Is it possible to... ?

[Targor Avelany]

Originally Posted by gap

Yes in theory. But, believe me, it would be a whole lot of work and I don't see it likely that in the near future someone will take on the task. Converting one of the imported ships/ AI subs to the GR2 format is in comparison a cakewalk, and no one dared to do it (which is a real pity by the way, because this is actually well within our reach)

I'm still daring Slowly. Even with current developments of GR2 Editor it is an extremely tedious work.
It have been very busy few month and it doesn't seem like things are going to slow down.

The issue with doing such things is that there are a lot of things about GR2 we still do not know. I will give you an example that I observed yesterday (finally was some free time) and playing around with the lates GR2 Editor version:

There are 4 bones in a GR2 file that I'm taking as base for my little project. I'll just call them for simplicity 0-1-2-3. The structure is also simple:
0 (root bone)
|
-- 1 (main mesh bone)
|
-- 2 (main collision bone)
|
-- 3 (secondary collision/dmg bone)

I honestly still have no clue why this was done for this particular object, which was taken as a base (chrysler building). But I do know that I cannot move 3 bone out and try and use it on its own or switch to bone 2 as collision. Just telling you - it does not work. The bone specs are actually very very different. At least it looks that way.

There are 2 meshes. Call them mesh1 mesh2.
Mesh1 is by default sitting on bone 1 (bone bindings).
Mesh2 is by default sitiing on bone 3 (bone bindings again).

Now, a bit of a history from GR2 Editor: in the past, if you would rename a mesh or a bone, a lot of times things got really borked. There is a sertain link between the mesh and bone that is bind to, that was affected if you changed names and they were not the same (exactly). Now, TDW has fixed that part and it works like a charm (LOVE IT!!!!!).
BUT.
If I change the bindings, which should in turn thange the name of the bone to the bone I'm changing the binding to, it does not happen.
Furthermore, the mesh/bone will somehow ALWAYS be bind to the bone/mesh that it was ORIGINALLY bind to.
So here is a particular example to stop my sluring

We go back to the mesh I described above:
Let say I want to change things and use bone 3 somewhere else. I still want a collision object/mesh and collision bone. That would mean that I would bind mesh2 to bone 2. Theoretically speaking, now mesh2 and bone 2 should be linked, united, two parts of one, etc (being silly here, but you get my idea). So from that, if I change the name of bone 2, the name of the mesh2 should also change and vice versa.
But that is not how that works. Changing name of the bone 2 will do nothing to the mesh2 and changing name of mesh2 will CHANGE NAME OF BONE 3.

Having fun yet? ))))))
Now, where was I going with all this explanation? Back to what gap said: even doing a non-playable unit can be a major pain. I have a half-done AI model of IXB. Taking me so far about a year.
To be honest, I haven't had much time working on modeling and these projects lately, but what I'm trying to say that every step of the way, even if you are doing the simplest thing is trial and error. Very tedious, frustrating, huge-amount-of-time taking, painfull, hair-pulling and extremely lovely and amazing process. Now imagin trying to do that to a model, that has 3x times the bones compary to regular AI unit?
Maybe I'm just bad at it (it is possible that my lack of knowledge in the matter causes me so much trouble), but I know only a few people here on the forums who got as deep into this as me (and much much deeper) in this exact part of changes to the game. I can call them out by names and count on one hand. And all of them are working on major things themselves including GR2 Editor itself.

p.s. the issue described above is something I should post in the GR2 thread, probably. I need to start figuring out how those bones are different. They are, if you look at their settings/options in editor, but it doesn't explain why the naming convention for binded meshes/bones works this way.