Is there anyway...

In Half-Life, to make a sprite stay static? Ie when the player moves about the sprite always follows, I'm sure I read somewhere that you can freeze it but I can't find anything now. I'm trying to make animated TV screens.. heh.

Quote from ReNo

Jinx wrote up an article on this a while back...http://www.cryotank.net/maps/tutorials/sprites1.html

Excellent!! You da man! etc

I take it there's no limit to how big the filesize can be and how many frames it can have as long as it's 256 colours and a max size of 256x256?

Quote from Skjalg

dont you make tv screens with an animated texture?

You're limited to 10 frames and you have very little control over the speed of the animation...

Success!

Here I made a simple slideshow of the hgrunt run animation (using an old reskinned model) and saved it as an spr file:

[Blocked Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/deathcrush/video_test.gif]

I then set about using the method in Jinx's tutorial to make the sprite a fixed position variant and applied it to the screen in game using a normal env_sprite:

[Blocked Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/deathcrush/pb_videotest_huh.jpg]

As you can see this doesn't look right, I rotated the angle of the sprite to match up with the desk and computer and that's what happened. So I simply moved it back to 0 degrees (360) and moved the computer to the end of the desk:

[Blocked Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/deathcrush/pb_videotest1.jpg]

This isn't what I wanted though so I realised that in order to make the screen act as it should in the middle of the desk I had to rotate the whole map round so that the sprite stayed at 0 degrees but was in the position I wanted it to be in:

[Blocked Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/deathcrush/pb_videotest_gotcha.jpg]

Obviously this means that you can only put this sprite and any others at a wall by 0 degrees limiting where you can apply it, although you can produce several versions of the sprite and rotate the original images around so they show up right on other angles. Why the HL engine does this is beyond me but I like to think everything has a workaround.

So that's it for this round, while most people are mucking about with source I'm trying to do things with the original game that hasn't been seen before so I can add new elements to the gameplay.

In the next addition I plan to record a demo of me playing a game and have it converted to frames and resized as another sprite test

Quote from ReNo

No offence mate, but fixed axis sprites have been done plenty times in HL1, and having a sprite animation as a screensaver on a computer in your map is hardly adding new elements to the gameplay Still, good on you for persevering and try to do things the best way you can - I'm sure many people would simply have opted for a picture or animated texture instead.

The screensaver is just a test, I want to add CCTV camera screens with some action on it ie when you press a button you can see a couple of guards running towards your position. Ok so it's not exactly changing gameplay but it does make you think that the screen is actually transmitting a live video feed as oppose to just a block with a static picture of the same thing, like what you see in HL2. I had an idea last night for a .dem file of a group of marines (including a first person view of the player) fighting some sort of enemy and then dying would be a good touch, as if each of the marines had a camera attatched to their helmet...

Peris: do you think you could try and work out how you rotated them? it would be massively helpful.

Thanks