How do animated textures work in Oblivion?

[DarkSpyda04]

I'm clueless about this and I don't know where to find a guide. Things like fire effect sprites and that room from SI that turns into butterflies. Could someone please explain these things to me?

[The_Vyper]

Those effects are caused by animations attached to meshes. The textures themselves are not animated, but are given the illusion of animation by the meshes that utilize them. The meshes use a variety of nodes to achieve these effects; what type of node utilized depends on the desired effect. I'm not well versed in those aspects of meshes, so I can't explain how to create these effects. Sorry.

[DarkSpyda04]

That's more than I already knew. So the effects are created by nodes in NIFskope? I never really studied NIFskope so I wouldn't know the details but that's what I associate the term "nodes" with. I'd have to go out of my way to learn these things if I wanted to know more but IDK I'm kinda lazy.

 

And one thing that confuses the bejebus out of me is in scripting "Playgroup forward". For instance, the script that plays when Haskill walks out of the butterfly room and the special effect triggers.

Begin OnActivate Player

if ( SEHaskillREF.leaveVAR == 2 )
          playgroup forward 1
          set SE01Metronome.weatherVAR to 1
endif

So if Haskill leaves the room, the effect triggers and the weather changes. But what I don't get is how "playgroup forward" knows what animation or effect to play. By god it must read the programmer's mind and work on magic!

Edited April 27, 2014 by DarkSpyda04

[Owrocc]

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/index.php?title=PlayGroup

 

The function is actually just called "playgroup". "forward" is a fixed term for an object's certain animations, just as "idle", etc. (had to use this with hidden levers).

[DarkSpyda04]

Oh, so "Forward" is the name of the animation. That clears some things up. I thought that it meant "play the animation forward". I guess I could do "playgroup DodgeBack 0" and the character would dodge backwards once after finishing the current animation. I don't know how this might work for world objects though like collapsing rock traps, though or even how I would set an animated texture to play or stop playing.

 

EDIT: I just realized that I can right click and preview things in the CS. This will be extremely helpful. If I were inclined to mod Oblivion, I know exactly what object I'm looking at and I can take a look at the script and try to figure out what's going on.

 

EDIT 4/27/2014 @ 10:22PM:

 

I'm checking some of the scripting I did a while back and it's some pretty cool stuff. I was able to make a switch that, when pressed, checked if a specified NPC was alive or dead and killed/resurrected the NPC accordingly. What I ended up with was a lot of fun making NPCs miserable. I had also created three other switches. One of them had an NPC walk to a location and signify that the location had been entered by playing the "AMBArenaCrowdBoo" sound. Another one had the NPC play a cowering animation and the last one is unused. This was my mod for mod testing.

 

Note to self:

 

Need to test out animation on self and animation on object such as collapsing wall. start/stop animated texture is also essential although I'm still unsure how to do that.

 

EDIT 4/28/14 @ 1:46AM:

 

Strangely when I pressed a switch that made my character do the "blockhit.kf" animation the character did the animation every time I pressed the switch but froze still and was unable to move. Still haven't tested whether or not this is because I didn't do a do once.

 

Nope, that just makes it so I can only push the button once. Well, I'm out of ideas. See you next Tuesday.

 

*Checks the post above*

 

Some animations will freeze. Here's how to solve that problem.

 

I knew that! I was just... playing stupid.

 

EDIT 4/28/14 @ 2:02AM

 

Okay, I officially ******* hate this site. Firstly I try to copy some code into my post but the site's like "I can't let you do that, Dave" and doesn't work. So I manually type out all of the code and once I finish I hit "backspace" to delete a few misplaced spaces and it brings me back to the previous page and I lose all my progress. Normally I'd copy the whole message and back it up in a text document so stupid **** like this doesn't happen but there's something wrong with the site and I can't paste things. Frick!

 

I'll type it up all again. Right, so I got the frozen player thing fixed by doing what the CS wiki said and called "playgroup idle 1" after the animation was finished. This allowed me to move around again and do stuff.

scn animTestSCRIPT
 
short animState
 
begin onActivate
 
        if (animState == 0)
               player.playgroup blockhit 1
               animState == 1
               message "animState set to 1"
 
       elseif (animState == 1)
               player.playgroup idle 1
               animState == 0
               message "animState set to 0"
       endif
end

When you push the switch, the "blockhit" animation plays but then a glitch happens and you freeze up. animState is set to "1" so that the condition for the next course of action can come to fruition. Then when the switch is pressed again, it plays the "idle" animation which returns the player to normal and sets animState back to "0" to prime it for another round.

 

Yes, you can have a switch do something different every time with cascading "if" statements. Another cool thing I learned is a neat way that I can remove controls from the player. It's not the way you're supposed to remove controls but it's pretty cool nevertheless.

 

But at least I'm learning new stuff. I can't say this will get me addicted to modding Oblivion but it's something.

Edited April 28, 2014 by DarkSpyda04

[Legotrash]

About the animating textures,if I got The_Vyper's post correctly then it's done via animated meshes and if that's the case (and you can do some 3d modelling) then this could be useful to you: guide