Ok, so I am attempting to make a whole new "faction" as it were (actually serveral) and have been stuffing round with the good old "dummy" and "soldier", while this is all well and good for a while, I need my actors for this mod to move slightly differently, they are also going to be proportioned differently. I tried my hand at playing round with the offsets on a tester character, but nothing i did made sense, sometimes +y was up, sometime it was down, ect. ect. is there a tutorial of any worth that anyone knows about? i tried the wiki tutorial, but that just made my poor test character look like a pretzel.....



can anyone help?

In general for offsets, the X-axis is normal and the Y-axis is flipped.

SpriteOffset is calculated from the top-left corner of a sprite. All other offsets are calculated relative to the SpriteOffset.

Maybe that helps a bit.

Thank you very much control, This helps immensely,

off i go to attempt to put someone's arm on in the wrong place again

much appreciated, thank you

Actually, I think I can give some useful input. I've gotten to the point where I can figure out the offsets correctly before I even run the changes to my mod for the first time. I've found it helps to actually look at a picture of what you're offsetting.

First thing is this: +X is to the right, +Y is down.

So, say you have a sprite thats 50x50 pixels. If you wanted to set the SpriteOffset to be smack in the middle, you'd set the SpriteOffset X to -25, and the Y to -25 as well. Decreasing these numbers (making them more negative) will move the SpriteOffset point down and to the right. Now, this seems counterintuitive, considering what I just said before this paragraph. Why does it seem like moving the SpriteOffset uses reverse numbers? The reason is that you aren't moving the center point in relation to the object; you're moving the object in relation to the center point. So, the (-25, -25) makes sense, now that we see its moving the object 25 to the left and 25 upwards in relation to the center point.

Something to note here is that a given object will always rotate around its center point, if it is allowed to rotate freely. Basically, changing the SpriteOffset changes the center of gravity.

So, like Control said, regardless of how you offset the object in relation to the center point, all other offsets for that object use the center point as (0, 0). Armed with this info, you can open up the image of an object in a paint program or something, and figure out how many pixels away from the center a desired JointOffset or ParentOffset point should be just by counting the difference in X and Y. Doing this, you can nail the right offsets almost every time.

I found this to be very helpful to help visualise what the hell I was actually doing when messing with offsets: http://www.datarealms.com/wiki/index.php/Offsets

But even doing offsets after having made a zillion guns, it still makes my brain fart.

Gun offsets hard? Psshh.

Try some LimbPaths and AtomGroups before you say anything.
They are horrible. HORRIBLE I SAY!
Brr.

Somebody made this a while back, can't remember who, though.
Hope it helps

Yeah. I've a mech that I need to finish and all the graphics are there, but every time I open the .ini my brain melts.
(Duh102 did the offsets for that thing, but I ruined them by changing the mech's size. Sorry, Duh102! )

Ok, the wiki says that limbpath sections use a subjective graph. Is that using the same down/right graphing stuff that everything else is?
Also, for clarification- is the whole system based off of the assumption that we're in quadrant IV of a standard graph, or am I wrong?

wow, thank you all,

Darlos9D that was amazing, i had only just figured out that the offsets for attaching the limbs are where spriteoffset is,

Also are you the coder for the DarkClones?


uuugrh, i see what you mean kallemort, limbpaths are indeed frustrating


Edit: i see why everyone else seems to be having an easier time with this, i only have the Demo, still saving funds to buy, did not realise the registered version has extra tools

We don't have any magical offset-makers.

Really the only editor I find useful is the actor viewer, and even then it's just a change variable - reload .ini rinse and repeat method.

thanks all, that's all i need to know about offsets, so this thread can be closed

If you say so.