk, trot, gallop, sudden
stop (rearing) rear leg loss of traction when cornering fast etc).

I think the vehicle class is a good place to start, won't be a while
until I attempt it though.

Would gladly pay quite a bit for a pack that does all the above
($200+ depending on the quality)

#4 There is a horse pack at 3d diggers for $40ish, don't recall the exact price. It was written for TGE/TGEA though, but I'm guessing would port over to T3d pretty easily.

#5 Lots of the games I worked on had horses in them. Back then we copied the Player class, renamed it to horse, and hacked our way into making it work. Easy things to do was disable the player collision when mounted, make the "mounting" player animations play without transitions (so we'd just do some mounting point trickery and have nice mount/dismount anim for each side).

The hard thing was getting collision to work properly, since horses need elongated bounding boxes which rotate to work. The solution was add code to push the horse away from interpenetrating volumes, which allowed it to rotate without getting stuck into things.

#6 The 3d Diggers Horse Pack drops in rather painlessly and works well in Torque 3D.

The bounding box problem that Manoel mentions is something to keep in mind. I personally would keep the player collisions enabled as mounted combat, melee and ranged, is quite fun. "Cavalry will move at a charge!"

#7 @Michael: I worded it wrongly - the problem was getting the horse to ignore collisions against the player riding it. In stock Torque a player will collide with other player mounting it.

#8 @Manoel: ah, but I didn't read clearly enough :D

#9 The 3D Diggers Horse Pack works well in Torque 3D? It does involve some source code changes, correct?

#10 Yes, the Horse Pack requires source code access.

#11 any clue what happened to this site for the horse? I had it bookmarked to buy later but it seems to be down.

#12 @Scot: looks like the 3d-Diggers site and it's content is gone now... and Beffy said this not long ago:

Quote: from the Horsepack Purchase Thread
I have taken down the shop since we aren't really able to keep the products updated and there wasn't enough interest in the packs anymore.

... the last Update was for TGE 1.5.2 and TGEA 1.8.x I think, I didn't have the time to update for T3D

It's too bad really, because it didn't take much to make it work in Torque3D.

#13 Michael would you be willing to share what you needed to do to get it to work in T3d?

#14 Going to throw myself at this as well, but will add to Ken's question Michael. Would you be willing to share the tweak?

#15 Sorry guys, but I'm legally bound not to.

#16 I am currently working on a horse vehicle class which is as Manoel said in comment #5 derived from the Player class. Current state is that it works in a pretty raw form, but collisions (with the mounted player included) do give some problems.

#17 what kind of collision problems are you having? If it's between the mounted object and rid-able class derived from the player class, there is an example in vehicle.cpp mountobject function of how to solve that.

The difficult part in creating a "rid-able" class derived from player is changing its forward vector to be parallel to the terrain instead of the object always standing straight up. It would look weird for a horse on a slope otherwise. There are some resources that show how to achieve this.

#18 @Richard: in your ridable class UpdatePos() function, you need to make sure to disable the collision of every mounted object before moving, then enable them back. This was the first problem I stumbled upon back in the TGE days ;P

@Kenan: it is much, much easier to do if you only do it for the render transform (which is used for display, not for simulation). This way you don't need to deal with collision or physics problems.

Back then we solved it by using blending animation threads, similar to the ones used to make the Player look up/down. We had an animation that adjusted the horse pose to fit a range of slope angles, and we calculated the animation position based on the height difference between two raycasts (on for the front hoofs and other for the back roofs). Worked very well and looked much better than simply rotating the entire horse.

#19 @Kenan and Manoel:

Thanks guys that is really useful information. :)