To be more specific, I'm trying to get two door animations to play at the same time, perhaps even in the same game tile.

What I've tried so far is overlapping routing slots linked to the two door trans slots- which still just plays one of the animations at a time.

Also experimenting with using just one routing slot for both trans slots , but it appears to have the same effect.

so I'm guessing that this needs to be controlled in the BHAVs, and have tried things like making the right door animate statement a "true" target of the left door animation, but so far to no avail.

If anyone can steer me onto the right track, I would really appreciate it.

This has been on my wishlist for a long time. Have you looked at the base game centred door? That one fires the door animation regardless of which tile you enter from. You could try adding the other door under the same joint in the cres.There is an object in game that has two doors that open simultaneously with the sim centred - the armoires. The cres of the armoire is the right joint set up I think. Try editing the anim file of the door anim you want to change to match the armoire?


There is a tool you could use here : http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...ic,10220.0.html

Did some edits (sorry for double post)

Thanks for the great suggestions.

That centered door, I believe, is the one Honeywell cloned for the Bespoke set and is how I originally got the idea for overlapping routing slots; but I should have a look at the original game version and see if I missed something. I've been digging in the armoires, and they seem to have sim animations (a2o, c2o) instead of object animations. Still, I'm sure the answer is in one of these avenues. Just don't know what I'm overlooking.

Maybe I need to get more creative with joint placements?

Thanks for that AniMax link - been looking for that sucker.

I think that you could look at putting both doors in one GMDC (like in the armoire) in the colonial door and then try animating. As long as the cres is set up right it should not matter. The door globals make it a portal, the gmdcs and stuff are just how they appear in game.

So r_door_s has two doors in it,and r_door_n has two doors in it.

Those two animation resources I attached are the open close animations from the armoire. They are linked in the open it and close it BHAVs fromthe armoire which I found using the import semiglobals tool (import semiglobals find BHAV, import, snuffle at ).

I was obviously wrong about the armoires having object animations. Tried and tried last night, but couldn't get SimPE to pull those animations you uploaded. Finally found them in objects00.package, and the openit! and closeit! BHAVS with the importer. I guess all that action is hidden somewhere in the game code unless you actually pull them and make changes, coz I never saw anything in the BHAVs that called any opening and closing action - not even in the clothesget BHAV.

Thanks for the eyeopener. Gave me a lot to think about. Agree with you that some manipulation in the CRES to make the slots and joints match up is key to success, maybe even some renaming of slots in the STR# as well.

Trick is, I'm working with sliding doors, so the CRES hierarchy is different already. Maybe experiments with the colonial door to meld theory and reality, then port it to sliding doors?

Exactly. To me, step one is a very ugly proof of concept where both doors move somehow. Then port to slide. I have a lot of appointments in the next few days, so I can't make a file, but I suggest using the colonial door. My star trek door wasn't cloned from a sliding door, I swapped the animation strings is all.

I had a bit of time and did some research on this.

I tested on the colonial door, putting two right and left doors in the GMDC, I then ran the animation and both pivoted on the right door trans joint. I will try moving the door trans to the middle of the cres and swap in your sliding door animation and see what we get.

You may have noticed there are no joint definitions in the cres of windows and doors despite them definitely being there. If we were to use the AniMax plugin then we will have a to build a complete GMDC to export for animations. That is not so hard to do, but are you confident with that? I am confident doing that.

In the meantime I also had a look at the advice from Jasana to "mirror the animations for the other door" in the discussion you linked to in your sliding doors upload thread. That looks like a promising avenue of exploration, or is that something you have already tried?

One last thing : @Jasana_BugBreeder - are you able to help us?

Been doing real life this week, sorry for the absence.

Yes, Jasana's suggestion is what got me started on this - made it sound so easy-peasy, I couldn't believe no one had done it yet. NOW I know.

I'll make a lot of experiments in the next few days, and see which way to go.

I'm not so uncomfortable with trying Animax; but I am woefully crappy at using Milkshape. Been promising myself to learn to use this new GMDC im-/ex-porter , since I'm really comfortable moving things around in Blender. Looks like I have a lot of homework.


quote["both pivoted on the right door trans joint."]
That's kinda where I was, it playing both as one animation at one joint. Then I mirrored the right(?) animation for the left (per Jasana..) and tried to make two animations move from two joints at same time time. That's where I got stuck. I'm hoping these clues from the armoire files will translate to the colonial door, then we can figure out the sliding stuff, maybe by cheating with a trans linear motion on a rot joint.

ETA:

Been trying to do this without needing to create a jointed GMDC, but still no luck. I made some animations in Blender and used the coordinates to edit the 'flipped' version but it still crashes the game in buy mode - even after I corrected some more errors I found. Buy mode crashes usually come from CRES errors, but I've been editing this package since July, so re-cloning it one more time before biting the bullet and adding joints to the mesh. And sometime in between, I need to understand what event trees are - nagging voice in my head says it may be part of solution.

I suspect those "missing" joint definitions have something to do with the origin points of the separate meshes, accounting for their bizarre orientations in a 3d modelling program. Part of the Maxoids' efforts at avoiding jointed meshes for doors and windows. Some interesting input concerning lack of GMDC joints in doors from Jasana and Echo here. It seems Echo believes that joints are required for two things moving at once, and Jasana thinks cloning another object with the right joints and editing it (i.e. cloning an armoire and converting to door) will do the trick.

Another thing I noticed while editing the ANIM files: The cabinet ones use the Unknown 2 fields, while the door animations do not. Curious if those fields have something to do with simultaneous movement.

So I got two doors to open simultaneously, and the mesh jumped off the wall.

I'm pretty sure it's because the the root_trans joint is at (0.5,-0.5,0). You and Jasana had already given me everything I needed. Was just too deep in the problem to see the solution. I was so busy trying to make the sliding door animations do the magic of the armoire animations, that I never saw the obvious answer was to drop the armoire ANIMs into the package. Here's a pic of the first "successful" double door opening.(below)

I re-cloned the Avy door, added the ANIMs you posted here earlier, renamed them, took the old ANIMs out, did TGI, made sure the new names matched the STR#0x86, fixed integrity, and boom. This is without any alteration of the armoire animations at all, and no joints added to the GMDC. Should work even better if you drop them into the colonial door. Just be sure to add an STR#, or it will play the global animations. Oh -- and it works the same no matter which routing slot you hit - so no need to edit those, either.

Since then, I managed to crash the game a few times while trying to edit out any mentions of 'armoire' and change them to 'door' (name of the main joint). SimPE doesn't allow editing the header of ANIM files, but I was able to fix it with AniMax and got the door working again. Now just to get the mesh to stay in place, change rot to trans, and fine-tune the range of motion and timecodes. Probably add in a few more joints to the ANIM file, like for the door frames and such, to keep them in place. Thanks again for that AniMax link - it's already paid for itself. Don't think there's any need to worry about the doorlights, though.

I think I might re-edit the flipped animations I made before, as well. I suspect the header and object info merely had item counts that didn't match the changes I made following Jasana_Bugbreeder's suggestions, and was causing the crashing.

Thank you so much for all your help in getting so far. I'm really excited about this.

**correction to my last [POST #10] post: I had both doors opening at a single joint, but still only one at a time. Sounds misleading when I re-read it; like I had gotten further than I really had.

You seem to have got far indeed. but, I am confused - did you get both doors to open at once using the armoire anims? If so, then maybe the answer to sliding doors is to edit the animation of the armoire to be sliding rather than pivoting?

yes, both doors open at the same time using the armoire anims.

subsequent edits & tests were:
1.) corrected the root_trans coordinates to make the mesh stick to the wall
2.) there was a problem with that - right side routing slots worked great, left side routing slots made the mesh slide over 1 tile, but still against the wall
3) corrected it by overlapping the routing slots at middle of door: (0.5,0,0) for N, (0.5,1,0) for S
Resulted in both doors opening correctly at the same time no matter from which direction approached.

1.-3. were all with swinging (rotational) animations, and should be all that's necessary to make normal double doors work. Now I'm working on changing the movements to translations, and it's getting bothersome again.

4.) renamed the door_rot joints in the ANIM to door_trans. Rebuilt these two (r_door_trans & l_door_trans) using the coordinates from the Avy door ('flipping' the values for left side). This works -- almost. Both doors open, but like this: the right door opens just as expected, followed by the left door at about the same time as the right door is closing. Which is what I'm trying to solve now.

Came on here today to re-read all these discussions and see if I can get a better understanding of what the Unknown 1 and Unknown 2 fields actually do, because a lot of fine tuning is needed to make the sliding doors work as well as the swing doors.

pictures of steps 1-3 attached

It looks like you are nearly done, great job. I am not sure which unknown field you mean as there are so many of them in SimPE once you start digging.

Yes, seems to be going well, but sooo much work to still be done. I have a completed perfectly working swinging double door (sliding is still giving me fits), that I was hoping to upload today. Hit a snag, however, when I linked up a diagonal. The diagonal is jumping off the wall like the test above, but no matter how I edit the CRES, can't get it in check. Sigh... And I don't think the overlapped routing slots trick will work with diagonals either- unless the Sim steps directly on the spot, the doors don't even open and he walks through anyway. Add a BHAV to force them to go to slot, maybe?

Pic below hopefully explains what unknowns I've been talking about.

Honestly? I would just forget the diagonal. What you have is very good and upload worthy (in my opinion) if you just say in the upload post there is no diagonal that will be fine.

OK. I think we can (cautiously) close the book on getting two rotating doors working simultaneously. I got the diagonal working! I was trying to move it in CRES, but needed to fix it in the ANIM instead. Thanks to Numenor, yet again. I was re-reading his comments here, and things just kinda started making sense.

Now to get this pesky sliding door to fall in line. Then we should have a group of ANIMs that work on all doors. (Should probably have a look at the two-story doors before making too bold a claim...)

The new door is complete now, but it seemed a bit lame to release it as just a matte n glass door that swings wide open, so as soon as I get the new mesh and textures in place - keep your eyes open.

ETA:

Ugh! minor disaster here. Got the new mesh into the door and was taking pics to upload when my Sim taught me a very valuable lesson: That being, how does your object affect other objects?
Instead of making a cool door that swings wide open, it seems I've created a global mod - every double door in my game has simultaneous opening doors!

so, guess I'm delaying upload a little longer until I'm able to make the anim effects local. Here's a copy, in case you wanna look at it and have any suggestions for improvement. I'm starting by importing any identifiable BHAV used by the door, and making them local. If that doesn't work, then more research.

Sorry for the late reply, Christmas and birthdays this last week I did see something like this when i was playing about with the doors and solved it by recloning the door. Clone the object in SimPE and make sure you have pull animations ticked. See attached.

Also, if you decide to go on the remake all the bhavs route check this out http://www.feenwald.com/en/bau/sets/metro01.php

Got halfway through importing BHAVs and noticed that I never changed the STR# for animations to group FFFFFFFF. Made the change and everything works great. So embarrassing. Uploading it tonight.