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Tutorial for flying melee?

Started by Swingman, December 08, 2011, 12:15:07 PM

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Swingman

Hi

I wanted to experiment with flying melee, but I don't seem to remember how to go about it. The flying melee tutorial referred to on the "comprehensive list of tutorials" is not available anymore. Therefore I'm hoping someone could help me out. I seem to remember it's not that complicated. Is there a tutorial out there I'm not aware of?

(FX may not be the right place to put this post, but it was my best guess)

JKCarrier

Here's a post I saved by Taskmaster X:

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It was recently discovered in a thread in the Mods forum that we could make flying melee attacks in FFvTTR (it hasn't been tested yet in FF) that actually look like Flying Melee! I wanted to make sure as many people know about the new discovery as possible so I'm posting detailed instructions here. Here's a video I made showing how it works and looks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-_llIHRTAk

Here's a basic summary of what I did:
There are melee animations in certain keyframes (Grenadier's Male_basic_eternal, Sub-Mariner, female_basic_eternal, Male_basic_superman, etc. are some examples) that have the mesh jump into the air and then fly straight at a target. All I did was, using Nifskope, rename one of these animations to flying_melee and set it to be a ranged attack rather than a melee by changing the "contact" to "leave_hand". Then, I loaded the game up and selected the character with that mesh and gave them a projectile power with the new flying_melee animation and with a FX that is only a melee "Smack!" at the end. And, Voila!, you're done!
If you're reluctant to mess around in Nifskope, let me stress that this is a very simple process. Anyone can do it. If you're still reluctant or for some reason it just isn't working for you, then you can always PM with your e-mail and I can send you the hexed keyframes you want. I can't make them available for download since I don't have permission from the keyframes' creators to do so.


Here's the Step-By-Step Process:
Let's use Gren's male_basic_eternals keyframes as the example. They're available at www.newpowerinc.com
1.) Once you have Nifskope downloaded and installed, double-click on the keyframes.kf file to open it up in Nifskope.
2.) If this is the first time using Nifskope, then the Block Details section might not be displayed. Just hit the F2 key and it will show the Block Details. We'll be working in the Block Details in a minute.
3.) The Block List shows the list of all the different animations in this set of keyframes. Make sure you load the mesh with the keyframes in the Character Tool to know the name of the animation you want to change. In male_basic_eternals, flying melee animations are melee_3, melee_3_a, and melee_3_b. Melee_3 and melee_3_b are the best ones to use since melee_3_a is the mesh flying around in circles rather than straight ahead. Once you know the name of the animation, look for it in the Block List in Nifskope and double-click the name. Erase the name and type in flying_melee.
4.)After renaming the animation, click the + next to the "NiSequenceStreamHelper" on the same row as the name of the animation you just renamed and you'll see "NiTextKeyExtraData" right below it. Click on it.
5.)Now, look in the Block Details and you'll see "Text Keys" at the bottom. Click the + next to it. You'll now see several "Text Keys" drop down below the first one. Each one is part of the animation (start, contact, end). If there are more than 3 Text Keys below the 1st then the animation probably has more than one contact or has stuff like lf rf, etc. If there are only three below the master Text Keys then the "contact" part is the second one while start is the 1st and end is the last. Melee_3 in male_basic_eternals has only three parts, start, contact, end. Click the + next to the second Text Keys and you'll see the word "contact". Double-click the word "contact" and change it to "leave_hand" (w/out the quotes).
6.) Now that we've renamed one of the melee animations to flying_melee, we need to make a copy of that animation to use when the character is flying. Right-click the name, flying_melee, and then click Block, then Copy Branch. Scroll to the bottom of the Block List and right-click on the blank line at the bottom and click Block, then Paste Branch. This can take a long time, even on a fast PC. It may look as if Nifskope is frozen but it is working. I've seen it take as long as a half an hour to finish this process.
7.)When the copy is finished, you'll see another flying_melee at the bottom of the Block List. Rename it to hover_flying_melee.
8.) Now you're done with Nifskope! That wasn't so bad was it? Click Save and save the keyframes.kf into your mesh folder (make sure you make a backup of the original if you're overwriting the existing one)
9.) Now to create the flying melee FX. Load FFEdit and click on the FX tab. Look for minuteman_patriotswing, click it and click the Copy button. Click the Rename button and rename the FX to flying_melee. Change the Attack Type to Ranged and the Attack Sub Type to Projectile. Click Save and close FFEdit.
10.) Load the game, and go to Edit your character with the newly hexed keyframes. Create a Projectile Power and choose the "ranged1, hovering" animation and the flying_melee FX. Then give the Power a magnitude, stun, knockback, etc. Give it Short Range and an Accuracy of Medium or lower. The lower the Accuracy, the better the chance that you won't have the projectile hit the target if the target ends up moving out of range and won't make it look strange. The projectile is fired when the flying character is almost right on top of the target, so if the target is close then it will hit them. But if they move, then the chance decreases that you'll make contact the further they move away. Depending on the animation you chose for the flying melee attack you'll want to choose either Normal Velocity or Fast Velocity. If you are using the melee_3 animation which is slower, use Normal Velocity, The melee_3_b animation is faster and should use the Fast Velocity.

That's it. Have fun!

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And I also saved this note (not sure who this was by, possibly Taskmaster X as well) about AI:

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CREATING THE FLYING MELEE AI TACTIC
Here's an example of how your AI tactic should look for Flying Melee:
"TRanged('flying melee',time=1.68,mindist=0,subtype='not flying',situation='not flying')",
"TRanged('flying melee',time=1.68,mindist=0,subtype='flying',situation='flying')",

Swingman

Thanks a lot, JKCarrier. This was just what I was looking for.

Good idea saving the post. I think I'll follow your example. You never know when information like this suddenly gets hard to come by.

CycloneJoker

Great! Now Kikaider can be more useful on air  :thumbup: