car with random color

[pommesschranke]

for the scenery I'd like to make a parked car that has a different color each time it loads.

do I have to use properties or can I embed nasal into an animation block, similar like this:

Code: Select all

<animation> 
<type>material</type>
  <object-name>body</object-name>
  <diffuse>
   <red>
      <nasal>
              <load>
                   rand();
               </load>
           <nasal>
   </red>
  </diffuse>
</animation>   


I also tried this:

Code: Select all

<animation> 
<type>material</type>
  <object-name>body</object-name>
 
  <diffuse>
   <red>
        <random>
         <min>0.5</min>
         <max>1.0</max>
     </random>
    
   </red>
 
  </diffuse>
 
</animation>     


no success so far.

[Thorsten]

do I have to use properties or can I embed nasal into an animation block, similar like this:

You have to use properties or expressions. A Nasal function returns a value to Nasal space, that's not accessible by animations. Not sure where the <random> tag is from - I've never seen it before.

[Hooray]

Note that you should also be able to use property-driven fgcommands to implement something like that, and that, you can also register Nasal callbacks as dedicated fgcommands - which is basically what the pui2canvas code is doing: it registers itselfs as a new fgcommand, and at that point it can be used by all sorts of dialogs without any of them having to be patched.

Thorsten is right though, in that such a Nasal-based fgcommand will get its operands/arguments in the form of a property tree structure - but that can be processed using props.nas internally.

See addcommand() for details

However, in general, if this is about scenery objects, I would consider using an embedded Nasal block and the cmdarg() API to get a handle to the object specific property tree.

[Johan G]

As this is about a parked car, I assume it will be for a shared model to use for instance on airport parking lots.

Consider different ways to make it as efficient as possible, as there might be quite many such models loading/loaded (in essence not only those you will easily see, but probably also all of those that are within the detailed LoD distance). Consider also that setting a model specific LoD range will require even more resources when rendering a frame.