Help with the old MD2

Mililo

Hello there, i'm new here and ever started with a problem , the real is that I was looking for a solution for a problem and found polycount.com wich have lots of MD2 models, thats a very useful site, then i came to this forum that appears to have a helpful community and there's my question...

I made an model on Wings3D and I want to export that to MD2 to use with an game engine, I know how to that with Milkshape, I also know how to animate there on Milkshape too, so I made the model and animated it but i'm having trouble when assigning the name to the frame numbers, like(1-10 = walk), I know that frames 1 to 10 are walk but how can I assign that frames to the name walk?

Note: This can be on milkshape or any other freeware program(cuz milkshape is the only one i bought).

Note²: I'm not who have the problem, it's my friend who's making the game with me, he's modeler and i'm programer but he dunno english, and I don't really know why i've writed in first person

Note³: Sorry for bad english.

Frankie

It was a long time ago I used MD2s in quake 2 but I dont think you could specify the which frames were which cycles, maybe you cant do it and it has to be done with code somewhere... sorry its not much help but almost 100% sure that its not something you can do inside the .md2 file.

Mililo

Humm thats bad =(.

But I want to know how the quake modelers did that, even if it uses code I can try to do that.

EarthQuake

Um, IIRC from quake2, there was just a list of frames, from like 0-370, if you were making a player model for it, you would just have to match up to the same frames that those models use. There was probabbly a list a some point, but i think you have to do it in the exact order the other models used.

Mililo

I dont know if that needs to be exactly that way.

Because he's not going to use a quake2 engine. He just need to assign a name to the animation frames that way i'll be able to use a script command:

SetObjectAnimation(ObjectName : String; Animation : String);

Yeah it's pascal...i know that's very old and slow :poly141:

But with that command i'll call the animations at the time I want, but that need to have a name.

MoP

I think to do that you're going to have to write a separate file which just contains a list of the animation names, along with their start and end frame.
I don't think MD2 format stores any animation segment names, as EQ said for Quake2 it was just a consistent list that the game used, and every model had to match up.

I may be wrong though - surely if you're a programmer you'll have no trouble looking up the MD2 format definition (I believe it's online somewhere), and seeing if there are any data blocks in it for storing animation names and frame ranges.