Animated crossing gates SC4

[ehbk2006]

Hi,

I was wondering:

How did they create/rendered those default animated crossing gates in SC4? Is it a .GIF or another type of movie?
And is there a tutorial for it?

Thanks in advance,
ehbk2006

[Swamper77]

How Maxis made those gates is anyone's guess. I haven't seen any tutorials on how to make animated props like Maxis did. I can tell you that there are actually 4 references in the prop to 3 animations and one static model. So, you would need an animation for each of the following states:

- Gate Closing
- Gate Down (blinking lights)
- Gate Opening

You just need a static prop for the static Gate Open state. The files for the gate animations are stored in "SimCity_1.dat". They are composed of FSH files, ATC files, and AVP files. The FSH files contain the frames for the animations. The AVP files point to the frames and tell the game which parts of the FSH images are used for each frame. The ATC files control the animations and are what is referenced in the Resource Key Type properties.

As far as I can tell, no one has made a replacement for the Maxis crossing gate animations. If you can manage it, you'll be the first. All I can provide is the technical information on how the files are linked and limited information on how they work. I can tell you that BAT cannot process animations done in GMAX, though.

-Jan