Some techical yada yada:
I finally managed to debug the entire StateMachineClass controller (AnimGraphs folder). Until now, I always missed a couple of pieces of the puzzle and always missed the time to find out. It still requires some more work to integrate support into the S3D UI, but what this controller will allow you to do is 'script' all the behaviors of all 3D crew (interior), including (but not limited to) what sentence they speak, their facial expressions (normal, angry, etc), their tone of voice (normal, angry, etc), what type of (character) animation is played when specific orders are executed, where the eyes will look at during specific orders etc.
There are a whole lot of possibilities when this support is available to the modder. For instance, correcting speech/animation bugs, but also to change how the crew reacts to certain orders (ie: turn divewheel to left, play speech order 'Rudder left'), when a collision occurs, when they get wounded, when you hit/miss a torpedo, etc.
Do note that this controller does not control/contain the actual 3D (mesh) animations. It controls the state of the actual character, what animation is played when, etc, and in what sequence. Together with the already supported lipsync controller, the crew behaviors can be further improved.
Support for mesh and bone animations, which will allow full control over all the bones (parts of the body) will follow in time. Meshanim support is already in development for some time, and the character part (ie. marine.dat) is the final piece of the DAT-puzzle to integrate. Apart from a couple of minor things I've now come close to supporting the full DAT-format (currently 97-98% of all data is supported).
No release date, but I just wanted to share the good news
