Frame/Skin group playback rates

[Willem]

I'm trying to get my MDL editing program finished up (as part of the new ToeTag editing suite) and I have a question. I've been plugging in time stamps for skin and frame groups but they don't seem to do anything. The id ones are all set up as .10 of a second apart from each other and I'm getting the impression that maybe that's some sort of hard coded engine thing.

Are the play rates adjustable in the MDL file itself or are those fields just ignored by the Quake engine itself?

[MauveBib]

I'm pretty sure skin and frame groups are engine limited to 0.1 second frames.

[Willem]

So if you wanted to have a skin on a monster that, say, blinked a light once a second you'd have to have 9 skins that are the same and 1 skin with the light on? That's ... nasty. :-/

[Urre]

You got it absolutely right mister Willem sir.

Framegroups on models are slightly more useful, such as the torch and flame models in the game, are animated without any qc involved. You could take it a step further like in Nexuiz, and have all the player animations be framegroups, so there's no network traffic for animating players. All the qc does in the case of animating players in Nexuiz is change frame depending on state, and the underlying framegroup is then handled by the client engine for animation.

The timing being hardcoded though, is agreeably a bad thing.

[Willem]

Alrighty ... just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something obvious. I'll be over in the corner grumbling and grousing if anyone needs me.

[Spike]

Actually, framegroups can animate at whatever speed you want.
Additionally, different frames/skins can have different durations.
However, GLQuake doesn't support different durations and will assume the duration of the first to be the duration of all. Some clients have fixed this, many have not.
They're actually specified as start times.

The down side of using frame groups on player models is that you have no control over when the animation actually starts. They're tied to client time, rather than time since update.
However DarkPlaces starts the animation on update, rather than pure client time.