HORSEY TIME ZEEHAW

[muted ridge]

So that's a couple days old at least

After pull

[short cloak]

idle animation isn't working for you?

[muted ridge]

I guess not tho I didn't restart the game after pulling and just reload ?

Could be why

Didn't plan on testing the horse mod lol so I didn't put too much effort into it

[short cloak]

some animation nodes were renamed so i don't expect a reload to fully work yeah

[muted ridge]

Give me a sec to try it out now that I got the screenshots I wanted from the in-game uploader

No idea why they spawn as blobs

[short cloak]

yeah i'm a little concerned since i don't get the meatballs

[muted ridge]

Yea idk

They never become blobs tho

[short cloak]

it might be because there's a zombie around scaring them, they might be shifting into a state we don't have animation nodes for yet

[muted ridge]

But they don't seem to become ones

Only leave that blob state

[short cloak]

if you right click under a horse it should let you open the animation debugger and see what state and animation node they're on

[muted ridge]

Uh

Start anim recording ?

Bcs that just nuked my game xD

[short cloak]

no not that, that always crashes the game lol

[muted ridge]

bruh

Yea no idea what you are talking about

There's nothing else

Aaah

wait

That ?

Animal behavior ?

[short cloak]

should be under [DEBUG] iirc

but this does show they're alerted which isn't something i've tested yet

so possibly happening because of that

[muted ridge]

Got it

Animation text

[short cloak]

yeah that makes sense, i didn't make any alerted nodes

[muted ridge]

Tho like I said, the blob thing never happened

Only when loading the horses

Anyway that looks cool !

[short cloak]

i think if they transition into a broken animation they just freeze in their current pose

they'll only meatball if they start in a broken animation

[muted ridge]

Yea

Sooooo uh

There's basically zero translation data in the animations right now ?

[short cloak]

there is no translation data in any animation whatsoever

[muted ridge]

None of them where exported even with a static translation data so I can't even try to edit the .fbx animations to make the translation data

Should we put the animation files in the repo ?

The blender files

[short cloak]

i think alex did

PZ_HorseRig_RedChili_Anims.blend

[muted ridge]

Oh lol

Didn't read the end

OH SHIT

THEY ARE MOVING

Shit but I only have the trot animation !

I can't test the other ones !

Also something to note here

Is that you need to set the scale to 0.01 when exporting

Or the horse basically teleports away

https://streamable.com/znnfkq

[muted ridge]

@brisk iris to make sure you check that out

That's fucking amazing !

The translation data might need to be tweaked here, or perhaps it's the animation

I think the translation data is a tiny too fast

@short cloak can you invite me in the github repo please so I can push those changes ?

Actually might too slow ...

Too fast lol

[short cloak]

ideally make a fork, i don't think giving everyone push access was a great idea 😅

[muted ridge]

👌

Ok going to start documenting translation data speed with video

There's only the trot blender files right ?

Unless I'm completely blind

[short cloak]

that's all i can see too

[silver holly]

ARMY OF HORSES!! YES!!

[muted ridge]

Yea lol

[silver holly]

Giggling and kicking my feet rn fr I'm so excited

Thank you guys SO MUCH for being our literal backbone on this I really really appreciate you both

@limber plinth Maybe we throw that later you made on all the horses an see how it looks? O: They look really flat in game as is

That sc you sent looked amazing though you did a great job

[muted ridge]

No the lighting is the problem

In my videos

If that's what you mean

It's because I activated a debug no lighting

[short cloak]

the textures are a little flat but something really weird is going on with the lighting even when it's enabled

[muted ridge]

Let me test

[short cloak]

when a horse rotates it changes colour entirely

and i noticed some really extreme shading in motion too

[muted ridge]

Oh yea lmao

[short cloak]

we're using the same shader as vanilla animals so i'm guessing it's just weirdly sensitive about something in the model, maybe the scale since that tends to affect things in this game

[silver holly]

Damn I forgot about that

[muted ridge]

Could be the texture roughness or some shit

[silver holly]

Interesting

[muted ridge]

Why does that horse looks fucking MASSIVE xD

[silver holly]

The horses also look a little floaty when they walk (?) - although I haven't seen other base game animals though

[silver holly]

He's been fed well

[short cloak]

LOL they have some random variance in scale and i haven't checked the numbers yet

it's based on genetics so this should probably be an extreme outlier

[muted ridge]

These are the different values of movement for the translation data

I think something close to 2 or 3 is the best

the numbers are in the file names

I just test 2.5 and I think it's too slow

[short cloak]

first one looks best to me

[muted ridge]

That's 2

2 meters

[short cloak]

though my only serious reference for how horses should move is my little pony 😅

[muted ridge]

That's 2.5m

I agree 2 looks good

Somehow I feel like 2.5 is worse tho

[silver holly]

2 is great!

[short cloak]

oh keep in mind horses do have a genetic speed modifier, i haven't tested if it actually works because they don't usually move anyway but that may skew the results 😅

[silver holly]

OH SHIT?!

[muted ridge]

Yea I noticed it with both horses not going the same speed

Uploading a video give me a sec

You can clearly see it

Like the small horse moves faster than the big one

In my case

[silver holly]

I mean that makes sense

[muted ridge]

You tell us lol

https://streamable.com/7hmay6

That's 2m

[short cloak]

the current speed variance should be 80%-120%

[muted ridge]

Oh man I'd love to have access to the other animation files from Alex

I absolutely did not plan on working on the horse mod today but hey let's go

[short cloak]

speed currently isn't linked to size, we'll probably just give horse breeds with lower size genetics lower speed genetics too

[muted ridge]

Yea

We'll see that later

[silver holly]

I put out a list of my suggested stats of each breed/coat! I just based it off the real life horses an what they're usually used to do. It can be happily changed though!

[short cloak]

i haven't actually split the breeds yet, there's only one breed so far that just uses all of the textures

unfortunately a breed using more than one texture seems to be an unfinished/scrapped feature so they randomise every time you reload the save 😅

and it was only ever implemented for female animals for some reason

[muted ridge]

Oh yea that's what I thought lol bcs spawning different breeds didn't change anything lol

[short cloak]

there's only one breed defined, wdym?

[muted ridge]

Wait you're right LMAO

Just me and my english not noticing these are just names for horses lol

For some reasons I thought these were breeds but no they aren't

[short cloak]

only mares will use the other textures, stallions and fillies will always use the same texture until i get around to splitting them

[silver holly]

WE GOTTA MAKE FOALS AND FILLIES AAAAAAAA

[silver holly]

Can be a future project for sure!

[short cloak]

yeah i've been content to just make them scaled down horses 😅

[muted ridge]

pigs.

[short cloak]

although currently they're not even that, they're just full size LOL

[silver holly]

Big babbies

[silver holly]

Yeahhh we can do that 🥺 I think I'll make special textures for babies though. It would be fun to watch them grow up and into their coats

[short cloak]

oooh go ahead! they use a separate texture anyway

[silver holly]

Alright lunch is over - once again THANK YOU GUYS ❤️ 💗

[muted ridge]

Did you leave the ability to ride the horses ?

From what I see it doesn't seem so ?

[short cloak]

it's in a separate branch, may be a little old now

[muted ridge]

👌

Also made a post in the official Discord since I hadn't made one to showcase the mod advancement like for the reddit
https://discord.com/channels/136501320340209664/1366841696796672031

[short cloak]

i've been a bit reluctant to get too much public attention on this until it's in a better state

[muted ridge]

Yea that's fair

[short cloak]

not your fault, but god the people who came in here after the reddit post were annoying

[muted ridge]

Understandable

That's why that post there I didn't link anything from here

Tho I hope the post I had made helped bringing modders interested in helping

At least it was my goal 😅

Welp I can't do much more without the other animation files to add translation data rn, so I'll stop here and go back to edit that wiki page which I was supposed to finish an hour ago lol

[brisk iris]

Ah okay, thanks for the info, I'll make sure to export with 0.01 from now on!

[brisk iris]

That's so fucking cool!!

[brisk iris]

The other ones should be in the same .blend file, I kept them all as actions with fake-user so you should be able to place them on an NLA strip

[muted ridge]

Uh I didn't see any other actions, wait

How can I see the other actions ?

Yea no you sure there's the others ?

[brisk iris]

Click on the <No Action> strip and then on this little icon on the right panel, it should show some

[muted ridge]

OOOOOOH

Damn

Alright back to fucking work LMAO

[brisk iris]

Yeah the whole action/NLA system is pretty fucked if you ask me

I ended up losing like 20 of my skateboard animation actions because I didn't know you had to enable "fake user" on the actions or they just straight up get deleted when you close the file

[short cloak]

😭

[muted ridge]

How do I remove the trot action ?

[short cloak]

another victim of reference counting

[brisk iris]

You can just delete the NLA strip fully

[muted ridge]

Uuuuh

But this will remove the action from the file no ?

[brisk iris]

It would, but I have it as a fake user so it will stay

[muted ridge]

Ok wait I got it I think

[brisk iris]

I actually have no idea if I'm doing things the right way, but it's been mostly working so I've just rolled with it 😅

[muted ridge]

I think that's good

Just Blender you know

[brisk iris]

Literally

[muted ridge]

I'm going to stream my tests if you want

Or we can even voice chat

[brisk iris]

I can hop in, but my wife is napping next to me so can't go on mic 😄

[muted ridge]

Alright np

Stream will be fine then

HOLY THIS LOOKS GOOD ?

I think I nailed the translation data here

It's 5 meters

[brisk iris]

LOOK AT HIM GO! 😄

[brisk iris]

5m for gallop and 2 for trot?

[muted ridge]

Yea

[brisk iris]

Sick!

[muted ridge]

I forked the repo anyway so I'll upload my blend files once I'm done

You'll be able to see how I did it

The important part is to use linear interpolation for translation data

Then just keyframe it like anything else

[brisk iris]

We should probably add like 1m translation data to the gallopToIdle as well

[short cloak]

is gallopToIdle finished? i didn't see an fbx for it

[brisk iris]

Ah nice yeah, I managed to get the linear thing sorted when I did my skateboard, it was driving me crazy for a while haha

[muted ridge]

What's gallopToIdle ?

[brisk iris]

Oh shit right, I need to make a PR for it

[muted ridge]

Also going to test idle to gallop

Oh wait it' s not done nvm lol ?

[brisk iris]

I made one where it stops from galloping, just forgot I haven't uploaded it yet.

I'll put it up now

I'll add 1m translation data to it, and then you can tweak from there

[muted ridge]

That's going to be annoying to handle having a singular blender file I feel like ...

[muted ridge]

Actually for speeds that should change, you're going to need to tweak its movement

You shouldn't use linear for things that vary speed

[brisk iris]

Yeah I'm gonna have it taper off

I've managed to get it pretty well on my bicycle, so I can use a similar graph

[muted ridge]

👌

I'll publish my fork if you want

[brisk iris]

Hmm, maybe if we use append? If you drag a .blend file into another you can choose to append only certain things.
So if we're clear in our commits with what's been added, the next person could just append that one thing to their file

[muted ridge]

https://github.com/SirDoggyJvla/HorseMod

[muted ridge]

No idea

Tho that's one reason to use multiple blend files

They are 7 Mo per files

The repo size limit is a Gb right ?

[short cloak]

i don't think there's a limit

[muted ridge]

Wait really ?

Naaah there's got to be a limit ?

[short cloak]

not what their docs say

[muted ridge]

Hmm

Yea

https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/xn8y97/comment/ips9cxh/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Just if you 5 Gb you basically get flagged or some shit

@brisk iris so I think the best way to handle animations and edits to them is to have a separate file every time

That sounds like the most flexible method to do it

[short cloak]

this person is just reading off the docs and getting it wrong 😅

[muted ridge]

Best way to handle multiple of us editing blender animations I'd say

[muted ridge]

lol yikes

[brisk iris]

Ah I see what you mean, each individual animation is in it's own .blend file
I agree yeah, good idea

[muted ridge]

Reddit mb

[short cloak]

if your repository causes noticeable issues for github they will email you, there isn't a specific size limit they'll do that at

[muted ridge]

I let you handle the splitting of your animations

[short cloak]

our repository is simply not popular enough for that to matter (and it's not going to get large anyway)

[muted ridge]

Eeeh when you start having multiple blender files it starts getting heavy I feel like

Tho it won't be a Gb I feel like

7 Mo per horse animations

So that's like what, 20 animations perhaps ?

140 Mo ?

• character animations in the future ?

10 animations perhaps ?

Yea we'll be fine

Welp I got nothing to do anymore lol

Back to wiki

[brisk iris]

I matched the linear speed before it hits the ground with the translation data from your fork Doggy, which was 1m every 3 frames, and then I gave it half a meter of slowing down. Maybe I should give it a full meter of braking?

[short cloak]

i'm wondering if this'll mess with pathfinding

it might overshoot

[brisk iris]

Oh, hmm, good question

[short cloak]

unclear if that actually matters though

i haven't seen animals actually path to a specific place rather than just... run in a direction for a bit

[brisk iris]

I'll make a PR for it rn and upload it along with the split .blend files for all animations

I'll give him a full meter of braking, I think it will look better, and then we can always tweak if needed

yeah 1m feels way better

[muted ridge]

tbf just test it

You can directly export in the mod files and it'll update in-game

Guys

I did something ...

https://youtu.be/UwVFV_lyhqI?si=DTdGJ_GW-2dewysf

[brisk iris]

I think I gotta hop off for the night, but I made a PR with the GallopToIdle fbx and blend file, so if someone wants to test it they can
https://github.com/AlexVDefi/HorseMod/tree/RedChiliAnimations/FBX/Horse

[short cloak]

kinda hard to get the horses to even run but seems to look good in-game 😅

[muted ridge]

It does yea !

It's pretty good

Is the issue with the trop animations that there isn't enough "friction" in the horse feet ?

Idk if you see what I mean @brisk iris

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1366841696796672031/1366867602022072370/2025-04-29_22-03-01.mp4?ex=68128227&is=681130a7&hm=e3050b5c7b051005858bbd774bc870500a1ca16c3531c1d9e9ca32d7da6977db&

[short cloak]

the speed variation looks a little ridiculous there 😅 maybe i should only enable it for galloping

[muted ridge]

Wdym ?

I don't notice differences here

[astral rover]

Redchili anims?

[muted ridge]

yea

[silver holly]

Yeahhh

Looking great though! Amazing progress today!!!

[astral rover]

Something like this could work for the thumbnail? what kind of thumbnail is good?

[silver holly]

Ooooo!!!

[silver holly]

I love the rearing idea!!!!

Maybe we could make a gif of the horse lifting up into the rear? Or would it be best to just screenshot a rear?

As well as - I was thinking of this earlier and I know it's super early to start talking about thumbnails and uploading the actual completed mod but! What are your guys' thoughts?

Who should upload it? What should it say? Who all wants to be credited with what?

[silver holly]

Also OMG I HAVENT SEEN THE HORSE WITH THE SADDLE!!! can I get a full pic? 😄 looks amazing from what I can see!!!

[halcyon monolith]

Is it possible you could store the texture option used in the animals mod data to then set when the save is loaded?

[short cloak]

probably

but it's not even supported for males in the first place so probably not worth using

[halcyon monolith]

also, about the multiple blend files for animations, why not just export the animations as FBX and then reimport them? Or is there something blender lacks when it comes to reimporting? (or maybe you lose the whole rig entirely?)

[astral rover]

It doesn't save rotations and custom objects of the rig, tho Im certain you could retarget the animation and import it back to the normal rig

[halcyon monolith]

hmm well space isn't a concern anyway like albion said, so I dont see why not to use blend

[astral rover]

I guess scene scales differ from one another, albion probably wants to maintain a standardized fbx repo so that they don't have to individually tweak it

[silver holly]

AAAAAAAA OMG!!!!!!!!!

[topaz meadow]

Just finally checking this after helping a friend move today and holy moly this is great

[muted ridge]

Chill on the camera motion I'd say

[brisk iris]

Oh yeah I see what you mean. I'll tweak it a bit and test it out in game today

[brisk iris]

I think I'm gonna have to split my time a bit between this and my bicycle mod, it's been sitting for a while with a bunch of new features at like 80% done and there's some bugs I gotta take care of 😅
But I will still make more animations in the next couple of days

[short cloak]

don't worry about it, we're all doing this for fun, you don't have a quota to fill

[brisk iris]

I would just feel bad for leaving you hanging when we're making so much progress 😄 The animations that are left are not super hard either, so they shouldn't take long

[muted ridge]

You can upload them and we'll do something with it

[limber plinth]

I believe I attached the images here, I wasn't sure if the GitHub was up to date at the time.

I can reshare later

[proper dust]

Damn! Looks like there's been a lot of progress since the last time I checked this thread

[agile shoal]

Incredible 😄

[silver holly]

Absolutely not a problem!!!

There is ZERO expectation for your time or work on this project! You've done a tremendous amount of amazing work and that alone is so appreciated.

Thank you for everything you've done so far 🙂 Good luck with the bike!! Maybe it'll give you more insight on this project, too

[topaz meadow]

For real. Take your time. This has been a slow burn of a project but it’s great to see consistent strides whenever everyone finds time to work on it.

[limber plinth]

As it should be, and it's great

[muted ridge]

I guess that's communism

[muted ridge]

@short cloak I see you implemented horse riding ?

Oh wait no, that's old no ?

https://github.com/demiurgeQuantified/HorseMod/blob/horse-riding/Contents/mods/HorseMod/42/media/lua/client/HorseMod/HorseRiding.lua

I checked the Trello and found that

[limber plinth]

[haughty bronze]

If anyone is able to help, can I draw a few alt textures? I use substance painter and the export stuff helps with the super bright textures the animals have.

[muted ridge]

The videos and images of the horses I shared ARE NOT with proper lighting

I use a debug option that removes lighting

So you'll have to test yourself the mod and you can always do pull requests on the repo to propse changes

People need to understand that this project is basically fully open source rn

[silver holly]

What were you thinking? O: we do have a number of textures already!

An for the most part it might be good to stay cohesive with the art style but I definitely wanna see/hear what you're thinking of

[limber plinth]

This was the painted on texture/shading I came up with. The layout might help you.

#1345522089720942665 message

[silver holly]

This is a bit more like how it's gonna look in game for reference sake! @haughty bronze but still wanna see/hear your idea!! Could bring a new perspective

[limber plinth]

Yeah, this is the first time I've tried texturing/shading-- there's some issues with seams

[short cloak]

there's something messed up with the in-game lighting that we'll have to fix at some point so i wouldn't consider either a good reference for how it'll actually look

[muted ridge]

Yea, but no idea if that's linked to the textures.?

[short cloak]

i doubt it's caused by the textures but obviously it's changing how they appear

[muted ridge]

Perhaps a model problem ?

[short cloak]

most likely

i'd guess it's something stupid like the engine expecting a certain scale or something, it's always something like that

[muted ridge]

Could be roughness or some shit

[silver holly]

Oh maybe it's too big?

[muted ridge]

Could an issue like for vehicles perhaps ?

[muted ridge]

Hmm I doubt it

[short cloak]

i don't think zomboid's shaders even pay attention to that

does that cause issues with vehicles?

[muted ridge]

No idea

[astral rover]

I've seen different texture resolutions affect the game depending on scale in project zomboids graphic's settings... Could be something like that no?

[silver holly]

It's worth resizing it to see I think

[eternal briar]

512x512 is the golden # for texture size

[astral rover]

oh...

How is paddlefruit handling the rig fix? is he going to do it? I can do it too, but it would be easier to generalize what each person does I guess

[agile shoal]

Ive been busy with my finals

Im almost done but im still busy sadly

[brisk iris]

Got my bicycle patch done and released! Now I can get back to making some more horse animations 😄

[silver holly]

Ooo congrats!! Happy to have some life in here again 🙂

[silver holly]

I've been doing some thinking!

There's been people who have been asking to donate, but no one has been wanting to accept (Which is okay and I understand you guys are so sweet)

But I think for those who want to donate, I'd like to direct them to https://equusfoundation.org/ or other horse conservation groups!
Donate in the spirit of horsey 🙂

[silver holly]

Btw I'm not saying only donate to this one but do some research - Or even research for local horse rescues near you!

Here's a few more links
https://www.hanaeleh.org/help-a-horse/donate/

https://sunrisehorserescue.org/

https://www.serraequinerescue.org/donate

https://www.heartofgoldsanctuary.org/

[astral rover]

I do think donating to some horse sanctuaries is a pretty nice idea

[brisk iris]

Back in the saddle! Did a Gallop to Walk and a new walk animation (couldn't find the blend file for the walk animation that was already there and had to make some changes)

[mighty flower]

The transition looks elegant, although I don't know if it's just me who thinks the head looks a little stiff.

[silver holly]

THIS LOOKS AMAZING!

[brisk iris]

Yeah I think you're right, the reference I was using had the head kind of stabilized, but looking at some other ones it seems more common that they bob their head around while moving, so I'll add a bit of that

[brisk iris]

Adjusted version

[muted ridge]

That looks amazing

[muted ridge]

One thing

Is that I think the end part should be shorter

I think if you leave it that long, it will limit the next animation that can be played

And so it's best to shorten that walking part to the minimum so the basic walking takes over I think

[brisk iris]

Oh I forgot the NLA strips aren't showing, this is a string of animations to show the transition better, but here's the transition and the walk shown separately

[muted ridge]

Oh okay that's perfect then !

[silver holly]

I'm not sure if it's on the to do animation list but if it isn't, we should put a full stop from a gallop

https://youtu.be/Y2EeT7rSlcE?si=Hc5swTc2JXhmcEe1

[brisk iris]

It's already done 🙂

[silver holly]

literally squealing and kicking my feet OMG!!!!! 👏 ✨

I just keep thinking to myself "this is the best it can't get any better" and somehow you keep managing

[brisk iris]

It's a fun challenge for sure, and definitely gonna be worth it! 😄

I've made a PR with the new animations, and adjusted trot a bit to feel less floaty. Also split all animations into separate .blend files for easier collaboration

Gonna do GallopToTrot which should be fast since I can use most of the GallopToWalk animation.
I think we might get away with not having any XToGallop animations, the engine interpolation should hopefully work well for those, but if it looks wonky I'll make those as well.

[brisk iris]

Idle Turn 90 Right

This one was tricky as fuck, goddamn horse legs

Something still looks a bit off about it, but I think I need to see it in-game to feel it out

[brisk iris]

Gallop To Trot
Tomorrow I should hopefully have time to do the rest of the turn animations.
Once those are done I can do some tests in-game to see how the engine interpolation for TrotToGallop/WalkToGallop looks and see if it's necessary to make those as well

[silver holly]

I think it looks super smooth!!

[silver holly]

That's a great point! I'd love to start seeing these animations in game

@muted ridge How do we do that? 🥺

[agile shoal]

Ok, sorry for my hiatus, what exactly are the issues some people are having with the horse rig?

Amazing work Alex

[astral rover]

man, yours is more polished than my turn left, nice work man

[astral rover]

Oh actually it doesnt end up in the middle of the x axis, that could cause issues, easy fix tho

[astral rover]

No problem with your hiatus, studies are important, Issue basically is as I described above in a comment to you, I think that was the briefest way to go about it...

[muted ridge]

We need to make the AnimSets

I suppose Albion simply copy pasted the ones from another animal and modified the animation file, and added a check that it's a horse

[brisk iris]

Oh yeah good point, I changed it a bit so it ends up in the center

Or hmm, I guess it would have to be center of Y as well

[brisk iris]

That should do I think

[muted ridge]

I will try later today to implement the animation in-game. Tho no promises as the AnimSets make my brain fry 🥲

[brisk iris]

Oh whoops just realized I created my previous PR on Doggy's fork 😅 I made a new one on the main repo with the 5 animations

[brisk iris]

I think I can help with that if you get stuck, I've wrestled a lot with the animsets lately, but haven't dug into the animal ones yet so not sure if they differ much

[muted ridge]

Did you separate the animations in different Blender files ?

[short cloak]

i've integrated GallopToTrot but i haven't been able to get it to actually trigger 😅

the others will be more complex, they aren't animations animals usually have

[limber plinth]

Set variable works for animals too right?

[short cloak]

i tested around with the turning animation, but they don't seem to set the animation variables players do to trigger theirs

[brisk iris]

I did yeah

[limber plinth]

I wonder if you can fake states using a matrix of conditions

[muted ridge]

Nice !

[muted ridge]

Yes

[limber plinth]

They're not using isTurning?

[short cloak]

doesn't seem like it

vanilla animals don't have turning animations so it makes sense

hmmm actually

[muted ridge]

They don't ?

[short cloak]

animation variables don't seem to be the issue, it's states

i wish they'd open that up for modding since it'd make basically everything about this mod easier

but as always it's circumventable

hmm no

the issue here is they transition to their walk state whenever they turn

i tried just putting the animation node in the walk state, but isMoving gets set to true when they're doing that

[limber plinth]

If you have two anims with similar conditions which gets set?

[short cloak]

the one with the higher condition priority

[limber plinth]

Ah I forgot about priority

[short cloak]

the issue is this animation should only play when they're still, if it takes priority it'll interrupt their movement, and if it doesn't then it'll just never play

[limber plinth]

And there's no other params that can be checked? I came across a file with conditions that are parsed.

Still as in idle?

[short cloak]

yeah

[limber plinth]

But turning isn't idle right?

[short cloak]

yeah

[limber plinth]

I don't want to suggest an onUpdate but... Maybe if you can get the angle difference between updates and set a condition that way...

But eugh

[short cloak]

to be honest we're going to need one to integrate a lot of these animations anyway

the existing ones don't need anything special but now we're adding things that vanilla animals don't do

i'm not sure how to integrate the walk animation either, vanilla animals only have two speeds

[limber plinth]

I'm just tired of leveraging on updates for stuff 😅

Do animals trigger on player move? If turning triggers it

[halcyon monolith]

i think a lot of people are too, at this point its a waiting game for updates rather than actually making the mod 😭

[brisk iris]

45 degree turn
Now it's just the 180 and all turns are done

I had to take some slight creative liberties with how they turn to make it end centered on the X and Y axis, I could technically animate it in place as if it was moving and use translation data to actually move it, but it's so damn difficult to do that lol
I can revisit them at some point to make them more accurate

[brisk iris]

180 degree turn, I think that should do!

Glad to have those out of the way

In terms of basic animations I think all the main ones are done. I'm gonna do the IdleToWalk/Trot now, I think those would look weird when interpolated by the engine, and they shouldn't take much work

[muted ridge]

Nice !

I haven't had the chance to try to get them in-game yesterday, didn't have time 😅

[short cloak]

i'm afraid i still don't know how to integrate any of these

scripting turning animations is going to be tough

walk animation will be fine but we'll need to work out what conditions would actually make a horse walk (vanilla animals only have two speeds)

[brisk iris]

Oh okay no worries! Worst case we could implement just walk and gallop for now, and add the others later, as well as turning later on

Is anyone already planning on doing the character animations or should I go for it?

Those should be a cake walk compared to the horse, so I can probably knock out the essential ones pretty quick

[muted ridge]

You can probably go for it

The main issue is linking these with the horse animations

I got no idea how that works

[short cloak]

it's easy

[muted ridge]

Good to know

[topaz meadow]

yeah that was the part we solved first to make sure it was even possible.

by We I mean Albion

[short cloak]

the only thing you might need to watch out for is the player's animation needs to match the length of the matching horse animation or it won't loop properly

for animations that have them directly interacting that would probably be the case anyway but just in case

[muted ridge]

I meant to sync animations

[topaz meadow]

it pretty much syncs the anims when the 'grapple' takes effect, the only thing to be mindful of is like Albion said to make sure they're the same length.

You could probably import a human rig into the horse walk/gallop animation and just animate in sync with the keyframes in blender.

[brisk iris]

Perfect yeah that's what I was planning on doing, I'll make sure they're the same length

I miss animating humans, this is gonna be fun

What position should I use, should I pull the human up on the Z axis to match the height of the horse, or pull the horse down?

[short cloak]

you should put the player up

[brisk iris]

Awesome will do

[narrow lynx]

I'm really looking forward to this mod, I hope it's out soon. Cheers and good work!

[brisk iris]

Do we have a saddle that we've confirmed to release with? So I can place the feet in the correct location for the stirrups

[muted ridge]

Someone made a saddle model I believe

[brisk iris]

Oh yeah @astral rover Did you get that saddle uploaded somewhere?

Do we know if the horse can wear clothes? Or are we gonna have to do the saddle as clothing on the player?

[topaz meadow]

We haven't proofed it-- but in theory animals should be able to wear articles of clothing if I'm not mistaken.

[short cloak]

yeah, hasn't been looked into, but probably possible

[brisk iris]

Yes or no on this one?

[muted ridge]

lol

I was not ready for that

[short cloak]

we need to work out some bullshit trigger for this animation that nobody will ever find

at the very least i want it in the files for the off chance somebody notices it

[brisk iris]

Haha I'll put it in the next pr 😂

[muted ridge]

hell yea

[astral rover]

Trello and did a push request on github

[muted ridge]

Yea don't put assets on the Trello I feel like

[brisk iris]

Hmm, what scales should I be using to match the positioning of the human and the horse? Importing the horse to the human rig and setting scale to 0.01 is still too large, and 0.001 is too small

[short cloak]

i think the horse has been observed to be too big in general

[brisk iris]

Ah okay, should I just eye-ball the scale using some references then? adjusting Z position of the human animations will be easy if we want to tweak it later

0.006 seems good

[astral rover]

can you pass the blend file so that there are no differences between us?

[brisk iris]

Sure thing! I'm making a clean .blend file that I will use as a base for all my human animations that has the horse and the saddle imported, I'll make a PR with that in a sec

[brisk iris]

https://github.com/demiurgeQuantified/HorseMod/pull/5

[astral rover]

danke

[astral rover]

The saddle on the file is backwards for some reason???

[brisk iris]

Oh that's weird, I had it flipped. I'll make a new file and see

[astral rover]

Still I got no idea how albion is going to add animations for getting on and off, closest thing would be actions but how would you determine from which side the player is getting on??

[muted ridge]

How are we handling player on horse with a different scaled animal ?

Since that should impact player's position on the horse ?

We can't have too much difference in height no ?

Also need to disable horse riding if it's a baby horse

[short cloak]

already done

they're a different animal anyway

[brisk iris]

Saddle up animation

I should make a bareback one as well right?

@astral rover It looks like the stirrup heights needs to be adjusted a bit, they hang a bit too low

[muted ridge]

Nice, figured it was smthg like that

[limber plinth]

I'm sure there case be horses this big, but damn lmao

I think everyone in PZ is technically 6'

[brisk iris]

Mount up bareback

[muted ridge]

Bro that's fucking insane 😭

That's so good jeez

Our job to move our ass to implement them in-game lol

I can't this week end sadly

[brisk iris]

Haha thanks! Feel good to animate humans again 😂

[mighty flower]

perfect

[silver holly]

I had to turn up my screen brightness and double take on this one ngl

You're doing miracle work this is absolutely amazing though!!! Your animations are so smooth and feel like they hold weight!

[brisk iris]

Thank you! I didn't think I'd enjoy 3d animation as much as I have tbh, new hobby unlocked 😄

[astral rover]

Dammit 😭

[astral rover]

and you just started animating and you're already so good man, incredible!

[limber plinth]

😩

[brisk iris]

Ah crap, didn't know you were working on it too 😩

[astral rover]

Your's is better tho, so no problem

[brisk iris]

Thank you! I've done motion graphics stuff for a while, I think that definitely has helped!

[astral rover]

Nice, guess you do a bit of everything now!,do you animate in ik or fk?

[brisk iris]

So I think I'm actually kind of using the rig wrong, but I like how it behaves. I have the rig set to FK, but then I enable Auto IK in the pose options. Paddlefruit told me not to, but it feels so good compared to just either of the options 😅 I just have to watch out to not over-rotate and keeping my shoulder and elbow keyframes in sync

But just for the arms, for the legs I use IK

[astral rover]

Its actually pretty useful, I used it a while too

[astral rover]

What do you think?

[brisk iris]

Looks great! Just need to fix that chicken dance arm 😂 Did you use constraints to match the movement?

[astral rover]

yeah, Im showing without constraints

[brisk iris]

Niiiice

Do you think you could do that one, the trot and walk? I can do the dismount, and I think those are the only ones left for a basic implementation

[astral rover]

yeah, im going to see about tomorrow tho

[brisk iris]

Polished the saddle up and bareback mount a bit, I think those are good to go now

[brisk iris]

Alrigthy, PR has been created for those. Tomorrow I'll do the dismount

@short cloak @muted ridge Since you are the main ones doing the implementation in-game, would you mind checking the remaining horse animations on the trello card when you have time and let me know if any of them are essential for getting a basic implementation done?

[silver holly]

Have you done:
Horse being called/summoned
Horse eating
Horse death?

I THINK those are essential(?) then again I wasn't asked sorry lmao

[limber plinth]

I think and idle graze is good

not sure what you mean my call/summon unless you mean the rider doing something

[silver holly]

I mean yeah probably a whistle animation for the player would be good o: I wasnt sure what summoning was gonna look like, or if it's just gonna be galloping from a certain distance

[topaz meadow]

These are so fluid dude-- incredible work.

[astral rover]

right??

[muted ridge]

When you shout and the animal likes you, it comes towards you

[brisk iris]

Makes sense! I'll do eating (fed and grazing), death, and a little whistle animation for the player

[muted ridge]

Not sure about that whistle animation

It'd involve something completely different, basically adding a whole new shouting method which I'm not even sure can be modded in

It's definitely not essential

Also there was someone who did a death animation already

I can't search for it rn, but if you scroll up you should find it I think

[brisk iris]

Oh wait is the shout used to call the horse? I don't know anything about how the animals actually work lol

[brisk iris]

I'll take a look and see, thanks, was not looking forward to watching a bunch of horses dying lol

[muted ridge]

Yes, you can see it in my clips when I implemented theur animations translation data

I maxed their trust and they came to me when shooting

[brisk iris]

Oooooh, well then let's just keep that, much easier

I'll add a petting animation too, I'm guessing you increase trust by feeding and petting? Or just feeding?

[muted ridge]

No idea lol

Maybe the wiki page about animals

[carmine kelp]

https://pzwiki.net/wiki/Animal

PZwiki

Animal

Animals with their own AI that wander the landscape are included in Build 42. The first iteration of animals are not utilizing Lemmy's AI code, and instead have very basic functionality. These animals are intended to support the new crafting features added in Build 42, therefore mostly only include animals utilized in animal husbandry, such as cows, sheep, pigs and chickens, providing a renewable source of milk, hide, wool, etc.

[limber plinth]

Didn't they add whistle items in game?

There might be a vanilla animation

[short cloak]

when you yell with a whistle equipped your character blows the whistle

[muted ridge]

Tho that could be a good thing to loon at to be able to wisttle

[astral rover]

I updated the saddle to fit correctly with the player now, I manually weighted some of it so you'll have to transfer weights, or we would need to use a new rig that can control the stirrups, its on trello

[silver holly]

Ohhh I totally forgot. Might be worth it to check and make sure it fits in with the frames of the other animations?

[silver holly]

Oh!

[muted ridge]

Yea check some clips of them walking I sent

I shout so they come to me

[brisk iris]

Saddle dismount, not 100% satisfied with it, but I can always go back and polish later

Low-key wanna go horse riding now, I've been watching so many instructional videos for reference footage that I feel I've actually learned some stuff, and it looks fun lol

[muted ridge]

That movement to the front looks weird I feel like

7 to 8 seconds

[brisk iris]

Yeah I agree, I'm gonna try to polish it a bit, or find another type of dismount to reference

I think if I just make the dip part a bit slower it'll work

Ah fuck it, I'll make a new one

[brisk iris]

This isn't fully done, but gonna do a dismount like this instead

[limber plinth]

The strap footing is super satisfying

[brisk iris]

Polished it a bit more and made the end position aligned on X axis

[silver holly]

I may be really biased here but

I cant recommend it enough - Whether you just do a trail ride or start doing some lessons it's really such an amazing experience

[agile shoal]

Id like to ride a horse myself for sure

Again every time I pop by im blown away, amazing work as always Alex

[brisk iris]

I definitely should, I know they do horse rides on the beach down south here in Portugal, and it looks really nice 😄
Last time I tried I was like 10 and we were riding in the woods, but my saddle started sliding to the side so I was struggling so hard not to fall off and I think it put me off for a looong time

[brisk iris]

So 42.8 is out, and it has this:

• Changed how animals become domesticated (aka "not wild"):
• Before, it was when the animal was put in a designated zone.
• Now it becomes domesticated when picked up.

Is it relevant for us? Does attaching a rope to an animal count as being "picked up"?

[short cloak]

there must be some method since there are vanilla animals that can't be picked up

[hidden lark]

If you end riding irl, it is not recommended to dismount with your foot still in the stirrup 🙈 if the horse starts moving it's easy to lose balance and you'll be dragged by your foot unless you have a quick-release stirrup.

Thank you everyone for this awesome work ❤️

[thin crescent]

Would be funny if there was a horse riding skill and this is how you dismount at a low level. Rng chance of the horse moving and breaking your leg.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/emojis/718071523013034125.gif?size=48

[hidden lark]

https://tenor.com/view/kermit-worried-oh-no-anxious-gif-11565777

[brisk iris]

Oh that's a good point, didn't think about that! I tried doing that other type of dismount where you kinda lean over the horse, release the foot and then slide down, but it was hard to make it look smooth and natural while also not taking too long.
Maybe there's a third type of dismount that could be easily animated and also is pretty fast and safe

[hidden lark]

That's the correct way, just release both feet and slide down ^^

[brisk iris]

That makes sense, but I think this is one of those times where it might be best to compromise a bit on the realism in favor of gameplay. The slide down animation would have to be ~4s to look good and that would probably end up feeling annoying in the long run

[hidden lark]

I 100% agree. I was more concerned about you possibly hurting yourself irl (I noticed that you might want to ride again at some point :D)

[brisk iris]

Ooooh yeah, I see now in your first message that you said "if you end up riding irl", I missed that on the first read 😅

[north ferry]

Would be cool if horse riding skills were effected by your animal care skill level, I couldn't tell you how that'd work though lol

animal care is also probably a little too easy to grind for that to be a good idea

I recall another modder making a driving skill mod, though./

[silver holly]

Weve been trying to think of a way to do rider levels, possibly incorporating a skill or a job like
Horsemanship
Jockey
Bareback
That can be leveled up, if somehow we can create a system so that lower level=higher chance of being bucked off and vice versa - that would be great

It would be even better if we could tie in bonding/breaking so if the horse is more bonded to you/broken by you the less chance it'll buck you

[hidden lark]

If I may suggest, you could boil it down to two skills

• Groundwork skill: makes the specific horse trust you/bond and raises horses stats (if those are included)
• Riding skill: character specific leveling (idk what it would include, but probably some cardio related things)

[agile shoal]

Id argue that all we would need is Riding, and the Groundwork could just be incorporated into Animal Care but either works really

Occams Razor my beloved

[silver holly]

Hell yeah

[brisk iris]

Is there hitching in the game already? I haven't done any stuff with animals in PZ yet, so not sure if you can already rope them and tie them somewhere. If not, we should see if we could add that so you can hitch your horse to a fence or light pole when you go looting so it doesn't wander off

[silver holly]

That's so smart

I don't know if it is

[mighty flower]

• Harmonica and Whistles are now visible when blown.
  They added that you could see the harmonica and the whistle.
  Couldn't that be used, to avoid making a specific call animation.

I think you can use a rope to tie them up and move them wherever you want, but I don't think you can tie them to some place like a fence or pole.

[brisk iris]

Replacing the animation and adding a sound wouldn't be that tricky, as long as a custom animset can still trigger the actual code that makes the animal move to the player when shouting/blowing whistle

[brisk iris]

I'm gonna play around a bit and see what's possible, if there's already a way to tie an animal somewhere, then adding a check to that action to see if you are near a specific object/tile would be easy

[brisk iris]

Oh hell yeah, there's already a full on hitching system in-game already, we can easily just add more allowed objects

[brisk iris]

Almost done with the bareback dismount

[north ferry]

So what will actually happen if you crash or get too close to zombies while riding?

[silver holly]

Hell fucking ueah

[silver holly]

Double hell yeah

[muted ridge]

That's better !

[muted ridge]

Yoooo that's cool

[muted ridge]

Zombies will drag you down, that's the idea

Tho with how the system works, it might be hard to change zombies attack system

[north ferry]

These things are not gonna be very useful on sprinter runs lol

https://tenor.com/view/seinfeld-not-that-theres-anything-wrong-with-that-gif-10732604

[silver holly]

I'm imagining that people who wanna play with this mod won't wanna have sprinters lol

[north ferry]

In my 400~ hours of PZ so far I have yet to try sprinters, but my personal vibe of them in this game feels like it completely throws what I like about PZ out the window

With fast shamblers you can not only survive eventually, but thrive, you have more time to get better and just start to create yourself a nice place to live and enjoy, which would be great for getting horses now to enjoy survival even more.

But with sprinters, I don't know, I guess I would guess they make survival much more intense, like you're constantly surviving by the skin of your teeth, there's isn't as much time to enjoy the fun things because you're constantly more desparate

[mighty flower]

No zombies (that scares me) > sprinters

[silver holly]

Project stardew valley

[north ferry]

my dumbass will still get killed by my own bull goring me or crashing my car or some shit

[mighty flower]

I think that's why they play them, the tension, the difficulty, alteration, anxiety, freneticism, my friends like strong emotions and cardiac arrest, although I do not judge them that feeling I get to experience with other games, and it is usually addictive, but honestly I do not end up enjoying if I have to be aware that if I get 3 zombies and I do not have a fence or a small obstacle jump is practically assured death.
Although the same, nuts this big those who play like this: 🖐️ 🖐️

By the way, something I wanted to suggest was that in low levels of Riding, if you made those braking movements with the horse, you would fly off or fall off the horse, since you are inexperienced.

[silver holly]

Kinda like I was saying, it would be great if
Low level=Getting bucked off
High level=No bucking
But we're all sorta flying blind here I think

[mighty flower]

And as someone else said, that a high level would make the horse less tired and make the horse run slightly faster

[agile shoal]

Is that how that works irl tho?

[mighty flower]

An inexperienced person does not know how to bring out the true potential of a horse, except for a true rider, who seems to be one with the horse.
Anyway it is a suggestion, or they can make the speed vary depending on the breed, as it happens with the animals that are currently, that each breed has something to take advantage of more than the others.

[silver holly]

It's really gonna depend on the horse, whether or not it's broke. Figure it's gonna be harder to vary stats of horses, so it being dependant on the player stats seems more doable. Correct me if I'm wrong tho!
Also if you're not a good rider, there is a legit higher chance of falling off

[topaz meadow]

Generally I imagine it’s a lot like grappling sports; you just start to understand what the horse is going to do before it does it via body language and simple plain experience. And that translates to better handling; less falling off, etc.

Anyway skills and things like that maybe come later?

[brisk iris]

So I was working on a different mod that has custom animations and I was having this issue with it.
It made me realize maybe I'll have the same issue with the rider animations since I use the same rig and unfortunately it seems so.

[muted ridge]

I remember something like that

[brisk iris]

You can see here that when I go from idle to saddle up it changes the position of the player to be under the floor

[muted ridge]

@topaz meadow does that remind you of something by any chance ?

I feel like I've seen that since B42 unstable

[muted ridge]

Perhaps the scale ?

Make sure to export with 0.01 scale

[brisk iris]

Oh I thought 0.01 scale was for zombies only, but maybe I'm confusing instructions for the other rig or something, let me try and see

[muted ridge]

I mean it is for zombies, where issues usually appear

But who knows, maybe it can cause such issues too ?

[topaz meadow]

Change the blend time in the xml maybe? This is just the interpolation between changing poses it looks like.

[brisk iris]

Unfortunately doesn't seem to solve the issue

[brisk iris]

Yeah if I change blend time to 0 to remove the blend then it instantly transitions to the animation and ends up correct, but the weird part is that if I make an animation using the old mystery's rig then it doesn't have this same issue.

[topaz meadow]

Having the blend time 0 is fine tbh

Probably either something to do with scale size or maybe just the skeletons position relative to ingame idle

[brisk iris]

Yeah I've spent all day trying different export methods, with different rotations and scales and stuff, but it's just not budging lol

We could always do blend 0 into a custom animation that is animated to look like a transition that then goes into the saddle up. There's ways around it, just wanted to check first if someone knew a fix

[silver holly]

That looks so crazy smooth omg glitch aside

[agile shoal]

Absolutely

[astral rover]

Something is off with bone rotations maybe? Could be that zomboid uses different axis too no? or try baking the transforms to the fk normal zomboid bones, that could work

[astral rover]

I don't really know much about zomboid animation (I couldn't even get it to work lol) so I would recommend you check out Lifestyle:Hobbies it has so many different interactions between player and custom anims and actions!

[brisk iris]

Yeah I'm not sure, I've been trying different rotation settings on different objects, and tried messing with the animsets and stuff, and that little rotation thing just won't go away.
The thing that is so weird to me is that it only happens during the blending between the vanilla and the custom animation, once the blending stops everything plays fine.
And if I use a different rig it works, so it feels like there's just some quirky PZ thing that is messing things up

[astral rover]

There are plenty "quirky" pz things sadly

[brisk iris]

Oh absolutely 😂

[brisk iris]

Okay I think I have all the mount/dismount animations done, for saddle and without, I will make a PR with those.
I saw that there is a death animation and I feel it works for now, I can make a new one pretty quickly later on.
I can make a quick idle grazing and eating from hand animation for the horse, and a feeding animation for the player.
After that, I don't think there's any other crucial ones right? Except the riding ones, but I believe @astral rover were working on those?

I can help out with the animset xml stuff as well if needed, just let me know

[astral rover]

Where should I publish it?

[muted ridge]

The repo

[astral rover]

Should I keep not using Nla Strips and All actions when exporting? animation name's don't export outside the scene!

[muted ridge]

Not sure what you mean

[astral rover]

Im exporting just the animation that is used in scene, when you re-import it into pz it'll not be the same as export, so I'm a bit confused on how you'll handle this, same with DEF and CTRL bones for the Bip01 rig

[agile shoal]

It's probably best to just use the NLA method, but whatever works works!

I'm not entirely sure what you mean though

[topaz meadow]

The name of the animation action in the NLA strip is used by zomboid to find the action name as referenced in the xml.

[brisk iris]

You should use NLA strip and have it selected, and have all actions disabled in export settings, that's what works for me

[silver holly]

i'm really sorry, only a month later am i getting to sit down at my desk and check it out - only to realize it's already got a texture! i'm so far behind. thank you so much

[agile shoal]

Nah we're all busy with stuff!

Id say that the progress made is still very good anyway though, especially thanks to Alex!

We still need to figure out where that translation data bug is coming from though

Is it affecting the horse as well, or is it ONLY affecting the player?

[brisk iris]

I think because the horse only has custom animations there shouldn't be an issue, that bug only comes up when transitioning between vanilla and custom animations

It almost feels like the animation is exported with two conflicting sets of translation data. Because if I don't animate the translation data, and I don't select the object when exporting then it still somehow ends up with the player moving forward, even during an idle state.

I can run some more tests today and compare animations exported using your rig with animations exported with mystery's rig

[brisk iris]

There definitely are some big differences, for example the mystery rig exports with the dummy01 parent at 90 X rot, bip01 -90 X rot, translation_data 0 X rot.

Yours exports with the bip01 and translation_data not being wrapped by a parent dummy01, and both bip01 and translation_data has 90 X rot.

The scale is also differing, the mystery rig export is 100x bigger scale

[muted ridge]

So if I understood right, PZ animations are flawed by default and won't allow us to use proper animation rigs, limiting us to some specific bone orientations ?

[agile shoal]

I dont think thats the casr

It really does feel like theres just one small detail we are missing herr

I dont think its the scale

[agile shoal]

When we exported with the dummy01 the game simply didnt read the animation data, but i think with mystery's it might? Its all so weird

[agile shoal]

You could try setting the dummy01 transform to have a rotation of 90 on the x axis and see if that changes anything even if you don;t export the dummy01 object. Maybe its something to do with some parent-child relation shenanigans?

The CTRL-TranslationData bone is actually parented directly to the Dummy01 object so that may be it

[brisk iris]

interesting... I will play around with that

[topaz meadow]

Yeah there's a lot of 'unknowns' with what PZ 'expects' from the rig for animations; so some experimenting was kind of required but Paddle and I mainly focused on the translation data aspect when getting the rig to work.

And as he mentioned, for reasons beyond our understanding when parenting everything under dummy01 the translation data simply failed to properly be read.

[brisk iris]

This unfortunately didn't work, the dummy01 already had a rotation of 90 in the file, so setting it to 0 caused the model to end up laying down, and rotating the bip01 back made the rotation glitch happen again

Is there some constraint forcing the bip01 to have a 90 degree X rotation offset from dummy01?

[brisk iris]

It really is an odd game to work with sometimes, lots of little quirks and no documentation

[halcyon monolith]

can you replicate this issue at a smaller scale? I might be able to do some testing

[brisk iris]

Should I publish the mod I'm testing with that is super minimal? All it does is player:setVariable("TestMod", true) on game start, and then there's an XML that replaces the default idle animation with Bob_TPose while this condition is true

So you can export any animation and just name it that, and it will play when you'r ein idle state

[halcyon monolith]

yes, the more minimal is easier to setup and diagnose

[brisk iris]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3492635963
Give this one a try

[agile shoal]

Thats a phenomenal idea, we should all get together and make an animation debuging mod

[limber plinth]

Ooh toss it in the community debug tools :0

I promise I'll give those more love this summer

[fathom rose]

hey guyss havent been here in a while

just came here to say hi and post this

wait not that

[agile shoal]

So skilled!

[silver holly]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.horseracingnation.com/news/Happy_new_year_but_why_is_it_also_happy_birthday_for_horses_123

[silver holly]

Just wanna take a second to say again
Thank you everyone for playing apart of this 🥺 Literally couldn't have happened without so many helping hands

[north ferry]

On this topic do you still want/need any ref videos for horse movements?

[topaz meadow]

I think Alex has managed to nail all the animations necessarry. Now it's just a matter of finalizing and implementation for most things iirc.

[muted ridge]

We got a bunch already but thx

[silver holly]

What they said lol

But thank you!

[charred leaf]

Just another little reminder that if financial support is required along any step of the way you have our full support!

Ya'll are doing some amazing work. So rad to see a team working so cohesively. 💜

[brisk iris]

Do we know exactly what's left to do for an MVP implementation?
Just getting the animsets working?

[muted ridge]

I haven't followed the project in the past week or two so I'm not aware of what's to do rn

[hexed pendant]

Model Peener

[agile shoal]

🤨

[limber plinth]

@sacred quail Saw your announcement regarding horses - thought you may enjoy this project + maybe be able to get those two modders involved. ❤️

[sacred quail]

Ours is B41 related. It's a clothing item with some specific stats and requirements to work

I wish we would have one for B42 but so far I like seeing the progress here

[limber plinth]

I figured the two groups could pick eachothers brains

[sacred quail]

@stoic sky

[limber plinth]

Especially about animations

[sacred quail]

he's the modder guy

I just type :p

[stoic sky]

Yeah as said above, I don't think there's a whole lot of overlap.
Our project has no custom animations. It's merely a clothing piece that hides the bottom half of the player's body and has the horse's legs rigged to the player leg bones.

I'd gladly give animations, but there's none 😅 It just uses the default player animations.

[limber plinth]

That's an interesting compromise 😭

[stoic sky]

Eh, not ideal. Agree on that. But it looks decent enough for what it's supposed to portray 😅

[limber plinth]

I think the bike mod is an item too

[brisk iris]

It is yeah, but it sets a variable that triggers custom animations. From the sound of it, Aerx mod uses the existing player animations to move the legs of a horse? I haven't seen the announcement that was mentioned so not sure exactly what's going on haha

[topaz meadow]

That is correct yep. It’s just a clothing item with the horses legs weighted to the players own animations and rig.

[silver holly]

Centaur mod?

[worn tree]

just thinking of this mod again and hope you all are doing well!!

[brisk iris]

Hey gang! Is it written somewhere how we're implementing the riding? I remember that basically the player decides what animations the horse play, but how do we start that relationship? By grappling?
If I can get all the information we have about how that all works then I could start playing around with the XMLs and stuff to get a basic version working

[muted ridge]

I believe @short cloak has the code to start riding implemented already ?

[brisk iris]

Oh really? 😮 I'm gonna go through the code then and see

Was gonna play around a bit, but they're meatballing 😬

I'm on the animation-integration branch

[muted ridge]

uh...

[short cloak]

did you enable the mod on the main menu and then restart the game?

[brisk iris]

Sure didn't! Thanks!

[silver holly]

Did that work? 😄

[brisk iris]

It did yeah!

[silver holly]

OMG! If you get time, would you send a video?

[brisk iris]

Oh I meant just the meatball issue was fixed 😅 I didn't end up having time to play with the mounting, but hopefully next week after I come back from a trip I'll have time to play around!

[warm sapphire]

Hey guys, I'm new to modding and just wanna help out. I can do some animations if needed, or model something like a wagon made from old car parts and wood. I'm also up for trying something bigger if needed. I don't know how to code and stuff like that.
Let me know if i can be useful, Thanks

[jade knoll]

hi guys, I'm love your mod, and i want ask an one question:
will be there a combat on horse? ( lances, melee and ranged )

[muted ridge]

We hope so

There hasn't been much work lately, lack of motivation or being too occupied I think are the reasons

We're close tho

Just need to get horse riding I believe ?

[jade knoll]

yup

other mechanics is optional for you, you are doing a great and hard project

hope you will made it to release

[astral rover]

Im honestly just waiting for all animation presets to be combined into one, so there are no more bone parent issues... And I guess you guys are waiting for a game update to properly implement it.

[muted ridge]

Uh

Wdym we're waiting for an update ? And wdym combine animations ?

[silver holly]

I think eventually a cart would be cool but for right now we're just trying to get things working with the horse and player

I wish I knew how to implement and code

[astral rover]

Yeah, its pretty much the hardest part about making a zomboid mod, that and getting everyone to align properly with its quirks...

[silver holly]

We're definitely in a tricky spot.
I'm confident it'll eventually get figured out 🙂 Everyone's been brilliant so far

Besides there's no rush!

[warm sapphire]

Hi guys, how are you?
Can I download some files from Github and try to make some animations?

[muted ridge]

Feel free to help :)

@short cloak did you put a license on the repo perhaps ?

If not, should we ?

[short cloak]

i don't think there's a license right now

[warm sapphire]

Ok, nice 😉 I’ll try to do something soon.
A couple of quick questions since I don’t have time to read all the messages XD
The Google Sheet Animation doesn’t seem updated, should I refer to Trello and github instead?
Should I do the animations using the file with the saddle, or is the one without fine too?
Would it be interesting to implement jumping over fences or is that not possible with the engine? If it's possible I would like to start from this

More questions soon, sorry in advance ;D

[muted ridge]

Idk about the fence jumping

[astral rover]

basically we are missing a common file with every anim and prop rigged, that's why there hasn't been more animations, also, when importing it, sometimes scale is off or something else

[brisk iris]

I think we decided on having each animation in a separate .blend right? So it's easier to work on them together, instead of having one .blend with all animations that needs to be maintained.
Right now all the basic animations needed should be on github I'm pretty sure, but when I checked last time it seems the code and animations were a bit fragmented across different branches, so I think the master branch needs to be updated with the latest animations, and all the code from the test branches

[brisk iris]

Yeah trello and github are up to date for animations

[silver holly]

Hope everyone is well and taking care of themselves in this heat ❤️

[agile shoal]

Heya!

Im sorry that things have been stagnant here, Ive been spending time on my own life and portfolio

Hope you guys have been well!

[muted ridge]

There's a lack of motivation I think sadly

Also everyone tend to have their own projects on the side

[agile shoal]

Ive just got a lot on my plate atm

[limber plinth]

The beauty of this is it is here for anyone to pick up, and always waiting 🙂

[brisk iris]

I might try to take another crack at it when I finish my current mod. Would be cool to get it working, and I see people asking about horses like almost daily on the subreddit lol

[topaz meadow]

Yeah I've sadly had my hands pretty much full making some custom work for my server so I haven't had a lot of time to do free-time projects

[agile shoal]

Im really wanting to secure an internship outside of the states so im focusing my efforts there

[brisk iris]

Ladies, gentlemen, others, we have a yee-haw

[muted ridge]

Lol the translation data is so wrong tho

Is that the last walking animation we had of the horse ?

I remember I had used other ones when making them walk with translation data

Tho they weren't walking in these I guess, they were going a tiny bit faster (don't know the words for it)

[brisk iris]

Haha yeah the translation data is fucked, I'm still messing with the animations and stuff

I also scaled the horse down, but I for sure did it wrong because the idle animation got fucked up and the blender file looks like this, so someone will have to scale it down properly 😄

[muted ridge]

Don't scale it in Blender

Scale it in game

Unless you did need to scale it in Blender ?

[muted ridge]

Looks like you didn't scale the skeleton alongside the model tho

[brisk iris]

I tried doing it by adding scale to the horse model script but nothing changed so I did it quick and dirty for now

[brisk iris]

Whenever I tried doing that it just wouldn't work, it would make the model skinnier and skinnier without scaling it down

I was mostly just trying to get the movement and animations synced

[muted ridge]

Bcs you need to scale in the animal definition file

Not in the scripts either

Basically if I remember right, animals can have a range of scale

And albion had mentioned the values were probably too high

So it's in the Lua

[brisk iris]

Ooooh I see okay, I'll look into that

[brisk iris]

It's pretty damn fun to gallop around I must say
Gonna keep tweaking the speed values a bit and then try to get the transition animations + turning working

[brisk iris]

This was completely correct btw, there's a minSize/maxSize in the horse definitions.
I think I should be able to compensate for that pretty easily, the way I put the character on the horse is by matching it's XYZ coords, so I could check the size of the horse when mounting and then offset accordingly so it matches

[topaz meadow]

Beautiful to see this coming closer to life!

[muted ridge]

It's coming along !

Oh damn this already looks pretty good !

[brisk iris]

Got some transitions in as well! And realized that fighting/shooting from horseback will be a breeze to implement, just needs new animations

Can control the direction of the horse independently from the direction where I am aiming

[topaz meadow]

Oh yeah it’s all coming together.

[muted ridge]

Lol there's still that goofy braking animation of the horse lol

But it already looks pretty nice !

[dreamy prawn]

Yeah it went from tech demo to alpha

[muted ridge]

I think the translation data of the walking animation is still a bit off, but I think it's also mostly the animation having issues

[brisk iris]

Yeah it needs some tweaks still for most animations

But at least they're not gonna be difficult to implement which is nice

[muted ridge]

Yea !

Also how is the placement of the player on the horse based on the size of the horse ?

Does it automatically vary ?

[short cloak]

so are we not even using grappletech anymore?

[muted ridge]

Isn't it grapple tech ?

[short cloak]

i see you're able to shove during it which i'm pretty sure releases grapples

people were asking for attacking on horseback and i kept saying it was impossible 😅

[muted ridge]

👀

[brisk iris]

Honestly I just didn't know how to get it working with grappling, so I used some stuff I had from my bike and auto walk mod and went through all the animal stuff I could find

[topaz meadow]

I suppose the issue is then— can we still sync the player animations to the horse animations doing this with your method?

[muted ridge]

With grapple tech I suppose yes

[brisk iris]

So it basically just overrides the horses pathfinding, but still sets bPathfind to true which makes it have locomotion when setting a new coordinate for it, making it run smoothly between two coordinates

[muted ridge]

Or at least better than currently

[muted ridge]

👀

[brisk iris]

So I tell it not to move on its own, and then just update X, Y coordinates based on movement key inputs

[muted ridge]

This sounds very interesting

Wait that's really cool, you can control animals with Lua ?

Compared to the dogshit zombie method where you can barely do that without issues ?

[brisk iris]

Yeah there's a lot of stuff that can be done with Lua from what I found

[muted ridge]

Amazing

[short cloak]

animals have been explicitly designed to be moddable

[muted ridge]

Wait so we can make hostile animals

[short cloak]

(which makes the couple major modding issues they do have going ignored really bizarre 😅)

[brisk iris]

I have the player basically just glued to the horse, and make it face the same direction when movement keys are used, but if aim is used the player can face a different direction

[muted ridge]

:>

Let's hope they rework the zombie AI one day to be as moddable

[short cloak]

i guess anything is possible

[muted ridge]

So much potential with that

[brisk iris]

I've realized through this that I can make a sidecart for my bike and put chickens/racoons in it, for adventures

[muted ridge]

[muted ridge]

@silver holly you need to see this

[topaz meadow]

Very nice. What’s the outlook on the player having riding animations? Or are they stuck in the static posture?

[brisk iris]

No it will be very possible, it essentially still moves the player even though they're stuck, so if I walk with the horse the player walk state is also active, same with idle/running.
The player also triggers some state that the horse doesn't, like turning. So using the player state I can also set some variables for the horse to switch between different transitions, making it match the turning for example. And in the horse XMLs I can set variables that can be picked up and trigger animations on the player. So it's very flexible

Best part is that with this method, the horse just has two states, idle and pathfinding. So whatever movement I toss in there with the right conditions will trigger

[topaz meadow]

Oh man that’s awesome.

[brisk iris]

And I can easily adjust for the different sizes of horses without changing animation since I just glue the player on using XYZ, so if it detects a big horse, just offset Z a bit

[muted ridge]

Wait you can offset by Z the player ?

[brisk iris]

Let me test actually, I never tried it but assumed it would

Jesus christ

hahaha

wait

I mean, kinda? 😂

[muted ridge]

Yea no you can't

Bcs you're tping around

[brisk iris]

Dang okay, I will think of something

[muted ridge]

I mean unless you stop the falling state of the player

No idea how you'd do that tho

[silver holly]

AAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!

[muted ridge]

https://tenor.com/view/walter-white-let-him-cook-cook-cooking-breaking-bad-gif-27522167

[silver holly]

Seriously omg @brisk iris absolutely amazing work 🤠

[silver holly]

Good luck!

[agile shoal]

Whoa! Fuck yeah guys!

[brisk iris]

I think even with that I can't get it to just visually offset, it will end up on a different z level

[muted ridge]

Yea I think it'll look weird

[brisk iris]

Maybe I'll just do like 3 different versions of each mount/mounted/dismount animation at slightly varying heights, and we just cycle them depending on the size of the horse.

[muted ridge]

What about grapple tech ?

[brisk iris]

I guess I could give it another go, just not sure how to make it work. I tried a bunch of different stuff and couldn't get the animations/movements to sync

Even then, maybe it's worth keeping what I have if it allows for horseback shooting/fighting? If the only drawback is having to make a few duplicate animations I'm okay with that

[short cloak]

yeah this seems preferable imo

[muted ridge]

Yea but at least explore the gapple tech to see if it's possible to do it ?

[brisk iris]

That's true yeah, I could play with it more and see if I can get the best of both

[short cloak]

it doesn't surprise me the previous implementation stopped working, the api for grappletech changes a lot

TIS barely uses it at all currently so they don't really have to worry about breaking anything

[eternal briar]

so is this on the git yet or?

[brisk iris]

Not yet no, I wanted to clean it up a bit and put in a few more animations, but I can push tonight

I just can't find my idle to gallop animation, but I remember making one

Fuck yeah found it

[brisk iris]

It's starting to feel pretty good, still some tweaking to be done though

Gonna make the player animation

[muted ridge]

Really nice yea

[thin crescent]

the run looks fantastic. the walk anim is also really good but it does have a bit of a "walking in place" look to it. not quite sure how to explain it any other way

[brisk iris]

Yeah I know exactly what you mean, I need to either slow down the walk speed or speed up the animation to make it match, I'm leaning towards speeding up the animation and also speeding up the walk speed a bit. It's slower than regular human walking currently

Also some turn animations will smoothen it out some more

[thin crescent]

super happy to see work being done on it again. I'm excited to eventually get my hands on it

[brisk iris]

We should probably agree on what an MVP for release looks like.
All the basic animations except for some when the player bobs up and down are done and almost fully implemented.
I haven't looked very deep into the feeding, animal zones, breeding, and other crucial animal related systems, but I think the trello has everything we need written down

[thin crescent]

I think everyone can agree that the only release blocker would be adding honse.

[short cloak]

i genuinely have no clue how animals actually work lOL

i've only gotten to play with them briefly so i have no idea if the horse is 90% done or 10% done animal gameplay wise

[brisk iris]

Lmao yeah I hope that the animal system handles most things automatically as long as the animal definition is set up

[brisk iris]

Tweaked the walk a bit so it feels less floaty, but I pretty much have to do it by making the movement more realistic which doesn't feel super great because it makes the screen kind of stop and go a bit with the movement.
I'll play with it some more

[thin crescent]

the camera thing is a little meh but that does look better. I think what is causeing the anim to look walking in place like to me is the fron legs are lifting too high. It gives a very exagerated look. like so https://tenor.com/view/immersiva-stationary-walk-march-on-site-gif-19984717

human but you get my point

where as something like this seems more natural

very minor thing so more of a nit pick than anything

[brisk iris]

Ah yeah good spot, I'll tweak that a bit and see how it looks

No I appreciate the input, it helps a lot

[thin crescent]

[brisk iris]

I think the reference I used was more for like a "show" type of walk rather than more natural like this

[thin crescent]

I can totally see that now that you say it.

a sort of trot

https://tenor.com/view/galloping-charlotte-dujardin-olympics-horse-riding-equestrian-dressage-gif-22640723

[muted ridge]

The interpolation is not straight for the translation data movement

Also there needs to be vertical movement of the horse too

[thin crescent]

honestly this mod would be so much easier if you went the uma musume route https://tenor.com/view/uma-musume-cheval-grand-anime-pretty-derby-horse-girl-gif-8072015020563260536

[brisk iris]

Yeah when I had it straight was when it would look floaty because the movement i referenced had the horse kind of stop and go like in the gif above which doesn't match a linear speed

So im gonna tweak the legs instead so it works better for a linear motion

[muted ridge]

Hmm

[brisk iris]

The movment is kinda like if it was walking with a limp, but that doesn't feel good when riding it

[muted ridge]

A horse moves at a constant speed tho no ?

When walking

[brisk iris]

Yeah it's just the reference I used had it doing some weird stuff

[muted ridge]

👌

[brisk iris]

I've also been trying to attach clothes to the horse, so far unsuccessfully, but I made an attachment slot that shows up in the attachment editor, so I think it might work somehow

Would be dope to actually attach the saddle to it, as well as saddle bags, gun holster etc.

[muted ridge]

0_0

Definitely yea

[restive steppe]

Man seeing all the progress for this mod is making me super excited for it

[brisk iris]

Added a trot toggle on C, so while walking you can either walk slowly, or press C and trot

[topaz meadow]

Crazy good work.

[brisk iris]

Seems the animal system takes care of most stuff automatically. I was able to give it a diet, so I can feed it vegetables/fruits/animal feed, and the hunger gets satiated. It won't eat grass though, it goes to a patch when hungry and enters the eat state but doesn't actually consume any grass.
Gonna look into that

Need to figure out a nice way to animate the mounting, this is what I currently have.
It basically needs the player to be inside the horse and facing the same direction before playing the animation for it to sync up well, but as you can see that looks a bit janky

[muted ridge]

Make the player walk to a set position around the horse like cars

Remove blending I'd say maybe so the player starts at the position around the horse in the animation, offset from the center of animation space which is its position when starting ?

Idk if that's clear or not

You can also force the player to be looking at a specific direction

[brisk iris]

Yeah I get what you mean, I'm gonna play with it some more

[limber plinth]

No sure if this is what you mean- but cars hide the actual player and have its own model inside assigned the players visual

[muted ridge]

no

[limber plinth]

Such a thing could occur right before the player sits but after they leap up

[muted ridge]

The comparison to cars is only the part where the player walks to the door that's it

[limber plinth]

Ok

[brisk iris]

It just needed an eating animset, all good on this end now

[brisk iris]

This kinda works, I just need to make it so after path finding to the horse it teleports into the center of it (only way to sync the animation position properly) and immediately starts the animation with no blend I think will be best. Gonna play around with it

I'm gonna try playing with changing the animation as well to have it walk up to the horse in the animation after path finding to it

[muted ridge]

Ah yea

How about

How about having the translation data do it

It sounds scuffed but eh

And tbf if there's a tiny tp animation it's fine

Vehicles already do that

[brisk iris]

I got it working pretty okay, there's a visual glitch when going from mounting animation to mounted because it throws a quick idle in there which triggers the rotation issue with the rig that was discussed a while ago (I have a workaround for this), and there's a tp that makes it look a little janky, but overall not too bad

But I will try to play with the animation itself later to see if I can remove the need for the tp

[coarse tinsel]

@brisk iris Got the model? Mind if I try to texture the horse?

[brisk iris]

Go for it! More textures are always welcome!
This is the latest model afaik https://github.com/demiurgeQuantified/HorseMod/blob/main/Contents/mods/HorseMod/common/media/models_X/HorseMod/Horse.fbx same one I'm working with

Fun fact, if the horse is hungry it will override my movement inputs and go eat grass lmao

I didn't even try to do that, but maybe we should keep it? We can have it still take input if stress level is above X, so you don't have a horse stopping to eat grass in the middle of a horde, but if you're out and about and things are calm and it gets hungry, it will eat no matter what

A little janky still, but I'm gonna leave it here and work on some other stuff

[muted ridge]

You make the player walk on the exact position of the horse

While you should make the player walk to its side

[brisk iris]

Yeah I was able to make the player walk to the side and face it and everything, but the issue is that the animation requires the player to be inside the horse and facing the same direction as the horse for it to line up properly, and I just don't have the energy to mess with the animation to get it perfect right now

I just want to get broad strokes and then polish can come later

I desperately want to figure out if I can attach stuff, so that will be next

[agile shoal]

Youre doing fantastic work my man

Im so happy this project is still kicking

[brisk iris]

Attaching clothing is a thing! Didn't know, but apparently all vanilla animals comes with bowtie and head_hat attachment slots lol

Just need to figure out how to get custom attachment slots working and everything. Probably just need to target the correct bone

Yuuuuup!

If anyone has been itching to make some models for attachable stuff, at least now you know it will work! I'm gonna see how accessing bags could work. Seems I can't directly access stuff attached to the animal (as in via the world menu or animal menu)

[limber plinth]

Yeah, this was brought up and quickly forgotten due to trying to get the horse just right 😅

Would be great for a saddle system + reigns?

How weird would it be to get a passenger?

[brisk iris]

Yeah it should work! It seems to despawn the attachment on exit though, so I'm looking into that. But worst case we could just unequip it on exit and re-equip on load

[brisk iris]

Honestly, should not be crazy. The horse just gets move to xyz from movement key inputs and smoothly travels there using built in locomotion, while the player is glued on by constantly setting the xyz to be the same as the horse, so to have a second player get on you'd just glue them as well but not give them any movement input control

Or maybe even have them just grapple the rider

[limber plinth]

Neat

[brisk iris]

Ah damn, I forgot I need to make a fall-off animation, there's gotta be a way to get knocked over by zombs

ALSO

Horses have collision and can trigger the player to fall if sprinted into, I think this means we could make hit effects triggered by the horse on zombies, which means ragdolls when galloped on

Will probably be glitch city, but could be fun as a "use with caution" feature

[brisk iris]

That counts as a passenger right?

[muted ridge]

Hell yea

[coarse tinsel]

Working on a texture now, very WIP

[brisk iris]

Even better with the big one haha
100% voting we keep a plushie attachment slot

[brisk iris]

Nice, that looks great!

[coarse tinsel]

Maybe a satchel backpack on the back of the horse?

[brisk iris]

Yeah the possibilities are endless! I think you can even make new clothing items weighted to the horse, but I don't know enough about that to say for sure, I've only tested with simple meshes
But this could mean full horse armor for example, with individually moving parts and stuff

But we definitely need some blankets, saddlebags, reins etc.

[muted ridge]

Aren't the items attached to the horse ?

They don't follow the skeleton

Aren't they clothing ?

[coarse tinsel]

That would be awesome! I could image something like that, Keep up the good work 😄

[brisk iris]

I honestly don't know enough about clothing to say if we can make weighted stuff or not, but attached stuff that follows specific bones is possible at least

[limber plinth]

Were the textures made before never added in?

[muted ridge]

The animals are supposed to be able to have clothings yea

[limber plinth]

I still have them on my end- I don't think I ever pushed it to the github:

[brisk iris]

Not sure which are which tbh, but if anyone can point out the correct ones I can test them and add them to my repo and push that so we can merge it with main