For the dropship for my Steampunk project, I would like to have spinning turbofans on the Steam Jets that serve as it's engines.

These fans will double as the joint from which the engines attach to the body of the ship, I just felt like putting them to use for something more aesthetically pleasing.

I have made the necessary frames, so I just need help figuring out how to make it so they loop over and over again to give the illusion of a spinning fan.

How would I go about doing this, code-wise?

Well, I'd set the image of the propeller spinning as the engine's muzzleflash, that seems to be the best at animating, just look at the default dropships.

Or you could just make them attachables or part of the body. Check out the brain and dreadnought: It's very subtle, but both of their bodies are animated. All that's necessary is that you have multiple frames.

You could use the method I used in my Sand Blimp: viewtopic.php?f=61&t=11366

That should work just fine for you.

Thank you gentlemen.

Also, a second question, how would I go about creating convincing pillars of steam being fired down from the engines themselves?

The reason I ask is, since this is a steampunk mod, a ship using jets of steam as propulsion would fit much more than just another "LOLROCKET" engine.

I would prefer not to make single whole sprites for said effect, as it would look odd when colliding with terrain, actors, etc. (whereas if the steam was made of separate particles, it would conform with the terrain, and look much more convincing.) , but at the same time I don't want to have an emitter that lags the game when the ship is deployed.

What would a good way to set up the emitters for this?

Sorry if I'm asking simple-to-answer, run-of-the-mill questions that I could figure out for myself given time, I'm just kinda new at this and unsure of what exactly to do.

Take a look at the Crobotech jetpacks. It looks pretty...steamy.

Okay, having a problem.

I observed the brain's coding for animation and tried to copy how they LOOKED like they worked.

The Brain's Sprite file was listed as BrainCaseA.bmp in the Brain.ini file
But there were several sprite files with numbers after them. (such as BrainCaseA000.bmp, and so on). I assumed that the game automatically uses the numbers to both tell that its one of many frames, and orders them correctly.

I set the dropship engines to their appropriate filenames, while putting in the appropriate numbered sprite files, and everything just like how I saw the brain set up.

However, when I started the game and tested the mod, the engines did not animate.

Any idea whats wrong?

Make sure you've got SpriteCount FrameCount set to whatever number of sprites you have in the animation. If it's set to 1 it'll just use the first one.

FrameCount, even.

You may also need to muck around with spriteanimtype or something, which determines whether it's random, in order, whatever.

I don't remember how iut works though, sorry.

SpriteAnimType = 1
animate forever in order. thats the one you want.
also, for steam, just fire off lots of MOSParticles as a copy of "Smoke Ball Tiny 1".. i think thats the name of it. using vanilla MOs is fun.

They're light as anything though, so throw in some Jet Blast Heavy for propulsion. They're just white pixels, so they should be effectively invisible.

or make a new MOPixel that has the colour 255,0,255 (invisible)
or make a new presetname for the copyof and raise the mass.