Make the ball attack?

[SickAlice]

Or any unconventional shape. I have some ideas but I want to do this by the numbers so I don't create flaws.

In my current case I have put a ball on a male basic based nif. The ball is of course a geometric sphere mesh which falls inside the outer bounding box and rests dead center at the male basic meshes feet. Every other 3d model is deleted but all the nodes remain. I worked the animations over and everything looks fine.

In game though it can't hit anything. Actually that's not completely true, sometimes it can hit one choice object once but afterwards it stops making contact. I considered perhaps the fact that male basic wasn't present was creating a problem with collision detection. So I put the male basic model back in then made it invisible with an alpha channel. No dice here either. Of course I presume this would be unnatural anyways as the collision would come from the guys outstretched hand and damage could be taken above the ball but at this point I decided the optical illusion was fair enough. However still no luck.

So back to the question how do I make my sphere hit things? Note: I do not have 3ds Max (or not the correct version for Freedom Force anyways). I do have Blender and Nifskope to work with however. Thanks in advance for whatever anyone comes up with.

[daglob]

Have you looked at Plasticman TJ to see how Texas Jack did it?

[SickAlice]

He didn't. His ball is attached to the Pelvis and only appears briefly during a melee animation. PM relies on it's own BBox's and contact points and the ball plays off it like the fist attachments do. Mine is an everypresent piece with nothing to support it, located dead center of the axis and at ground level. It's actually the front tire from his Judge Dredd to pull off the rotating effect. The original suggestion was to use a rotating texture but it needs to stop spinning during certain animations so I had to go a different route.

[yell0w_lantern]

I'm not quite following you on this.
You have a bounding box and you deleted the geometry for male basic but also tried hiding it without success.  So far, I don't hear anything that should break it.  I've made a jet, 2 flying saucers, an X-wing fighter, an egg, and a gas cloud which all seem to work fine.


You need:
1) bounding box
2) selection box
3) center of mass
4) keyframe animations
5) keyframe notes (with 'contact' or 'leave_hand' notes in the attacks)
6) working exporters

Optional:
1) mesh geometry
2) weapon node
3) additional bones
4) physique modifier
5) omni lights
6) NI Shader materials

[SickAlice]

Your following me there, it's as simple as that. I put a sphere in a nif, TJ's Judge Dredd. I left all the nodes and everything else. The sphere was imported in place of the front tire of the lawmaster cycle which rotates during the run animation. Done. Made a hero file for it and took it for a spin in the rumble room and it doesn't interact correctly. So I'm at a loss here as well.

* Sorry, not thinking straight today. Here's everything as is. Thanks for both your helps:
http://catman.freedomforceforever.com/temp/rolling_ball_BETA.rar

* Edit #2: @yell0w_lantern: I came back to this tonight and read what you wrote again. The keyframe notes part stuck out. I wouldn't know that it had them or not and have never played with those before but thinking about it I used a swapped run for the melee so it probably wouldn't have them would it? So I copied your words into a search engine and came up with Wiki instructions on how to do that. The problem is resolved, thank you for your help and knowledges.

[yell0w_lantern]

 
Glad you got that fixed.

[SickAlice]

Glad you guys helped and were so...wait for it...on the ball. It was a matter of adding contact, contact_2 to the extra data was all. It still doesn't look right but only because a ball wouldn't walk up slowly and bump someone hurting them. That's fine though as it's only there as a placeholder. On release I'm prompting users to use speeding bullet/zc sb to achieve the right effect anyways (ball blasts through obstructions).