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Animation and the Final Exporting

Since we're going to start animation we should probably hide the _surf object.

Under display select "Hide Selected" with the _surf object selected so that you don't have to worry about it getting in your way.

Animation in the engine is pretty simple, press down the animate button, move the slider, then move all the objects to where you want them to be at the end of the animation. Deselect Animate when done.

Now we're ready to export, if you haven't already make a button for the exporter as described in the Texporter Installation Guide

Before we finalize our models I must remind you that you have to export all your *.s2z files from your savage\game directory. To do this you simply right click on the file select re-name and change the extension to a .zip file and extract them. (If you can't see the extension go to Tools, Folder options, then click the View tab and make sure "Hide extensions for known file types" is disabled)

Press the save button, then select the savage\game\human\building\icons and give the file an appropriate name and format.

With this done, why don't we get a nice shot of the wall so that we can see it from the menu in game. Change the Height and Width to 128x128 then press render.

 Before we export, unhide the _surf object as it may not be exported correctly. Now, select the ModelExporter R4, then Press export

Select both Export Animation and Copy Textures, then press ok

Type in an appropriate name for the Model and an appropriate location. If it is going to be a simple model you would want to put it in the savage\game\props folder, but since I'm doing a human building I'm placing it in savage\game\human\buildings.  Make sure you type in .model at the end. Hit ok on the next screen and this one should come up

Make sure you change the extension to .clip, then click save and ok.

 Now, browse to the location to which you saved your model, in my case C:\Savage MOD\game\human\buildings

Now, browse to the location of your two new files, we're going to have to do a bit of work to get this in game, the first thing we're going to have to do is to copy and modify a *.anim file, after copied re-name it "wall.anim" (or whatever you named your project)

Now, open up wall.anim with a text editor, (to do this simply double click it and select to choose program from list and choose WordPad). We're going to have to modify this so that the objects it refers to are for the wall file. Note this *.clip file I used had and idle and a death animation, right now we have no idle animation, so I could delete this but, instead having the "//" before it makes the engine read it as a comment, or basically it ignores it. The numbers following the clip are the start frame, end frame, and (if memory serves) the speed you want it played at.

For my .clip file the only thing I had to change was to change it to wall.clip and change the time it went for. Make sure to save the changes you have made to this file.

Now, browse to the Savage\game\objects folder as we not have to make an object file for the game.

Copy Human_arrow_tower.object and re-name it human_wall.object

As you can see there are a lot of things we can modify, I'm going to change a few required ones and highlight them.

Most of the settings are self explanatory, but you need to at least change the model name and the icon name if you want it to look right in game.

Now, open up objlist.cfg and add "objload human_wall" somewhere.

Now, browse to the savage\MOD\game\gui\standard\gridmenus folder copy a gridbutton* and name it gridbutton_WALL.cfg. Also change the set_name human_wall

Now, you have to browse to  \human subfolder and open layout_build.cfg add "wall" to one of the grid spaces.

Now, go into the game and enjoy.

You now have walls with almost perfect clipping and destructibility.