We have finally figured out how to import our own individual animations for each character (player and NPCs) and call them by binding them to a key in default.bind. The next issue we face is calling a .dsq animation when the player enters a trigger area in the game world. We have managed to get this working with animations on the player character but not with animations for the NPCs. Also, we are having problems in that the triggered animations is being called when either the player or NPC enters the trigger area and we need to be able to specify that we want only the player to be able to trigger the animation in the code. We also need to specify which NPC the animation will be called on.
Our chatHud is finally fully functional and we are able to output messages to it when the player enters a trigger area in the game world, eg. when the player approaches a patient the chatHud will display a greeting message.
One of the biggest problems with the torque game engine is positioning the NPCs. Torque was built as a game engine mainly suited towards multiplayer FPS games. In these games the players are randomly spawned throughout the game world. Obviously we cannot apply the same pattern of NPC positioning to our game as this would put patients and doctors in areas of the hospital that they logically should not be. We overcame this by each NPC calling a function that maps it to its own individual co-ordinates.
As well as coding we have done further interior and exterior modeling using 3ds Max and Quark respectively and have added some fully textured objects to the game world.
We need to keep working on the trigger areas and linking them to animations and functions as many of the different aspects of our game developement plan will rely heavily on these triggers.