A Pushable Shopping Cart/Item Transport

[devinpatterson]

OK rigged it (pelvis was really the only option blender would let me export, but at least it did export). It's not really bad if your walking, but it is kinda crazy bouncing if your running. In about an hour this video will be live and you can take a peek

 

 

http://youtu.be/L-HWxi2A4kA

 

 

[Deleted4363562User]

Wow. :laugh: Look'n nice. The fact that it makes the same movements as the body isn't necessarily bad; that does simulate bouncing in the road a bit. Like you said, it looks decent when walking; running is where it gets ugly. The wheels dipping under the ground is what grabs my attention. There really aren't any animators left in the NV community? Man, not that I know what I'm talking about, but it seems like just a few touch ups and you'd have a really good mod here.

 

Could a script be added to inhibit you from running while it's equipped? I'm thinking no one would run with a cart over rugged terrain, anyway.

 

I also wonder if we could have unique sounds for when the cart is equipped. Hearing the wheels turn and bang against conrete and other material would be fantastic.

[devinpatterson]

Wow. :laugh: Look'n nice.....Like you said, it looks decent when walking; running is where it gets ugly. The wheels dipping under the ground is what grabs my attention.

Yeah you have to think of it as a invisible line of force connecting the shopping cart to the pelvis bone (armature). So it can also have some graphical glitches. For example kneeling would probably put half the cart below ground.

 

When I get some free time I am going to try a script I'v used in the vid I just posted. It isn't nearly as sensitive to the players vertical movements as being rigged to the characters skeleton, but it is somewhat processor intensive. If you have a modern mid level or higher dual core machine you probably won't notice the hit, but slower machines are going to suffer a frame drop.

 

There really aren't any animators left in the NV community? Man, not that I know what I'm talking about, but it seems like just a few touch ups and you'd have a really good mod here.

I have only recently started back after a year off of modding (just a lack of time) but even before I took a break I wasn't all that well connected. So if I said one way or the other I'd really just be talking out my *ss.

 

However it's a skill that we can all learn and there are plenty of tutorials. I have been meaning to learn myself and last night I made a simple little animation of a protectron lifting it's leg in a little jig. It's not as bad as one might think, blender fills in all the gaps so you might need to generate a keyframe every 5th or 10 manually. Blender does 80 or 90% of the work.

 

I wasn't able to get it in game, but that will come next time I have some free minutes to spare.

 

Could a script be added to inhibit you from running while it's equipped? I'm thinking no one would run with a cart over rugged terrain, anyway.

Yes a script can be added to prevent running or it can be weighted so that when equipped your overloaded (its rigged as armor). A script could probably also prevent jumping and crouching while it's equipped. And it could be hotkeye'd so you could release it immediately.

 

I also wonder if we could have unique sounds for when the cart is equipped. Hearing the wheels turn and bang against conrete and other material would be fantastic.

Yes armor can have a sound profile associated with it, and that sound could be made of audio of squeaky wheels.

 

It's certainly possible to rig a animated nif. (rig it in blender than copy'd over the appropriate blocks in nifskope to re-enable the animations). While it's not as common in FO as TES type games you can see examples of it in the FO world via the enclave armor (the fan) and other places.

 

It shouldn't be hard to make the wheels animated for a animator of any experience. A attached script would have a playgroup command forward and backward depending on which direction the character was walking. I don't, however know of anyone personally to ask on nexus for the animation.

[Deleted4363562User]

Well, actually I think weighting the cart is bad because then it would inhibit the player from even moving at the Vanilla "jogging" rate, which is really essential for this mod to be of any use to anyone. Most likely this would be a Hardcore mod for people not using fast travel. Walking at the pace of over encumbrance would be too much for even the most hard core player. The walk from Primm to the Mojave Outpost alone would force me to ditch the cart.

 

I love the notion of hot keying the cart, especially if the cart uses a script that impedes your movements to any degree. It'd be great for those moments when you're assalted bya bunch of raiders.

 

 

 

If I look around for wheel sounds what format would be best? MP3, WAV, or that OGG format?

[dangman4ever]

Nice work Devin!

 

@ aloot

.ogg would be best. .wav would work as well.

[DaemonGrin]

FX use wav if I am not mistaken.

 

Good Luck,

Geoff

[Deleted4363562User]

ok, thanks guys

[Deleted4363562User]

I found some decent cart sounds on Freesound.org. Here are some:

 

http://www.freesound.org/people/alienistcog/sounds/125161/

 

http://www.freesound.org/people/CGEffex/sounds/89584/

 

I think we could edit these to make them suitable for our purposes. Basically chop a block of solid "cart-rolling" out of there and loop it. It would be nice if we could have an indoor and outdoor sound. Is that possible?

[devinpatterson]

I found some decent cart sounds on Freesound.org. Here are some:

I think we could edit these to make them suitable for our purposes. Basically chop a block of solid "cart-rolling" out of there and loop it. It would be nice if we could have an indoor and outdoor sound. Is that possible?

Cool I will check them out. As for different sounds indoor or out, it's easy to set a condition to check if your indoors (and by default outside being != indoors) but you couldn't attach that condition to the armor's sound profile. You could change the armor via a script though depending on whether your outdoors, and the armors would look exactly the same, but each would have a seperate sound profile (one for indoors one for outdoors).

 

Or you can drop the sound profiles completely and use a seperate script to make the sounds, something that would play when the cart was equipped (in the onequipe block you'd stick the condition to determine if your inside or outside) but it would get messy fast. You'd need some way to determine when you go into a location, exit a location etc so you'd probably have to stick it in a quest script. There are probably a lot of other details as well.

 

So I guess in summary what I'm saying is I don't think it would be worth tying to make two different sounds, at least with the methods I outlined above, but someone else may have a simpler and far more elegant approach.

[xaosbob]

This is a very interesting idea, and one I've thought of many times...honestly, whenever I see a shopping cart. I'm not much of an animator (Lightwave--I can do some, but I'm way rusty) but I know the basics. What about using a modified skeleton, either a custom one or something like BBB? As far as I know, BBB uses additional bones to give...uh, bounce to things, so that means at least a few more to play with.

 

Otherwise, adding an elbow-jointed bone stemming from the pelvis or chest might help anims for crouching, so the cart doesn't sink into the ground. You crouch, the "cart-arm bone" extends, you stand again, it adducts into the curled position. When running, a couple keyframes could help level out the extra bounce of the cart a bit with such a joint, too.

 

All that said, I should add the caveat that this is coming from a modder who is having a hard time sorting out how to attach a new or modified mesh to an existing skeleton .nif in the first place.

 

As to the sound issue, there seem to be audio differences between worldspaces and interiors--at least on my PC, gunshots (for example) sound much louder in interiors, and there seems to even be a brief inside echo. Is that something to do with cell audio settings? If so, that could mean one sound file could work in both and have those subtle differences. And again, I haven't done much (and no public) sound modding, so ...well, there it is.