[Ninquenor]

I'm trying to get a dragon working basing it off the fell beast, but I'm having problems with adding Saruman's fireball. Some preliminaries...

I made a dragon's skin and used the fell beast/nazgul skin for it, and the fell beast/nazgul now uses the fell beast/witchking skin. Like this:



And some shots of the fireball in action:



Now for the problems. Heh. Using GiantBirdAIUpdateInterface, the dragon refuses to auto-turn to target when you use the fireball. If he is currently within 15 degrees (as set in weapon.ini) he'll fire it off, but otherwise nothing.

Switching to the more generic AIUpdateInterface and changing the locomotor to use HOVER instead of TWO_LEGS works (for the most part) as far as the dragon visually still appearing to be flying in the air, and it DOES auto-turn to target when you use the fireball, but...

The dragon is now attackable by ground units (who apparently don't realize the dragon is hovering 121 units in the air), and the swoop animations aren't working for his attack. This results in him simply floating 121 units in the air and instantly grabbing people up or smashing them without visually swooping down for the attack. But boy is the fireball fun. Heh.

In any case, I'm posting here for any ideas on how to get the dragon to auto-turn towards a target with a ranged weapon uising GiantBirdAIUpdateInterface, or how to get the swoop animations to work using AIUpdateInterface and a locomotor of HOVER and not have ground units be able to target the dragon. Either or...I'm not picky!



I've pretty much exhausted my options as far as GiantBirdAIUpdateInterface, so I'm gonna' try and at least get the anims working for the swoop/grab using HOVER.

Any help and/or advice would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Take care.

[Phoib]

I dont have a clue, but please send that dragon to Biohazard!

[Ninquenor]

Originally Posted by Phoib";p=&quot

I dont have a clue, but please send that dragon to Biohazard!

To Biohazard? Beg pardon?

Take care.

EDIT: Managed to get it so melee units don't attack the dragon. That's good. Now to try and get swooping to work using AIUpdateInterface....

[LynX2oo3]

Thats really cool man!

Smaug!

[darkgondorian]

How long did that take you??? looks amazing

[Ninquenor]

Oh. Well, the skin was simply a strict recolor - no skill involved and took like all of 5 seconds. Adding the fireball was just cut and paste from Saruman's object. The hardest/longest part was experimenting with the Behavior to see which one worked best, and I'm still not satisfied.

For now my dragons are on hold.

Take care.

[Gondolin]

I have a few questions. Its hard to see in the pics but did you take the Ringwraith off the model, and how, are they seperate? Looks very nice. Next thing, whenever i've used the fire ball ability on a different unit it would only shoot from "Saruman height". So it would be shooting out of the balrogs knees, lol. How did you work around this, or did you have to? Last thing, for the HI of the dragon how did you get it to have transparency, what type of file is it, dds? tga? Whenever I save those types of files they get flattened and lose all transparency. Looks awesome.

[DeeZire]

For your swooping thing, if you want to stick with the normal AIUpdate module then I'd suggest making the swoop attack into a special ability using the SPECIAL_SWOOP_ATTACK enum - that will allow you to define a specific animation set for the SWOOPING state

[Ninquenor]

Yes, but will this allow the dragon to actually swoop? I was under the impression that AIUpdateInterface didn't possess anything that can change the unit's height (i.e., a 2D AI).

Does making it a special ability somehow allow it to take on 3D movement characteristics for the definition of the ability? I've got to test it out - don't know.

Gondolin, somebody showed me that the Nazgul can be hidden with the command:

CurDrawableHideSubObjectPermanently("NAZGUL_SKIN")

If you opened up the model in a W3D viewer you'd see what I'm talking about. NAZGUL_SKIN and some others are sets of bones, I guess, that you can turn on or off.

As far as the weapon's origin, I used this:

WeaponLaunchBone = PRIMARY BAT_NECK

That makes the attack come from the neck of the creature instead of the right toe (BAT_TOER1 is the default)

I use PSP 7 for image editing. I downloaded a DDS plugin for it from Nvidia's website which enables proper loading and saving. I don't know the "correct" method for using the alpha channel.

First I would open the DDS without the mip maps. Next I would load a mask from the alpha channel. At this point you can edit the image, the mask, whatever. Finally, save. When you do so your DDS plugin will pop up and give you some options. I don't remember what the defaults were, but here're a couple that work for me:

Save Format: DXT3 ARGB (Explicit Alpha)
MIP Map Generation: Use Existing MIP maps

and

Under Config...
Texture Format based on Alpha is checked

That oughta' do it.

Take care.

[Halbarad]

how do u make it so that melee units cannot attack, this is the main problem with the dragon i have made (it is basically the same as yours)