Hi there,

I have quite an odd request. I've seen that bone weights are finally available in A7 but they require A7 Pro . Normally, I wouldn't mind just buying pro, but my intentions are to make Bones Animation the primary animation method for my plugin, Intense X, but i'm pretty sure that the vast majority can't afford to buy A7 Pro.

I think that animation is one of those things that keeps Gamestudio stuck in the past. I don't know if any game in 2008 still uses vertex animation. As far as I know, most of them keep a folder of animation files (20kb-30kb each) like attack.anim, death.anim, idle.anim and they just apply those animations to each model by code.

I've been informed by my modeler that without weights, then bones can only really be used for mechanical/non-human animations. So, I guess what I'm asking for, is to drop the weight feature for Bones to Commercial, so more people will begin using Bones instead of vertex animation. Maybe you could move a Commercial feature to Pro in return?

One more thing. If I had bones, is what I said before possible with A7? I mean, is there a way to keep animation files in one folder (maybe dummy MDL's with named bones attached to them?) and then add bones animations by code to other rigged models that have no animations in their MDL file. What I finally want to achieve is, have all these 2000 frames of animation supported by Intense X, and my customers could just make a humanoid model, rig them with bones (and name those bones whatever I tell them), and then their models can magically play the same 2000 frames of animation as well (even if those frames are not in every MDL file of my customer's models individually). How easy is this to do with A7, even if it needs A7 Pro currently?

Finally, I think A7 should eventually start moving to this path as well. I dislike how everything is inside a humongous mdl file. I much rather would prefer if we'd do it the same like every game is doing it and have a folder with our meshes (badguy1,badguy2,goodguy,girl) a folder with our animations (idle,attack,die,sleep) a folder with our textures (badguy1,badguy2,goodguy,girl,girl_skin2) and a folder with our materials (human,machines) and just mix and match everything by code. I think this will be sooo much better for the RAM, than those big inflexible MDLs..).

Cheers,
Aris