I'll just have to live without the animation for now it seems. It was just going to glow like the torso does when the chest plate is blown off.

On another note, I've converted this thread into "Prove That Concept", so that I might stop populating the Mod Making boards with all of these threads.

In light of this, my next question is: is it possible in any shape or form to make a "fog of war" effect around the current actor? I have a wicked maze/labyrinth map idea, but it will be a no brainer if players can see everything on the map to work with. I want just a small circle of sight around the actor, the rest obscured by a constant FoW. Can this be done with really big glow effect or something?

Well, walkpaths are entirely liberated from the sprite; I think it was a deliberate choice by Data to make walking dependent on specific paths, and attempting to animate anything that looked even slightly natural from that would have taken more effort than it was worth. Especially since I don't believe CC's walking has changed since Dirt B1.

But it doesn't really need to animate, it would only need to use IK. The walkpaths would be kept.

I'd love to see proper animated robots though, with some forces applied to keep them steady. Doing keyframed animation isn't hard at all. I'd like to at least see the ability to make such robots, so the modders can dig their teeth into new concepts and come up with more audacious creations.

edit: as to the attachments on the arm rotating with the head - if the arm was a null sprite and the attachments were on the body, would it work then?

Walking as just applying force is easy. You can (through workarounds) force each leg to move, but it's still never going to be perfect unless Data fixes it. Consuming a prodigious number of CPU cycles just to make one actor walk a fraction better isn't my idea of "progress" for CC.

proper animated robots here meaning?..

I'm still wondering about limiting visibility / implementing fog of war.

currently, no. we have no bitmap access and no subtractive glows, and as far as i know there arent any masking functions. so no.
it would be nice though.

So there's no hacky way to do it? Like make a script that attaches a non-colliding attachable who'se sprite is a map sized black area with a pink hole around the actor?

Proper animated robots meaning that the movements are governed by code. You have scripts, such as Walk(), Climb(), Aim(), Fire(). Inside these, you define the movements of the actor and any additional forces acting on it. The actor then does whatever you tell it to do. You could, for example, make a creature that changes its movements on a press of a button - from four-legged to two-legged, for instance. A custom actor like that could probably coexist with normal actors just fine, so no need to convert existing content.

Wouldn't this be better for b24? With Lua on attachables and such?

As long as there is going to be a function to check which frame the arm is in that is.

technically, you could do hacky stuff with mail's attachable code and the frame variable, as well as custom based timers. i'm just not sure if the normal leg code would override that, and dont want to test it. have a play around with .Frame and .FrameCount, and timers.

@sean: you can already do that. you can remove an object from the physics sim completely and then govern everything with lua if you wanted. its just a hell of a pain to do and make it work with the terrain and other MOs, and we already have a system. you could also make the creature that changes for 4 to 2 legs with about 8 lines of code already.

Changing an actor's behavior by swapping the actor out for another isn't likely to be a good way to do it in any circumstances. And there're still a great many things not possible with the current layout. Say, thrusters attached to legs instead of the back. Or six-legged creatures. Or four-armed creatures. A scripted motion system is a lot more flexible.

However, if it is possible to simulate that motion with the script, maybe it's not all lost? I'd need to be a Lua guru to pull it off, but what if a set of such "artificial limbs" is attached to an armless and legless torso? Would the physics engine understand the attempts of such a construct at moving, or would it all just sink into the ground?

Is it possible to give the actor a 'torch', either a HDevice (bad idea, unless they can't drop it) or an attached emitter that emits a big black glow with a pink hole in it?

I don't care how hackish it is. The mission I have lined up is completely crap if you can see the whole screen at once.

If it's for just one mission, then I think a giant overlay black square with a transparent center that's Lua'ed to center on any actor you are controlling, or the mouse (to prevent Q-scouting beyond the box) will work fine.