Possible Projects Interest

[Randomdays]

1) M'ress - I took the broken mesh of M'ress and exported all her parts as wavefront obj files. These are what I built all the original trek meshes with. Imported all the pieces back in and copied the meshes' weights over to the obj. Deleted the original mesh and parented the obj parts to the armature. I exported her and put her in the FF1 Danger Room. She ran around, jumped, flew, fired a phaser pistol and rifle and went through 2 rounds in the Danger Room without any errors. I think she's fixed and I'll go back and do the rest of the girls again.

Still a little shine to her face. She did not come with glow and reflect skins for any of her uniforms. Her original skins were various variations of 256 x X jpgs that had to be turned into squared up tgas. Since she's in part so is her skin - 8 different skins for her plus 3 more for the weapons and tricorder.



2) Speed Racer - Basically done.  Overall a big pain - not due to Style's model, but the imported Mach V. Poly count down to about 25k in a multipart nif. Had to remove his visor due to conflicts with the Alpha Channel. Wheels removed and replaced with the ones from NPI's Datsun from their vehicle pack. At present, done for FF1 and I need to test him out. FF2 conversion after that with test, then probably a bunch of uploads coming up. If Style doesn't mind I'll post his original mesh with the Mach V skope. His is for FF2.

[SickAlice]

As far as that I'm about the "smart' thing. I'm not. I just read a lot. I read a lot of manuals for this stuff and sat through tutorials. I was also around in the day and people like Tommyboy and Val taught me a lot of what to do. And I keep notes on all this of course so I can check back while I'm putting together nifs and such. To anyone's credit a lot of that isn't online anymore and I'm factoring all that into the tutorial tome I'm putting together.

And hey for M'ress upload it to that MU site if you please and put a market on it like "updated" or something. I'd like to see where you went with it. I bet I can probably suss out the shine on the face too. It "looks" like the polys weren't smoothed to me from the pic but it might be something else. Or just the original model is like that even.

Here's something for you to study. You brought up spinning weapons animations the other day. Now I know how to make them but they are a real tedious pain and more often it ends up messy. The alt method game devs use is a spinning texture piece that acts as a dummy. So here is an FBX of Donatello from the game Mutant Rumble I extracted. All of the animations are included in the FBX. When you look you'll see model of a bo staff. Then there is also a dummy spinning model. It's just a flat circle plane. The texture is basically a swirl. So in Nif say you would make the texture animated in the nif itself so it spins in a circle like any shield FX we have. Then in the keyframes you hide the bo model or dummy spinning one during moves where you wish to pull off the effect of a spinning. This actually looks much nicer in game, I've used this technique for a few things. I used it on the tires and engine of the Spider-Mobile and am using it for the fan on my Turtles skateboards.

http://thelitterbox.freedomforce4ever.com//temp/Mutant_Rumble_Donatello.rar

[Randomdays]

Thanks SA. I still say you're smart.

Good ideas on the spinning textures. I've seen similar effects for plane propellers in a few games - a swirling image on a spinning disk.

The face is a bit low poly. Not sure why they broke the head up like that - a central face piece, a hair piece, and then the rest of the head. Must have been a decision based on the game engine. The texture for the face is also only a half face mirrored to the other side. Most of the models are like that

[Randomdays]

Uploaded and moved around some files on the Megasite. New Folder - "Mounts and Vehicles.

Moved the Civ4 Gunship and the Thundertank here. Uploaded Style's Speed Racer and the Mach V with Speed Racer at the wheel. Also uploaded the 3 Tarzan mounts - eagle, elephant and triceratops here.

Tested the Mach V in game in FF1 and it moved around and fired a beam weapon I gave it. Bounding seems a little off as it "clips" various items on the map. Everything runs fine until the end of the Danger Room mission and then the game errors out. It could be the car, the FF2 converted to FF1 Speed Racer or something else.

The vehicle itself has no textures. Final poly count about 21K. Deleted some hidden wheel vertexes that were no longer needed, added inner side panels and a floor since the originals are visible only on the outside only. Did the same with the windshield and side windows and added transparency.

Uploaded the corrected M'Ress to the Star Trek Folder and the Dragonzord to the requests folder.

Deleted a bunch of files from the requests folder.

I'm holding off on uploading the horse riders for a bit - I still want to to see if I can work with the kf's and see if I can lower them in the saddle. One set of corrected kf's should work with all riders - even Tommyboy's if needed.

[SickAlice]

I made the propeller effect here actually. I came up with the idea of a stationary model where the model itself is in two position and the spinning texture runs across the alpha channel on the texture. That was for Overdrive originally, requested by CB in the day and I improve it a bit on Mario's propeller hat. It's a good method especially if you don't want to figure out axis rotations, which again more often can come out terrible looking and just take a lot of time.

I didn't see the M'Ress in the folder (also this site is coming out backwards for me for some reason?) but here's a run down of any reason for that issue, some I already covered with you:
- lightmap conflict: More often this will be very glaring. A nif should only have a single lightmap assigned to the Scene Root. Any other should be deleted since can conflict with one another. It's also the cause of the Pink Gloss issue.
- MaterialProperty is set to anything than 10.0000. Blender export plugins as I explained do this.
- Additionally Properties attached model. Blender again is the cause. It adds things we do not use in this game or ones aren't needed for a model like StencilMasks with odd settings.
- There isn't a refl and glow text assigned to the model. This should always be for character models because FF games look for it. Just to tell the game engine there is NOT a reflection via a Fanta refl texture.
- Model is assigned a refl texture but it is the wrong thing. This was one of the issues with the Dragonzord. It was assigned refl and glow textures but both were pointed to the base/main texture which itself is very light of course. This of course needs to be changed and is another reason nifs should have refl and glow textures whether they need them or not.
- The model faces were not smoothed before weight copying. I forget this one sometimes but before weight copying one should switch to Edit mode and smooth the faces. The old version of Blender will by default "unsmooth" faces on a model upon import. That will create a shiny look.
- Copying the wrong mesh. Blender again here. For reasons, Blender will export two different versions of the same model in a nif. One will have texture data assigned to it and one will not. If you copy the one does not it will have a glossy look to it. That is something that is used for other Netimmerse games but not the FF games of course. I forget this one every now and then as well. Go in Block List Mode in Nifskope instead of Hierarchy Mode and make sure it's the model that has a texture assigned to it before copying it over.

Those are the only reasons I know that happens other than the refl texture itself being colored anything other than Fanta Black. Which I've done by accident where I colored a refl a slightly grey color instead of black.

[Randomdays]

Hey SA

Checked in M'Ress is in the Star Trek Folder as "St MRess RD.rar" Probably I need to clean things up a bit with directories up top and the rar's below them.

Had time to check the mesh and smooth was on. One thing of note on the head is that even in Blender, the side planes of the face are so shape in angle compared to the center that they seem in shadow - that and being separate parts with different skins may add to that as well.

I'd have to look back a view pages to when I was working on my map, but I think I wound up with rotations at three different speeds;

1) slow - I was able to get a lighthouse with a revolving light imported into FF2 with from Wildlife Park 2 with its keyframes intact. I think I used this for the merry-go-round and the haunted house cart disks.

2) medium speed - There's a few spinning meshes - mainly some Red Tornado's - where in fly or hover he sticks his arms out and spins. I think I used this for the barnstormer ride

3)fast speed - I was able to get a Civ 4 gunship imported with its keyframes. I was able to use the animation for Doc Savage in the autogyro.

FF2 had a tank with revolving wheels but the speed was uneven. There are some airducts around with spinning blades on the map, and I think NPI had a helicopter with spinning blades, but I couldn't get those to work.

The autogyro and the gunship are on the megasite if you want to check them out

[Randomdays]

SA - No problem - you've done a lot helping both many in the community and myself Its noted.

Back to the Zord - Here's a pic of Val's Mechagodzilla and the base import of the dragonzord



The next two pics are the original glossy rig and SA's corrected rig. The rig itself isn't too bad but I found I had one thigh vertex rigged to the upper arm. I had to go back in and fix that but it should be good to go. SA added a glow and reflect texture.



Last, spent most of the day working on getting Style's Speed Racer into the Mach V. First rough draft pic below. He still needs to be posed and the car need a lot of cleanup and poly reduced - It started at 120K polys and at present its down to about 70K

[SickAlice]

I can't get it to load for  to look at it but first delete the NiSpecularProperty from it for one. That's for adding shine.

Go to the faces NiMaterialProperty and View > Block Details:
Change the Glossiness from 1.5000 to 10.0000
Ambient = 0.502
Diffuse = 1.000
Specular = 0.900
Emissive = 0.000

See if that helps. Else the imported model from Blender that I mentioned in the last one. Funny, right after I typed it I did the exact thing with my Selene nif. I mean grabbed the wrong mesh from the output file of the 2 Blender puts in there. And yeah it was all glossy of course.

I'm realizing in peoples defense on the side when I mentioned reading a lot of the manuals are gone from the internet including the original NifLib docs. I read all that back in the day and kept a folder full of indexed notes of settings like this but else as I say male basic effects is your best friend, an unconverted and a converted version. Between those nifs and the chicken for the second every single setting for these games can be found. I almost always have a copy of mbe on hand and open when I'm putting together a nif just to be able to quickly copy these settings from.

[Randomdays]

1) SA -

Put M'ress back into Blender and exported a FF2 version out. She seems to run fine with no errors in a couple of rounds in the Rumble Room.

I posted her on the MEgasite next to the FF1 version if you want to check her out.

I can't seem to figure out how to get where you're saying to go. Maybe I'm using a different version of nifskope? Checked the info and there's no version number.

Do you need to be in tree mode or list mode for blocks?

For the different colors, I just can't enter a number as they come in three data block for RGB.

Pic of what I have below with the face block highlighted.



2) Ultimate Alliance. I was finally able to get MUA1 up and running again and figure out how to get the WW2 Fury functional. It's a reskin of the Fury character and the simplest way is to change some file names around and have it replace one of his normal skins - in this case General Fury.

The next problem is normal screen cap wasn't working and I couldn't get the game to enter windowed mode. I was able to get the in-game screen cap working finally and then locate it - screen caps are not in the game directory but in the "my documents" area with the save games (which is why all my old save games are missing!)

A %100 solved game save from the web helped with that.

So, pic of WW2 Fury below. The gun and the sword will probably go if I bring it into FF. Taskmaster? Punisher? PV? Maybe add a helmet?

I used 3D ripper back in the day, which worked, but the meshes came out pretty flat and 2D like. I'll see if Ninja ripper works and give a better output.

If so, I might redo some of the previous MUA rips I did. There's probably a bunch of new meshes and skins available now that weren't then over in Marvel Mods.

[SickAlice]

You enter the same number for all three in the set.

Here's the NiMaterialProperty for the face for your  Mress.
Look below at the Glossiness. That needs to be 10.0000. You have it at 1.5000
Here I am filling in all three of the Ambient blocks with 0.502.



This is what the finished result should look like for  .



If it's for  it looks like this.



Another problem isn't that the face is too bright, it's the rest is too dark for Freedom Force. See here on the torso.



The fast way to fix all this is go to the mesh of the NiMaterialProperty we just fixed. Open up the Properties and find the number for that NiMaterialProperty.



Enter that number in place of the number for the NiMaterialProperty the torso is pointing at. Since the settings are the same for everything they can all share a NiMaterialProperty. It will also cut down on the size of the nif file itself.



Do that for all pieces. Also these NiSpecularProperty's must go. They create "shiny". Delete them by highlighting them and backspacing.



Once you're done close up the trees and delete all of the NiMaterialProperty's and NiSpecularProperty's that were dumped at the end of the file. If you don't the nif won't load. Delete them by "Remove Branch" or CTRL + DEL. Save the file.



So the whole pointing thing we just did. Next time then you can just copy a piece with an already correct NiMaterialProperty into one that doesn't have it and swipe the NiMaterialProperty from it to the new nif and save yourself the time of doing it this long way. You can delete the copied piece after, once another piece points at the NiMaterialProperty it will be retained no matter what.

[Randomdays]

 

Clear and concise. Thank you!

[SickAlice]

I hoped the last bit wasn't unclear. I have a note for myself to make a nif that's just a couple static pieces and nothing more that contain settings. The thing will be a tutorial, a little cleaner than this one, and it will be just be stuff people can skope into their projects and do the whole pointer thing and save themselves a ton of work.

[Randomdays]

Everything was clear once I got home and was able to go thru it with the nif open.

The adjust with FF worked fine and she looked great in game with the glossiness gone.

For FF2, I "thought" i followed the same process, but the model didn't show up in character select, and when I deleted the character and remade it, she crashed the game.

I went ahead and imported the corrected FF character to Blender and exported her out as FF2. All properties were good and the standard material for everything was now "Extras" - something from the original tommyboy mesh that's not even used, but I assume it had the same properties as the correted pieces and became the new standard.

This mesh worked fine in FF2 with the glossiness gone also.

Corrected versions of both FF and FF2 uploaded to the megasite with "UD" on the end for "update"

I should be able to redo all the females (again) with the improved rigging and materials. Should be quick and hopefully easy.

[SickAlice]

I always had problems with that.  I always convert but use the untainted nif instead of the donor/exported. I also always had issues with Tommy's TV nifs and just avoided using them. More because they aren't cumbersome to skopers and skinners and I want to make stuff can use to build whatever is in their mind. I digress, those are specific nifs he made, a lot like VX and you end up with a lot of odd results. I had the same exact issues with the  of that as well, crashes and so forth. And I think you know I won't make  stuff either due to lack of functionality, more the broken alpha channels though than anything else.

[Randomdays]

All the girls are completed (again) Importing just the head to the base set and exporting out again worked perfectly, except that because of the specular issues it kept going from ".900" to "0.00"

Since the head and neck are a separate piece from the chest, one of the hardest problems for each was trying to get a good adjust for the y and z axis after importing. Mainly I went with lining it up with the old one before I deleted it.

There are a few other females that were done that I didn't do before that I might add to the group - some generic crewmembers, Dr Dehner from the pilot, Noel from "Dagger of the Mind", some "Mirror Image" costumes. And.....

Dax from the DS9 Tribbles episode.

[Randomdays]

Working on a bunch of releases and some should be out soon.

Some Star Trek, some riders, maybe the WW2 Fury from MUA. There's hundreds of MUA custom skins that still might be available, but I think I would still look at the ones that don't have a good presence already in the game. Maybe the Watcher? I think Tommyboy's is the only version we have now.

For the skoped riders, I can't figure out how to lower them in the saddle. They're for FF1 so the process SA gave me for rotating the mesh for wall climbing in FF2 doesn't look like it would work to change the z height.

[SickAlice]

I used to have an official plush Tribble I got at a convention. It would make the sound without warning when I would lay in bed and accidently roll on it and scare the bejeezus out of me. I gave it to a friend and she gave me my Rapheal figure in turn later for it.

You normally adjust the Z position in the Translations in Biped01. This assumes both things do not share that same Biped01 in the Nif. If they do not have seperate nodes your buggered. You can also add the handle to keyframes but again if they share that you are also out of luck. Lastly you can add, which I did with that example in fact, the specific node. So the node name the rider's mesh is contained within as opposed to the rides/animals node. You have to of course then add this to every animation so the position on and off the ride is accounted for.

When I put these things together I keep the rides in the Scene Root by themselves so they aren't effected by what the body model is doing, like Gren did with Hawkeyes flying sled. It saves the trouble of all this nonsense.

Off-Topic: The "riverdance" you mentioned the other day? It's the dance INK's Dazzler does and it does work on male basics albeit a little crunching in the neck area. I used on Deadpool.

[Randomdays]

Thanks on the riders. I'll look at that and see if I can figure that out. It's been a while since I worked on that climbing stuff and I've forgotten almost everything

On the mesh, under handle, there's a bip01 and a bip02, each with a separate list of bones, like pelvis and spine, so I'm assuming that that's good from what you wrote.


On the riverdance, not the one from Ink's Dazzler. When I was working on the Ultima Online kf imports, since its a MMO there a lot of "social" animations that are in the game for interacting with other players and that's one of them. I was working on the basic male model where some of the anims worked fine, some had the mesh disappearing on the middle of the animation, and some just crash everything.

[SickAlice]

JFC's Valkerie? I'm at a loss on that one. Anyways so you want to control the position either in the keyframes OR the nif by those separate Bipeds. The dependancy is whether the keyframe animations already have the seperate Bipeds in them or not, I am assuming this but check them out and see if it's there. If they do not you can just position the rider by their separate armature. If not you have to manually go through and adjust the Translations in every keyframe. It's not too much work, it's a lot of copying and pasting.

It is a Riverdance that Dazzler is doing though. Just saying, watch the footwork on it. The only thing in need of change is to put the hands on the hips instead. Now I am not familiar with the program but what I understand is most modders get danicng animations for any other game, be it Sim's or GTA and so on via MMD (MikuMikuDance). Apparently that's the program to use and I figure any kind of dance you can think of is probably already made for it and available for download somewhere. I have seen their Thriller and Canned Heat dances used for a hundred different game mods. I also say someone use one of those to program an Optimus Prime toy to dance in real life. I think that would be the place to start. Advanced animations like dances always just seemed like to much work to me for this Freedom Force stuff. I always did kind of want to make the Can-Can for fun.

When meshes or parts of meshes vanish that is because the End Times somewhere in that animation do not line up. Every single Quaternion, Translation and Scale must have the same exact Start and End time without exception. This is one of the things I was talking about in the PM the other day. Even the best people miss a number sometimes but that is the cause of that problem. It is also why you can't either neglect to account for a string in any keyframe nor why you can't point two or more to the same keyframe. Additionally every keyframe in every animation must be set to either Cycle or Clamp. They can't be mixed or this will cash vanishing. Crashes are happening because their are bad string names in the animation somewhere.

Example. In the typical male basic keyframe set in the Idle animation's NiTextKeyED000 the Start Time is 0.0000, which everything always is, and the End Time is 1.8000. There are no Contact Points to speak of in the Idle. This is all shown in CTool in the info box on the side as well when looking at the animation. So every setting in every keyframe in that animation must start with 0.0000 and end with 1.8000 and it must be set to Cycle. If not it will vanish.

Let's say for example the keyframe for Bip01 L Foot, because this is common example I have found in peoples keyframes, is set to the wrong end time. I'll just say 0.9000 for example. It happened because someone transferred the animation but didn't go through and fix the times. So when you play it in CTool and game the left foot of the model will vanish at some point before the animation ends.

Between that and the fact animations are interrupted midplay when a character is attacked in game. But that's the problem and solution for that anyways which is also a pretty simple thing to fix. Just just every number in the keyframes and make sure they are all the same, because if that's happening they are not.

[Randomdays]

SA - I looked at JKC's Val and some other female riders. From what I saw the gait of the winged riders is different from the normal horses - they're not just running in the sky.

I'd like a female setup for the females that I'd like to make into riders - maybe your Red Sonja, the cowgirl mesh and Ariel from Thundarr. Maybe more if I can think of them.

I'll have to tinker around some more this weekend. Hopefully I've got your pm's from back in the day.

On a small side note I started thinking about transparent meshes again after doing Space Ghost a while back, as well as Jan and Jace. I couldn't get a lot of them to work right, but the FF2 basic "CapeMan" worked. I figure I can get a lot done with this, either trying out the basic "NoCapeMan" as well, or just removing the cape from the first.

First experiment below - CapeMan with a Vision skin from C6. Not a perfect fit but looks good for a first try. I'm wondering if I remove his bounding box if he'd "phase" through items like in the comics. Without the cape, Dr Strange's astral form as another example.

Females like the Invisible Woman would need their own mesh, as would special characters, like DC's Gentleman Ghost and Deadman.

[SickAlice]

In my previous I already said I know to make a separate mesh as I already have in my works. I was trying to discover how to dictate the texture via the keyframes. I know that function exists for Netimmerse I just don't know how to set it up. And of course if the FF game engines even implemented it, I assume the 1st game did not. And alpha's don't work for it anyways. Normally a nif doesn't change textures in these games so things like transparency are just built into nifs themselves. But I already covered that. Like much else I am just curious to learn it and a lot of the documentation for Niflib is either no longer available online or it was just lacking to begin with. Otherwise if you looking at it Renegades Martian Manhunter is the earliest example I know of where someone used two distinct models, one for transparency. Actually I think four, two for the bodies and two for the capes. But again I covered that already.

And else? You make a character transparent by adding a specific greyscale to a textures alpha channel and having set-up an alpha property in the nif. How everyone has done it for since  and Nifskope came out. Again as there I was not asking how. I already know. Which is why "I am NOT looking to use a separate mesh".

If the part of the nif does not already have an alpha property you add one by right clicking on the mesh itself.
Select Node > Attach Property > NiAlphaProperty.

The right setting for NiAlphaProperty are as follows:
Enable Blending: Check
Source Blender Mode: Src Alpha
Destination Blend Mode: Inv Source Alpha
Enable Testing: Check
Alpha Test Function: Greater
Alpha Test Threshold: 200
Sort Triangles: No

On the alpha channel for a 32-bit TGA/DDS the color settings are:
Visible: #ffffff (white)
invisible: #000000 (black)
Transparent: #d7d7d7 (light grey)

So after it's all said and done what we do is make a transparent directory/skin selection and people set up their Hero files so when the character goes transparent it points to that skin.
As was already done on Invisible Woman by me and daglob. And all the Lantern Corps and so on.

On BBox I'm not sure? That's more coding side and not my area. I "assume" the engines just default on the model faces but I dunno. What I would think is you set it up in the editor instead/FFX. Where you make two characters, one is the "shapeshift form" and check off the astral one as not being solid. Someone already did it in a mod I am sure and would know how to go about it. Boundaries are, well flawed in these games. For some odd reason they did not program proximity into much of it. I'm thrown by that because it's the oldest and most basic functions of video games, one the very first things I learned to program. Yet it's just not there. It's why a character can't say ride on a map object. Or walk under a bridge yet fly over it. That detection just isn't there. In any of my experiments either the character gets kicked away/can't pass the object at all or the get stuck in null space somewhere when trying to exploit proximity and contact. So I think you likely will encounter a glitch doing that but it's worth a shot to find out eitherway I suppose.

[Randomdays]

SA - Looked at my last post and sorry I wasn't more clear, but the transparency stuff was more in general to the boards than to you specifically. The info you gave back was great as always though.

Added the alpha with the "Attach Property" as you said. These would be more for the people that haven't learned how to manipulate nifs or don't care to learn.

A separate mesh working with one of the "other form" abilities would be easy for most people to set up with their character.

Besides the CapeMan, I found Dean's Deadman worked as well. The Gentleman Ghost mesh was for FF1 didn't work, so I'll see if converting it to FF2 will enable it.

I set up skins for CapeMan for LP's Vision, a C6 Dr Strange, and and a Martian Manhunter. Other possibilities that I can think of off hand - There's a Danny Phantom out there as well as Kenn X's Casper, maybe DC's Spectre and Shadow Thief, Marvel's Red Ghost, Shadowcat,  and the Swordsman became a "spirit" at the end. Probably others out there.

I know that dm made both a vision and a Martian Manhunter that had a different "phased" form appear during different animations, as well as Ren's. I'll have to look at yours and DG files again.

Changing to an alt transparent skin in the hero file would work for visual, but would it also be able to make the character astral and able to go through items? Most of the transparent characters are also astral so would need to be able to phase as well - only a few just turn invisible alone.

I didn't know you could check off a form as being astral and it become not solid. Is that in FFX3? 

On the map objects again, I wonder if you could do something like two forms with that? One without a bounding box so you could walk under it, and a swap to one with a bounding box where you could land on it? There would have to be a trigger to swap them back and forth.

[SickAlice]

You choose whether a thing is solid or not the Editor. FFX has astral form for a choice though as well.

[Randomdays]

Ok, good to know. Somehow that disables collision I guess. I'll have to try that out and see how it works.

[SickAlice]

Ghostly in FFX come to think of it. There's others and Phasing of course. So it's a selectable function in other words. But there's a lot of stuff right in the Editor, in fact if you forget it then you end up not being able to interact with said object. Anyways Astral Form in FFX is already set up for this.

[Randomdays]

So, maybe on the map objects, that would enable you to go "under" an object, and maybe "on" and object, turning it on and off or with two different almost identical objects, just not two characters doing so at the same time.

Or, if a bridge was a large character with a bounding box, not a map object, can a character stand on a character, like standing on a car? Could you turn phasing on and off on a npc or map object with its kfs? 

When a character lands on a car, it stops and won't move per the game engine. Supposed the car was actually high up, non moving, and looked like a bridge, and was phased. Could you walk under it? And then if the character landed on it, like on a car, it would become unphased, and you could stand on it?

[SickAlice]

Not sure where you're going with that. You can have an object you can stand on OR walk under but not both. It's just the needed function doesn't exist in the game more or less.

You know out of curiosity I just tested a little in FFX.
Ghostly just automatically makes the entire transparent for one whether it has that setting or a texture fyi.
Astral project you simple select a created Hero with the Astral Projection attribute. It could be the same nif pointed a transparent texture or not, whatever.

The thing I noticed right and hadn't thought about is characters naturally avoid objects. Like I tried to pass through stuff and occasionally pulled it off, like a got through a tree and a fire hydrant but mostly it wasn't happening because the characters avoid the solid object, being a character and all and that just being the programmed behavior. So, and maybe somebody already has made this, but I think what you need then is a script to enable such a behavior. As usual if the function even exists in the game engine to tap for it.

But mess around with FFX and the Ghostly attribute and try to force the character to run through anything solid and you'll see what I'm talking about. Automatically they will walk around the object instead, and in settings the objects have "Avoid" as one of their settings.

A little more on that and I wasn't thinking, long night and I'm watching seven of snow fall to shovel but we do not control the movement of characters in these games. It's not free roam which is again odd to me because that's a common thing, going back to Quake engine and so forth. But there's things on both the maps and map objects that came with the game. Like there's flat planes on top of building objects for example that says a character can stand on it in the nif. On the map where the building is place on what "appears" to be the ground level, as their is no proper height detection, there is also a square that determines there is a building placed on that spot. So your character won't say walk into the bottom of the building, they move and own and avoid it. In the second game the second building up on the right from the starting in the city is flawed and they forgot all this so if you try and land on that building the character will just kind of vanish and they have find their back from null space. Or "footsteps" There's paths that on that say "a character walks here". So like that basically, I'm not good with all the maps settings but I know the gist and more than we don't actually control the movement. So the character would have to attempt to walk through say a building in order the next step, pass through it but that won't happen because they will actively avoid. They just stop when they reach the building.

And that's the hurdle here I think. Like remove the bounding boxes all you want but this is defined as character in the game and will behave like one anyways and avoid objects that are labelled with Avoid on them.

[Randomdays]

Just thinking about possible get arounds for walking under and over an item.

I know you can't do both with an object, but if its a character that "looks" like an object? And as we just discussed, you can change a character from phased to unphased, can you do the same with an object?

Like I mentioned, can a character stand on a character? If I put a large flat bounding box on a thug, can I stand on the thug? And then if the thug flies, I can walk under him?

Another thought. If I'm standing on a car or  boulder or something, and a character picks up the boulder, can I still be standing on it? If a character has already picked up a boulder or car, can I fly over and land on it? How about targeting the boulder with an attack and blowing it up before he throws it at me?

I'm guessing no, since the object has probably been transformed by picking it up and is no longer an object.

On the Ghostly, maybe the bounding box is still influencing behavior. If you went the other form route and used the second form with no bounding box, would he just walk in a straight line, or would he still go around the object?

[SickAlice]

I just thought about phased and tested it out. It's Displaced is the function. I found the FFX Kitty Pryde hero and gave it a spin. And her character can phase out objects and characters. So I phase her, I phase a park bench and...no, she avoids it because a character following a path. Same with buildings, trees, stature. "Should be able to" but won't because the characters behavior tells to to avoid said object.

And I thought on it from game programming and a lot of games, like say modern superhero games do not put free teleporting in them for one. Lego hero games I had thought about that one. And the reason is that would make glitches. First every object and ground and such all also has to have settings to account for this phasing. It can't just be the characters 3d model. It does not work like that. So putting all that in opens the door for a lot of conflicts. And the other more obvious is the player leaving the games boundaries and say getting stuck, null space right? Or just falling outside and that's it, game is over and the player is mad.

I mean it would be cool. Just like I thought it cool to make this bridge I wanted to make. Or a vehicle or platform could stand on or walk across from building to building. But you know I did a whole thread and I ran every test possible, models without bounding boxes, every setting, you name it. For months on and off. And like other stuff I'm on about here I wasn't doubting anyone it wasn't possible, for me it's about discovery and as a math person I need to exactly how things work and why, not so much as to alleviate doubt. And these games are just very limited and confined is what's up. Like it's kind of annoying in some ways again because I look back on game classes and way back then and the first 3d engines, well a lot of stuff that we don't access was so common place it's hard to understand why they did not include those features. But I could understand they did have reasons nonetheless.

*Edit: I have to shovel snow but for discoveries and clarity sakes I went ahead and did it with the result that would happen. I choose Kitty because I already tested this one and removed all the BBox's and contacts from the character. Tossed this new one in game, even put it and phase mode and...it didn't matter because the characters movement and interaction are determined by the game itself and she just avoids solid objects anyways. Because the player does not determine the movement of these characters. It's not Mario. We don't press a direction on a controller and hold it to say walk into a building. The game determines where the character walks, like a director of a film, and tells to walk on certain paths and walk around certain other things. Or to stop before this wall. And not leave the stage and so forth.

Again maybe someone can script something that would allow for that. Scripting isn't my area so I wouldn't know but I know what your thinking about doesn't work because the game work that way. This isn't a free roam physics engine or something like that.

[Randomdays]

That's too bad and could have been fun. Thanks for the testing.

I looked at some of the FFX attributes in the manual to get a better idea of what they do in this area, and phasing, astral form, ghostly and gaseous form seem to be mainly combat oriented. Astral Form will create a transparent other form with flying, with the other form being either a choice you make, or of the original character if you don't make a choice. This looks like a good copy of Dr Strange's ability.

I have seen a character walk right though a map object more than once. When I was adding my custom map pieces like the merry-go-round, the characters would walk right though it because I hadn't added the bounding box. Once the bounding box was added, shaped to the outline of the merry-go-round, the character went around it normally. Removed the BBox from the standard bench though and the character still went around it.

Also, I loaded in a vehicle I had made with no BBox and put it on the map. Another character and the civilians wandering around easily walked through it instead of around it. A flying character trying to land on it sank through it to the ground below. The vehicle itself still followed pathing.

On the other question I had on picking up objects - If one character is standing on an object like a boulder and a second character picks it up, they fall off, fall to the ground and have to get up again.  Once lifted, the first character cannot fly and land on it as when it was on the ground.

If a character is holding an object like a boulder, you CAN target it and destroy it out of their hands. I'm glad that this works as I think its a cool touch.

I'll probably go ahead and still make a few transparent characters for those out there who'd like them for the "other form" ability. They're quick and easy to do. For FF2 only though.

While the transparent texture SA and DB set up is neat, its only for that particular character. With the transparent CapeMan, you can just grab normal skins from multiple characters and throw them in the skins directory as is. You'll only have to rename them to match CapeMan's skin's names from what they are to match.

The characters with a single skin that are always transparent, like Deadman or KX's Casper would have the transparent form as their base.

Dr Strange could use one even with the astral form ability, just to keep with the comics version where the Astral form doesn't have a cape.