Ways to tackle the positioning issues?

[Fredas]

I started out just trying to add something to a certain discontinued mod, and it's exploded into a sort of overhaul.  Today I decided to start looking into what I thought was one of the mod's biggest longstanding issues: The rather odd nature of actor positioning prior to any of the animations it calls.

 

It didn't take me long to figure out that the mod was not actually doing any positioning at all.  It was just lining up actors and animations, and handing it all over to SexLab.  Since I can hardly start delving into SexLab to make tweaks, I thought I'd seek some advice.

 

To put this problem into perspective, let me offer two cases in point: Say I use one of the mod's commands which calls up "Arrok Lesbian".  Sequence of events:

 

 

 

1) Third person camera is forced (free cam forced off also).

2) Actors undress and maybe don strap-ons.

3) Follower teleports about five feet in front of player, facing away.

4) Follower slides through player, who then about-faces to meet follower for the animation.

 

 

What I would seek to avoid in this case is the whole.. people sliding through each other thing.  But this is just a visual anomaly.  The next case is really what brought me here.  This time the command calls up "Arrok Anal":

 

 

 

1) Third-person camera is forced (free cam forced off also).

2) Actors undress and maybe don strap-ons.

3) Follower teleports about three feet behind player (off camera).

4) Follower teleports a further three feet backwards.

5) Player then slides backwards to meet follower for the animation

 

 

By the time all of this is done, the actors are no longer anywhere near the center of the camera's rotational axis, which necessitates some practiced readjustment.  Ideally, I would hope for one of two things: Either that the actors are repositioned on the camera's axis, or the camera's axis is repositioned on the player.  I'll add that "free cam" carries not only its usual caveats, but also my own recent discovery that armor animations and effects completely fail to work (on the player) while TFC is active.

 

So what am I hoping for?  Suggestions. ;p  Maybe there is a better way of getting this done.  Maybe the problems I listed above can be circumvented.  I'm mainly hoping to avoid having to write my own rudimentary substitute for SexLab's functions.

 

[Menesh]

The sliding happens when actors switch from idle animation to SL animation. There's nothing that can be done about it, short of rebuilding the animations themselves to include a proper "get into position" stage. Same for the teleporting. It's simply the only way to reliably place actors at the positions where the animation requires them to be.

I'm not sure about your camera issues, as I don't think I ever noticed something like that, but you'd have to talk to Ashal about that to see if he can do anything about it.

[Fredas]

The sliding happens when actors switch from idle animation to SL animation. There's nothing that can be done about it, short of rebuilding the animations themselves to include a proper "get into position" stage. Same for the teleporting. It's simply the only way to reliably place actors at the positions where the animation requires them to be.

 

Well, I wasn't really counting on anything dramatic for those aspects.  Mainly I was just underscoring the undoubtedly fixable issue of players being in the wrong positions (for this animation) before the SL animation begins.  They start off on the wrong side of one another, so the animation flows one actor right through the other.  This could probably be fixed with an attentive tweak.

 

I'm not sure about your camera issues, as I don't think I ever noticed something like that, but you'd have to talk to Ashal about that to see if he can do anything about it.

 

This here is the main item of this thread.  I will note that while "Arrok Lesbian" does place the actors slightly off-center (and only when the player is not the main actor), it is by no means as critical an anomaly as in the case of "Arrok Anal".  This would be less of an issue if TFC did not outright break animated armor.