No, I don't mean making the extension animations.

I mean is it possible to animate an arm?
I'm working on my Dummy Behemoth arms and like the torso I want the innards to be animated (some glow shifts) when the attachment hand is destroyed or missing. I want to know if this is possible given that it's an arm and already has to have animations for extension.

nope. you could try having 3 frames for each extension frame, but its not going to work very well.

How would you even code that?

well, you'd first do all the animation, and then you'd multiply the framecount variable by 3, if you had 3 animation frames. O_o
obviously, its going to be buggy, and based on movement of the arm.
i'm sticking with "nope"

Blalfshghdathfrd.

That really sucks.
What about an attachable on the arm? Can that be animated?
If yes, can a seperate attachable be made for each arm extension, and can they be mutually exclusive?

If no, ♥♥♥♥.

I was under the impression that you could put attachments on legs, but not arms.

At least attachments can be animated. I've never tried attaching things to arms though.

I don't think it can be done, but you'd need to make how ever frames you wanted for every frame of the arm if you did get it to work.

Say you had 8 frames for the arms, and maybe 4 frames for the animation.
4 frames for every arm frame...
That's 32 frames!

That is A LOT of frames.
I recommend not doing that.

I only need 2 frames for the animation for each arm, so it'd be 10 frames total, and 5 of those won't take any work.
I can do that animation work, I want to know how I'd code it. I can't have two "Arm000.bmp" or "Arm001.bmp" so how would I go about making the game recognize more than one frame per extension?

From what I've seen so far, static animations for limbs are unpossible. However, for a really hackish way, you could probably code an emitter/particle attached the arm to display the animation you want. It would involve getting the current animation frame of the arm, and somehow setting it to the emitter (somehow because I've only seen SetNextFrame so far, and no way to set a specific frame).

Stuff like this is the primary reason I think CC could benefit from custom limbs. Make an attachment with a free joint, make another attachment with a limited joint, add the hand/foot to that...
Yeah, I know it would have problems of its own, but I don't think applying 2D IK chains is going to impact performance much, with all the other stuff going on taken into account.

Agreed. I was surprised when I found out that limbs were actually animated for their movement. With the way everything else works, I figured a limb would have an upper part and a lower part that were attached at the elbow/knee and that they would just rotate around each other. These animated extensions are a tad silly. Why have five sprites for a limb when you can just have two? It'd actually save space as far as resources go.

i think its more due to the fact that the developers can be bothered completely reworking every actor they ever made, and as much as i can sympathise, i'd prefer proper ragdolling in CC.

Once again, wut? If you look at Numgun's old MPAM versions, you'll notice that the arms are almost covered in attachables. Or at my Dummy Smasher: the thing's arms ARE attachables. They have a null sprite and an arm sprite attached on top of it. So yeah, you could make it work with attachables, but it would be difficult to get all the offsets right.

Once you got the thing attached (via code, so as to have the handle for it available), you can probably determine the current frame of the arm and set the attachment's sprite to something appropriate. You could alternatively have the attachment masquerading as the arm.

Btw, is it possible to rotate a pair of successive attachments? Meaning, part A attaches to torso, part B attaches to part A. You take the point of the arm's shoulder joint, get the current offset of the hand, and rotate the two attachables using a few trigonometry snippets. The result is a fairly advanced "arm", consisting of three attachables, each of which can be independently animated.

attachables on arms rotate with the head, which looks pretty awkward.
unless that's been fixed. which it hasnt.