Mishap #4: Too Many a Skeleton in the Cupboard
Symptoms
Have you hear of supernumerary organs? Never? Really? C'mon, take a look at the page in the Wikipedia before continuing reading...
Ready? Ok. Having an excess of organs in your body does not necessarily goes in your favour, but supernumerary bones don't usually cause problems, either. At least, that's the case in humans: when those affected are Moviestorm's characters, things are a bit different.
We'll see two cases illustrating the real meaning and reach of my last statement.
Case #1: The Hat of Doom
Do you remember our much praised HHH? This time we'll make sure everything's right: no faces without a material assigned, no unrigged vertices and of course the polygon count for each and every one of its submeshes remains low in their poly count. So this time everything will go ok from start.
One more time, it looks gorgeous in the Modder's Workshop:
Got it published and this time, full of self-confidence, launch Moviestorm. Open the Set Workshop... OK. Hold your breath, switch to the Dress Room and...
101 Error switching to Dressing Room.jpg 14.41KB
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[NOTE: the title of the dialog box says: 'Unknown HUD component in DressingRoomDirector', and the text states: 'Unkown component requested from director character selector']
The what? The text in the dialog box could be very well expressed in Euskera, Lojban or Welsh, for one thing: it would make the same sense to me.
Check the log file and we'll find something like this:
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Unrecognised bone HEAD
...
Failed to switch due to nulljava.lang.NullPointerException
...
missing component designer from DressingRoomDirector
missing component character selector from DressingRoomDirector
java.lang.NullPointerException
at mscope.ui.charactershop.DressingRoomDirector.isCelShadingActive(DressingRoomDirector.java:73)
...
java.lang.NullPointerException <-- Lots of this
...
Not the more enlightening text in the world, but please note there's a reference to a 'bone HEAD', which is unrecognized.
Before moving to the solution, let's take a look at the second closely related case:
Case #2: From Hell's heart I stab at thee with this gesture.
Everything began with an innocent, mostly useless, silly gesture, which in its mid-point looks like this in our modding tool:
201 Anim 00.jpg 46.91KB
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What was the modder thinking of when he created this gesture, I can only guess. Anyway, we'll proceed to make it into Moviestorm.
Everything looks fine on the Modder's Workshop, so Jack should be completely safe when executing out new animation:
202 Anim 01.jpg 46.34KB
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Again: got published, launch Moviestorm, switch to the Dress Room and...
101 Error switching to Dressing Room.jpg 14.41KB
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Just the very same gibberish utterance. And the log file looks exactly the same as in the previous case.
So, what has gone wrong this time?
Fixing It
Remember the first threatening line in the log file:
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Unrecognised bone HEAD
There's a reference to a bone, so this line may point at some problem with the puppet's skeleton. We made sure that out hat in the case #1 was correctly rigged and bound to the puppet's Head bone, so what's the problem, then?
Actually, our model is absolutely right. If we now closely inspect the contents of the addon folder hierarchy we'll find something like this:
301 Accessory.jpg 24.57KB
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The red arrow points at the very origin of the problem. We had inadvertently included a skeleton file as part of the asset file deploy. Actually the file, despite its name, is the stock Male01's skeleton.
If we now take a look at the addon for the case #2 (the Very Silly Gesture):
302 Anim 91.jpg 17.46KB
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Exactly the same case in the end: somehow a skeleton file has managed to slip into out puppet folder hierarchy.
So, how to fix it? First thought: simply delete the offending skeleton file.
If we do so, deleting the file and immediately launching Moviestorm, that's what we get:
401 Tras borrar csf sin replublish.jpg 45.2KB
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Things have even got worse! Actually, we're unable to create a new movie or load a pre-existent movie.
The only and real way to fix this occurrence implies:
- Deleting the skeleton file in excess
- Re-publishing the addon
Proceeding this way, we'll get things ok again, and we'll enjoy watching at Jack executing our Silly Useless Gestures while donning his pretty stupid HHH:
501 Anim 99.jpg 33.84KB
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Conclusion
When creating puppet assets, such as bodyparts (bodies, heads, accessories, etc) and animations of any kind, be sure not to include any Cal3D Skeleton file (.csf) inside the Puppets folder hierarchy.