Dino Distortion

[Chupacabra]

I remember bringing this up a while back when I was still making my Desolate level and no one was able to give me an answer, maybe 3 years later someone knows a little more. For seemingly NO reason, after playing a level 100 times without any glitches, errors, or crashes, one of the dinosaur models will turn into a stringy mess. I haven't even opened TresEd since the last time I turned on my computer (yesterday) and was playing the level just fine this whole night, but the last time I loaded the level, it happened. It won't happen to one specific dinosaur either, it'll happen to every dinosaur of that type in the level, in this case it happened to my Dilophosaurs. They'll wake up, move, make sounds, attack, interact, and die like they should, but the model will render as a stringy mess from then on every time the level is run. I'm assuming the only way to fix this is to re import the models and start from scratch with them, but that would mean that the models got corrupted somehow, and if that's true, I'd really like to know how they got corrupted between exiting the game and starting it up again. Any advice?

This video shows what should be a Dilophosaur, fighting with a Raptor. The Raptor wins, and subsequently starts eating the corpse of it's prey before coming over and attacking me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXFz8tgsmoI

[tatu]

It seems to me like it's a bad import of some kind. You could always reimport the dinosaur and check "replace existing meshes" (replace existing instances should be unchecked). It's will only replace the raptor mesh and not the dinos you placed in the level. Only the first one

[Chupacabra]

I'm pretty sure we had this argument on the Desolate thread too, its NOT I repeat NOT NOT NOT an import problem, if it was an IMPORT problem then the model wouldn't have worked to begin with. But it was fine, worked for a whole week. Worked all night long. Didn't touch a thing and it just happened. Unless models reimport every time a level is loaded in game, which still makes no sense why the import would suddenly go wrong.

[tatu]

Does it happend all the time you load the level now? Or just some times?

[Chupacabra]

I wasn't and now it is, and once it starts, it's permanent, idk what causes it, I didn't even open TresEd the whole time I was on the comp, I was playing the level repeatedly and it happened the last time I loaded it

[tatu]

If you use the retail engine to edit it, try delete the swp in the Dreamworks/Trespasser/ folder. Could be something that was cause during loading

[machf]

I haven't seen the video, but if it's what I imagine, then it's caused either by vertices that haven't been attached properly to the bones or bones that have been moved away from the dinosaur mesh when editing the level.

[Chupacabra]

Nope, still happening, like I said, I think the only way to fix it is to delete the mesh and reimport the dinosaur, but fixing it isn't my main goal, I wanna know what causes it so I can avoid it in the future

EDIT: @Machf I checked in TresEd and somehow that did happen, how, idk, like I said, I wasn't even in TresEd at all between level loads, but thanks for the info, greatly appreciated

[machf]

One problem with TresEd is that when you edit a new dinosaur's t-scripts (particularly after the Mesh and Physics values have been set, as well as the physics meshes), they take over the original's bones and physics meshes, and when you move the new dino, those move together with it (even though you may not see them because they are far away). Before moving them, it's better if you edit the original's t-scripts once (even though you don't change anything, just hit the "update" button) so that the bones and physics meshes get reassigned to the original mesh instead. This will happen every time you edit the new dino's t-scripts, unfortunately.