Looking For a Programmer to help with 'The Mythical Creatures' mod!

Modding
#1

Hi! I’m Back again!, (still haven’t thought up an intro)
i was planning of returning sooner but i ran into some… commotions… so it delayed my return for a handful of days, and i was planning on getting other things set up first, but i do have a record of unkept/late promises here so o figured i’d set priority for here a little higher

anyway, putting that aside, i’m now planning on actually re-activating the TMC(the Mythical Creatures mod) but i’m only an animator and an artist, so i need some help getting the code side of it all done and because of it’s scale i don’t think it’s something i can just progress slowly without taking forever

the primary things to add in will be Dialogue, encounters, camps, and entities. basically a campaign
also it has to be done from ground-up since i don’t think my old mod holds much usefulness at this point.
other things like items and equipment should be easy enough for me to add myself, but the whole dialogue thing is rather new to me (alongside everything els)

if you can’t do it super fast that’s okay, just teach me how to add things myself and i should be able to manage some amount on my own, but for now i’m just looking for some help, or at-least some learning.

oh, and also have this


(fresh from Blender!)

that reminds me @malley how stable is the whole scaling thing? i’d love to try add them to my animations, but my blender add-on probably doesn’t know how to handle it, so could you give us some details on how it works? so maybe i can get the add-on upgraded to handle scale as well?
of course if it’s a little too unstable or too in the workings to give any details that’s fine (or if legal stuff comes in)

Sym-, i mean, uuuh… Out!

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#2

Welcome back! I like the new name, and that’s a beautiful new animation ; ). My brain is wanting to see some blast of holy light shooting off of her as well : D.

Hmm… scaling… there are no legal issues with me telling you how to do it, its just EXTREMELY complicated. I also don’t know much of anything about Blender, so I can’t be much help there. Scaling in general is (to my knowledge) perfectly stable in game, and actually exporting the scale is relatively simple (you just need to query Blender to get the world scale of an object every frame and export it the same way as translation/rotation). The problem comes in with the rig itself (the thing which doesn’t leave blender), and of course depends on what you want to do (how you want to scale). More specifically, the problem comes in with hierarchies - for example: when I scale the chest, the shoulders and arms also scale. And when I scale the chest and the shoulder and the wrist, the fingers then get a blend of all three of those scales.

So the trick that makes it possible for me, is separating out the scale from the trans & rot, and then applying them to their children such that trans & rot happen together and THEN scale happens. I also added an attribute to every control that’s called “apply parent scale” which disables all parent scale info just in case I don’t want to use the parent scale for its children. Its pretty nuts - I ended up having to disassemble the matrix math and reassemble it as needed : /. Was not fun, and I literally gave up at one point - had to get help from several tech artists from Riot main to eventually figure it all out. I’m sorry I don’t have more advice or suggestions on how to tackle it, but if you have questions or try it and get stuck, maybe I can help via screenshots?

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#3

How is your campaign compared to the other campaigns in the game? Is it bigger? More complex?
The basic campaigns are not hard once you learn how it works, just tiring, there is a lot of json even for the smallest things.

If you want I can help with the main setup for now. I’m also requiring help with a fishing animation (too “robotic”), so maybe I could steal a little help from you too :sweat_smile:

1 Like
#4

Oh, i guess that makes things easy.
Y’see, i don’t have a rig at-all so… i guess i just have to figure out how to get the add-on to know how to read scale and on what measurement scale to get it working for me!
I can make rigs, it’s just that thanks to SH’s style i just feel more comfortable not using one here

Thanks a bunch! I’ll let you know if i(or rather the programmer that will help me) runs into any issues

Oh, and just in case, if you were to scale a cube to exactly double the size, what number would the output be?

#5

The dialogue itself is not special thoughi’d love to add a new pice of UI for dialogue(more similar to classical rpg dialogue) but that’s not that high priority.
The most complex part about it is having quest influence each other, say, you saved a goblin in one quest and in a future quest they’d come to help you, but as far as i know that means making a seperate branch of scenarios if they never converge back to a single campaign branch that is uninfluence by them, because i don’t know a way to make the campaign go :
“if Quest-A was finished trigger Quest-Z instead of Quest-H”
Or “if Character-A is alive Trigger Quest-U, if Character-A is dead Trigger Quest-I instead”

The best way i can think of is giving the player a hidden item that the game will detect like it does with the Goblin and Township quests but under the hood so the player doesn’t directly know

Also there’s the character/entities themselvs, some have some traits like splash damage, stuns and more, though rght now having them work at-all And assigning and building a camp for them would be the minimum i need (which i’m incapable of)

As for your animation i can totally help you on that! One or two animations isn’t too much work to get working, but i can’t use scale yet of-course so they’ll have a blank look, but i’m pretty sure i can get them done in no time!

#6

If you have a cube that is 1x1x1 and you double the scale, it should be 2x2x2. Is that what you’re asking? The output would need to be the same trans & rot, but scale would be 2.

I don’t know blender’s scripting language, but if you can access the original script then giving it scale shouldn’t be too complicated. The problem with scale comes from hierarchy, so no-hierarchy rigs are super easy : ).

#7

oh, huh, now i realize that as a stupid question
XYZ translation should have a sale that’s more customized but scale really doesn’t need to be any other vlaue than 1 does it…

#8

yeah, its a little strange to think about. takes a lot of gettin in there and playing with the guts of it before you really understand whats going on.

1 Like