@OTRI understand. Once again thank you for taking the time to explain things like this so clearly each time (that even I manage to understand it).
Personally, I wouldn't want to go back to "simplified" horses. First, for me this would mean disrespect towards the work of Adam/Ragnarok. I'm assuming that if the animations were created in the way they were done, they were done with care. Everything that should not be there isn't, and everything that is there probably should be.
Next, it would take someone truly skilled (way more than I could be) to do it properly. Hacking & slashing through the work of someone else is one thing, creating from it or enhancing it is a whole another business, which in the animations field takes a good deal of experience, talent and of course time. Therefore, working directly on "optimizing" the keys seems a pretty... uh, hypothetical option to me.
How about "optimizing the super chain" one may wonder ? Well, while I could conceive that not everyone sees the need to have every "emote" animation available on mounts, for example, other people will disagree, and we will have the eternal question of "universal" resources coming back to the surface. It might be possible to somewhat simplify the chain, making mounts restricted to specific races or phenos, but I'll have to go back looking at how exactly the super-chain works before confirming this. I don't think it would yield spectacular results in any case.
As a builder, I can stand the 2 seconds lag that using horses imply. My players are used to it by now, I just have to be "careful". "Simpler" (pre-DLA) horses still exist in the CEP by the way, for any PW or builder that wish to use them.
However, I get what you're saying, and the point that particularly has my interest is the following :
This is compounded by the fact that, for whatever reason, some of the horse animations made it into 1.69 without being compiled, including the two largest animation files for horses, h_ba_custom.mdl (6.1mb) and h_ba_med_weap.mdl (2.8mb), and these models have to be compiled on the fly by the game either when they're first being loaded onto something that uses them or when they're being re-loaded after NWN has unloaded them from the animation cache to save space.
If I understood correctly what Draygoth currently does, all the mounts more or less benefit from the existing horse supermodels (their animations actually). Yet, it seems that Draygoth models load with no noticeable lag (or to a degree that satisfies their original creator, which I infer would probably satisfy most players or builders).
So I come with questions again (you're starting to know me now, yes ^.^) :
1/ (for Draygoth more specifically, I guess) do your models use a simplified animation super chain ? otherwise said, are some of the animations that the 1.69 horses use not used by your models, explaining that they seem to suffer less from "lag" ? I apologize for asking, since I could very well look this up on the vault directly.
2/ do we know if there is a reason that both the super-models you pointed out ("h_ba_custom" & "h_ba_med_weap") were not compiled by DLA/BW ? I assume it's technically possible with "nwnmdlcomp". I'm always very wary about what could seem obvious to me as a self-declared "amateur" when it comes to the work of specialists. Of course, nothing prevents us from trying that out at an individual scale (and that's all to your credit for giving us this new option, OTR, and I will try it sooner or later, being the curious cat that I am), but it would take some serious testing among the community, or better yet, feedback from Adam/Ragnarok or any other animation expert, to be sure that we wouldn't break anything for the long run.
Right now, I admit that it's very tempting to think that if Draygoth mounts behave nicely, looking equally good (same texture quality, poly count and such), there is no reason that we couldn't get the horsies to behave as well, without "tarnishing" the original work. It seems almost too good to be true though that BW/DLA simply "forgot" to compile these supermodels.
Modifié par Nissa_Red, 24 mars 2013 - 11:41 .
