Thoughts on animation scripting language

[Tore Eriksson]

Is your LDA information online somewhere as I'm very open to suggestions.

No. I'm afraid most of it, like the latest tutorials and examples, were lost when I ended the contract with the ISP who hosted the webpages I stored them at. However, I did store something I called "Animation Start Kit" in a folder, along with what must be the latest version of the executable as recent as April 2011.

Animation Start Kit

If you want to test run the executable, it's a good idea to unpack all content not in a subfolder but directly into your LDraw\Models folder, because that is where LDA will write all its output files, the temporary as well as final ones. And, if you use Dropbox or similar, you need to temporarily pause the updating while LDA "compiles" or it will crash due to file access conflict.

I want to believe that most of the syntax is totally self-explaining. Most lines begin with [object_name].[command] followed by some arguments. From the smpl.txt file, a minifig object namned "Minifig01" is created by the line:

Code:

Minifig01.Load Scene 1  0 0 -10  0 0 1  0 1 0  -1 0 0  mf01.txt

The object Minifig01 is created by loading the file mf01.txt with the object Scene as parent and the LDraw color and matrix applied.

Inside the mf01.txt file, for example the object Minifig01.LeftHand is created on its parent object Minifig01.LeftArm with theis line:

Code:

Self.LeftHand.Create Self.LeftArm 14  5 18 -10  1 0 0  0 0.73 -0.64  0 0.64 0.73  983.dat

where every 'Self' is replaced by the object name from where it is called, in this case 'Minifig01'

Code:

Minifig01.Animation = MFWalk01.txt

tells LDA to apply the animation instructions in MFWalk01.txt on the object Minifig01.

And the walk looks like this:
Five Seconds in Datsville

Please feel free to ask if there is anything you'd like to know about LDA.
/Tore