hi

after a intensive research on the board and another topic which got no replies, I have to ask you lot directly:

what is the matter with ent_setskin?

generally speaking it works like described... but there are a few exceptions to that... a lot of them acutually...

- i am not able to load a texture which hasnt been cached before... example: test.bmp is in root-folder/savedir/path/wrs (tried all)... i now call ent_setskin (my, "test.bmp", 1); and nothing happens... BUT: as soon as i add a Bmap object it works:
Code:

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 Bmap TEST_BMP, "test.bmp";
Action Skinchange { ent_setskin (my, TEST_BMP, 1); }

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- i can only change ONE skin ONE time whether i call ent_cloneskin or ent_clone or both or none, i can only change one skin.

- the second time i use the ent_setskin command on the same model it does nothing more than to erase the skin it is executed on making the target skin completely see-trough (looks like the alpha channel got erased or cleared to black)

- and here is the worst thing: mipmaps are not affected! only the original texture is changed... as soon as the camera is moved far enough from the model, the mipmaps appear and show the old skins!

- ent_cloneskin kind of improves things a little, and increases the chance to get the skin acutally changed to the new file... but still no change mipmaps and no change of further skins

- the first skin i change is a BMP file, this works okay except the mipmap thing, the second one is a TGA with alphachannel, this i did not get to work so far! it also wont work when called ent_Setskin is called first to cchange the TGA skin...

- another thing: i am not trying to switch between formats and change a BMP to a TGA with 32bits, i only want BMP->BMP, TGA 32bit -> TGA 32bit

my model is a standard bones animated MDL7 file created with the latest public MED, it contains a total of 9 skins, the last 2 used as render targets for 2 different views and the second skin is empty for now. the model has bones and around 60 frames. just to give you the parameters of the test.

can you please help! this command is one of the major reasons we upgraded to A7 and now we cannot get it to work properly!

ent_setskin is a simple function, nothing special to it. You can change any bitmap as often as you want. Only thing to care about is that you can't change the transparency type of the entity this way, i.e. make a transparent entity intransparent or vice versa.

Quote:

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Only thing to care about is that you can't change the transparency type of the entity this way, i.e. make a transparent entity intransparent or vice versa.

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okay, i avoided to do that, but it still does not work...

I still have this problem:
I cannot change a TGA Skin using ent_skin!! The skin simply becomes completely see-through!

When you can see through a skin but don't want to, there are 3 things to check first: The content of the alpha channel, the MDL material of the skin (if it has any), and the entity's transparency itself. If it happens after skin changing, chances are that maybe the previous skin was transparent but the current one isn't, or vice versa.

Hi JCL

I've been running into some issues with ent_setskin too, here's a demo I uploaded:

http://www.rebelplanetcreations.com/jcl/jclsetskinbug.rar

The model is 2 boxes, each box has a different skin.

ent_setskin works fine for the first skin but when I use it for the second skin the entire uv disappears in game. This is the line I'm using:

ent_setskin(you,bmap_createblack(32,32,24),2);

Any advice?

Thank you!

David

Yes, that was indeed a bug. The bitmap was set, but marked as not used in the UV set - that's why the UV disappears. This will be fixed in the next update. Here's the workaround:

BMAP* newskin = bmap_createblack(32,32,24);
newskin->flags |= (1<<25);
ent_setskin(you,newskin,2);

is there a way to work around this in C-Script?

Unfortunately no, because there is no direct way to access the flags element in C-Script. I'm not sure that this was the reason of your problem anyway - your problem description sounds different. But you can send or upload your project also and I'll check.

This is the same problem I'm having now with ent_setskin. See my post here for details and screen shots.