btw, for v3 of this I will introduce
subfolders in tex_ua for much easier navigation through the frames...
So if you are searching for a skin or for a screen-overlay or button, you will find all of these in their designated subfolder...
I am just not 100% sure what to do about the buttonskins, because they should be in the same folder like the buttons are & maybe even stored redundantly for each animation, so the 'coder' of the material file can not 'forget' the skin around the button, if they need one (not all of them do)...
Also I will make some additional demo material-files for other levels, like basedefend, where I will show more of the benefits this new system has to offer & that is, that we could use most of the screen overlays for multiple different monitors (example: the so2_17_0*.* animations also 'fit' on the screen of ufo2_13-16), so we can use the same overlay-animations on different monitors & screens if we design them wisely
Also I will introduce a new readme.txt file, which gives a short explanation on how many frames a animation has, what it shows & which playback-command to use to best show it in all of its beauty & to help making the set-up of the material file
as easy as possible for the mappers There will be also a material file, which contains
a whole setup for the most complex animations for the U.F.O.s possible (all buttons, all displays, all animations enabled), so mappers can copy & paste from there & just have to delete what they do not like for their level afterwards. So it should be
possible to set up a complete U.F.O. material definition in 2 minutes if one does not like to optimize stuff
Also each other material-file I will make, will have a
complete documentation (with comments), so it would be easily understood even from people who know nothing about the material system & also can be copied easily to other material files
.
You can see a preview of this (unfinished & unpolished) in the tropic.mat file of v2 already...
I will also
update the wiki (never done that before) to keep everyone interested up-to-date regarding all of this.
I found out for example that it is
not necessary to compile @ all, when adding new definitions or changing existing ones in the material files.
You can set this up on the fly. That also will help mappers in setting this whole thing up nice, fast & easy...
Also I want to note here, that this new system is
really innovative, I checked out
ALL available demo-material files from Quake2world,
before I started this, to see what others have done with it & to learn what is possible, just to find out that
NOBODY pushed this as far down the rabbit hole as I did here for UFO:AI
. Maybe it got a little complex
, but it
adds loads of functionality & variance-possibilty to our U.F.O.s for sure... For all of you interested in this, please
check out tropic.mat from 1materials.pk3.
And now I will