Building Animations - M2TW

Building animations are used in M2TW battle-map buildings to represent gates opening and closing, walls being progressively destroyed, and towers and gates being damaged.

Useage Overview

Walls

Wall objects have a varying number of groups, normally depending on the size of wall. Town pallisade wall objects only have 4 groups, typical castle wall objects have 6 groups. Animations are used to show the transition between one group and the next, so for a 4 group wall object you would have 3 transitions. If animations are not used the view in game simply switches suddenly from one damage state group to the next.

Towers

Arrow Tower objects should be a 2 group object with a damaged and undamaged state. Animations are used to show the transition. Tall and complex tower objects in the game that can not be specifically targetted by artillery may also use an animation as above. If an animation is not used the view in game simply switches suddenly from one damage state group to the next.

Gates

The only building animations that are essential are the gate animation sets, when the gate 'opens' it uses an 'Open' animation to show the opening process, it stays at the end of that animation until troops clear the area, then uses a 'Close' animation to return to the starting position. Unlike the other transitions this is not a switch from one object-group to another, the temporarily open state is solely shown by the animation, if an animation is not used troops trying to use the gate will get stuck. This is a peculiarity of gates - for other building items the structure collisions do not actually stop troops.

File Structure

The object itself (wall/gate/tower) and its groups are structures within the .world file.

The animation requires the following files which will be common to all instances of the same wall/gate/tower:

• .anim
• .mesh
• .evt - sound effects trigger
• Textures - which would normally be the same as those used for the object.

To activate the animation for a particular instance of an object the .world files for the settlement are used:

• .world - contains the file-path and name of the .anim to be used, and the assignment to each object.
• .worldcollision - sets the displacement and rotation from 0,0,0 to where the animation should appear for the specific object.
• .animinstances contains packed chunks of compressed information specific to each object.