Frame groups, as I've come to learn over the weekend, are basically a collection of frames that are special in that they will animate autonomously without having to tell the server about it. Each frame is a complete animation frame, just like the simple frames in other models. 

the different parts in one frame make quark tell it is a framegroup.

I know nothing about servers and how it works in quake.I just wondered why one frame left in qmle after deleting all other frames in flame2.mdl still errored quark with framegroups.

It is the same error I had after decomposing a death frame to divided parts. After saving they were all melted together again. 

It looks like MDLs have support for animated skins but no MDL that I ever open has one. Can anyone recall a model that had an animated skin on it in a mod or anywhere else? 

but i believe you are refering to skingroups?

i've heard people talk about that but never found out how to do it, myself. 

Sorry, yes, skin groups. I see them in the spec and was just wondering if they've ever actually been used. I guess once these tools are further along I'll just test them out and see what they are. 

on Nehahra? They have like facial animation as in the mouth texture has two frames. Also isn't there some blinking? 

Well, how are these skingroups used? I'm going to assume that it's like the frame groups - some sort of automated animation system. If that's the case, I guess they could have had a moving mouth with blinking thrown in here and there to make it work (no lip syncing at all but that's probably a given in the Quake engine). 

i believe the talking and blinking (not sure about the blinking, that may have just been random?) was handled via impulse commands and that the 'actor' players would do that themselves. or it just occured to me, they maybe did it in post in a demo editor. 

just to clarify, do you mean something like painskins (sweeeet)?

http://www.inside3d.com/showtutorial.php?id=95

Or, an animated concurrent effect? 

i managed to do that once when i was about 15.

Bring back painskins! 

HT

No, that tutorial looks like it's just bumping up to another skin index. The skingroup stuff looks like an auto animate deal.

Preach! :) 

You can auto animate skins, it's pretty much the same deal as the frames, you can designate a collection of skins as a single skingroup, they autoanimate according to timings set in the model. I have no idea if the random flag works on them, or if the same glquake bug for duration exists. If you want an example of a model which does it, dig in the quoth pak1.pak for a model called pickup.mdl. The last two skins, which are for the health and megahealth, have such animations to make the lights blink.

Necros: how you do it in qme is arrange the skins in order, then right click on the first one and select "Append Skingroup To Previous Skingroup". Repeat until all the skins in the animation are combined, and then save the model again. 

i'm pretty sure these are the analog to framegroups in models and sprites, basically client-side looped animation.

based on the engine code, it looks like glquake has pretty half-assed support for skin groups, for example every skin is given 4 pointers to textures, and almost all the time the 4 pointers are to the same texture, but when loading a skingroup it gives them unique pointers. If you have more than 4 skinframes, it drop some.

So effectively you can only have 1, 2, or 4 skinframes in a group in glquake. If you have 3, it will animate 1, 2, 3, 1, 1, 2, 3, 1... and if you have 5+, it will animate (e.g.) 5, 2, 3, 4, 5, 2, 3, 4...

Also, not sure if the model format supports intervals for skingroups, but glquake clearly only does 10Hz animation for them.

My guess is there's one model somewhere in the mission packs using this feature, and that required them to add this minimum of support to glquake when they wrote it. 

Christ metlslime, pull the curtain back again, that's hideous!

Informative though, cheers really. 

Haha, horrible! Well, good to know that supporting that can go at the bottom of the priority list at least. :P 

Blinking health items at least.

Possibly some really shitty animated soul sphere swirling is possible . . . in four frames.

Can't think of a decent monster application - glowing eyes? 

"Blinking health items at least. "

Huh, that's true. OK, I guess that'll be my test case for loading skin groups then. 

"Can't think of a decent monster application - glowing eyes?"

I think many cool ideas could be done there. Glowing demon eyes, blinking lights on enforcer armor, blinking eyes, etc. Could be neat. 

pain skins!!!pain skins!!!pain skins!!!pain skins!!!pain skins!!!pain skins!!!pain skins!!!pain skins!!!pain skins!!!pain skins!!!pain skins!!!pain skins!!!pain skins!!!pain skins!!!pain skins!!!pain skins!!!pain skins!!!pain skins!!!pain skins!!!pain skins!!! 

To be honest, pain skins don't really excite me in Quake because how often is a monster in pain? You see the monster and it's generally dead within seconds. Would you even see the pain skin kick in? 

Monsters are all a bit bruised/bloody anyway, but brown grunt stood up, 2 seconds later red and bloodied grunt on floor. I mean I know that the pain skins would be non-locational, but for monster like a Shambler or a Vore you could have three or four increments of pain, relative to HP, and it would show how close that Shambler you've been picking away at with an SG or SSG for five minutes is to death!

I just think it looks cool. I also wanna see a mod with pain skins and zombie-gib blood splats dribbling down walls from when mosters are shot.

I know its meant to be easy in Quake C, theres a tutorial on Inside3d. Maybe this will be my first Quake C project . . .

(I had it working once when I was about 15, but I cant remember how it worked now, and haven't tried yet) 

Dead skins might be a decent idea. The corpse on the ground could be all fucked up and bloody. That might make more sense... 

Lets say we work with the grunt, and give him a second skin which is bloody and beaten up. Now open up soldier.qc and look for the function
army_pain
Right at the bottom of this function, add

if(self.health < 15) //if we are below half health
self.skin = 1;//turn on the pain skin

This will work a lot of the time, but there's a chance that the grunt goes from above 30hp to dead without going into pain. Also, if the grunt is dead, we should check if he gets gibbed, and set the skin back to 0 if so, because the grunt head only has 1 skin. So find army_die
and put

self.skin = 0;

just after

if (self.health < -35)
{

Then put

self.skin = 1;

after the closing } bracket of that gib section of the function.

You can do a similar thing with pretty much any monster, find the pain function and use that to add the pain skin. Remember that some monsters don't automatically go into pain animations, and may return near the top of the function. This means that you have to think about where to add the line. You could put it right at the top, so that it always gets checked. Or you might decide that the skin should only change if the monster goes into pain, and so put it at the bottom. 

could have a practical purpose...

assuming your were consistent and always used pain skins for, let's arbitrarily decide 50% hp.

you could make like a monster that 'heals' wounded monsters if they are below 50%. you'd have a visual indicator for what's happening and it could be a cool new mechanic.

well, maybe something more complex would be in order like 'heals the monster to 90% of maximum health.' so each time it heals, the max health goes down and you could put in a check where it wouldn't be able to heal if the current max health is less than half of the actual max health. 

Oh duhr ... I can't use the health packs as a test case for skin groups in MDLs because those aren't MDLs (they're BSPs). Heh. Oh well...