I done animation before but never for a game so I figured I would tinker around a little bit. I made a quick drone type bot that flies up, does a swirl and hovers, then lands again for a test. Everything looked fine in milkshape so I borrowed a script from a different animated object and set the key frames then tested it. I ran into problems.
1. They key frames. The animation has 41 key frames but if I set it at 0,41 it only plays the first frame of animation. I set it to 0, 41000 and then it played the whole animation. But that shouldn't be what has to be done . So what's going wrong here?
2. Animation speed . From what I understand each key frame is one second long, at least that's what I read on a tutorial. Is this correct? The bot animation is 40 frames long (which is 15 seconds too long but it was just a test on my first run) but in game guru the animation seems more like 2 minutes.
.so, why are the key frames working against me and am I correct in assuming the key frame duration? Any help would be appreciated!

The model is below. Ignore the terrible animation, it was just a test

1 frame per second?

That sound very odd.

Usually animations are made to run at 24 or 32 frames per second, this is a common standard for animation and video work because it is the point at which the eye starts to see movement as fluid.

i think the animation is 4200 frames not 41 frames.

i checked your file in fragmotion,
And Belidos is correct about the speed 24 or 30 frames a second.
it is working in fragmotion, only extremely slow. and the duration is 280 seconds now.
Secondly you need a simple script to play the animation correct.
In the script you can also set the animationspeed so it goes faster.


Harry

What I was saying is that tutorial said that each "key frame" equals one second of animation at 30 frames a second. I guess I should've been a little more detailed in my explanation.The walking animation they were showing was only made up of nine frames and The program fills in the animation in between keyframes



It showing 41 frames in the editor unless it multiplies the number. Here's a picture



I guess we were answering at the same time so I didn't see your message. If it's playing that slow and the editor shows that keyframes at 41 then these frames would have to be longer Then the tutorial is saying wouldn't they?

There was a script included with that model to play the animation once, not the right script this would need if I was going to use it for something but enough for my demo to learn how things work. I didn't set the animation speed in the script, I just changed it to 3000 in the editor of game guru for my test Because of how slow it was running.

edit: you said script not fpe, I'm getting ahead of myself this morning! yeah, I do. I borrowed this fpe from an animated flag to test the model and changed over the info. It was set to use the character script so I left it at that for the test.

This one is working for me.

i put the download below

Harry

Thank you harrywever for what you put together here. I still have some questions to make sure I learn this correctly =)
You set the animation frames to 0,4801 in the script. How did you come to that conclusion for that many frames? The end of the animation seems cut off as well, did the model not land back at the starting position in the end of the animation with fragmotion? with milkshape each keyframe is the main points of the animation. It creates the frames in between based on the positions of the keyframes. What I'm gathering here is that SetAnimationFrames are how many frames are in the animation, not how many keyframes. I set the frames per second at 30 so 30 times 41 keyframes equals 1,230 frames of animation so why would the SetAnimationFrames need to be set so high to play the whole animation?
It wouldn't really matter for an object with only one animation but if I tried to do a character with several animations finding the starting and stopping points would be very difficult if the numbers are lining up.
Sorry for all the questions, I just want to make sure I learn this right and get all the kinks worked out, thanks for the help guys

I'm not sure how milkshape works, but with most modelling programmes you don't set the time between key frames, you put the key frame on the frame you want it to be set at, ie if you have it set to 30 frames per second and you want 10 seconds for an animation, you put your initial keyframe at 1 (I would never use 0 as an animation frame as a lot of game engines and animated movie software gets confused with zero frame animations) then the final keyframe at 300 and fills the animation in on the frames already there in between.

I'll have to take a look into Milkshape and see how it works, because if it works how you're saying it seems to be going against the "usual convention" that most animators use. Do you have a link to the video you used to learn from?

That's pretty much how milkshape works but the timeframe between each keyframe is a lot longer than one frame of animation. It would make a lot more sense if each keyframe represented a frame of animation. I have 41 keyframes on my animation and without speeding up it's over 2 minutes long. Maybe there's an adjustment slider I'm not seeing that shortens the time in between keyframes? I'd appreciate it if you did look into milkshape. I'm surprised more people don't use that program, besides this animation hassle it's real easy to work with

thanks again!

By the way , I almost forgot. It was a written tutorial I've found, let me see if I can dig it up

I open the file in fragmotion, and that was the amount of frames in the animation, according to fragmotion.


I don't know how milkshape's animation works, so i can not help you with that.
But you can download fragmotion for free and if you type the anthem ( i hope i spell that correctly ), then you can use it completly for a week.

Harry

Animation is played (and counted) in frames since there is no way for engine to know what is a keyframe and a frame, think of it as filling in the blank frames between keyframes and that's the frame count. If you have a keyframe at 30 then there are 30 frames not one
If you have a keyframe at 130 then there are 130 animation frames.

You don't need a script to play this animation in GameGuru just set in the fpe, if using bones remember to use the character shader.

thanks rolfy, I'm understanding what you guys are saying but the final frame in my animation was 41 which would necessarily mean I only had 41 frames of animation.
but, I think I've found what was causing some problems. First, was the tutorial I was reading. It didn't explain things that well. So I watched a video of another guy animating and he was treating each notch on the animation bar as a single frame while animating his project which makes a lot more sense. It didn't make sense why my model only had 41 frames and wasn't 4.1 seconds by how he was doing it. I went through exporting the model again and look that all the options while exporting and found this:

The animation time factor was set to 210 for some reason which was causing the animation to be a long . So I changed it to 1.3 to match the animation frames and now it seems mostly fixed to match the time frame. It still cuts off the last part of the animation which is the big problem I'm having.
Only thing left to figure out: If it's only 41 frames why do I have to set the FPE/script to more frames to get the whole animation to play.

Here's the milkshake file with the model animation if that helps. I redid the animation to 400 frames (13 seconds). Still has the same problem though

It seems to me that you need to install the "Animation time factor" 1.0 when exporting models , something to match the ratio of the length in the animation, and the number of keyframes.

In my opinion it is logical.
suppose:
There timeline, 50 frames in it, but only six animation key frame to 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50

When you export you specify is not the number of animation keys, namely the number of frames on the timeline.
And I think that this is the "Animation time factor" scales the animation, I think you need to set it 1.0

oldpman, you are the man! I set it to 1.0 and everything is fixed! The frames are correct, the duration is correct, everything! I guess I was misunderstanding what animation time factor was doing. Very much appreciated!

Glad I could help, in fact it was just a a guess.
I wish you fruitful work
Regards