I've been writing a tool for testing mods for a flight simulator, it's gone well and I can handle all the basic functions.
The problem is animation.
In the game they use a java class for each plane. This has methods like moveGear, moveBays, etc.
moveGear animates the landing gear, moveBays animates the bomb bay doors, you get the idea.
I have written the app in C# using XNA as a renderer in a winforms application.
My initial idea to handle animation was to parse the java source code into C#, replacing calls into the game engine with my own functions and compiling the generated C# class on the fly.
This worked for the plane I was using as a test case, but doesn't work as a general solution. Every java coder writes code in a slightly different way, there's issues with inheritance, oh man so many problems.
I'm thinking about embedding a JVM into the app and running the java class without editing. With this in mind I have hacked out all the java classes from the actual game. So it would be feasible to run the java.
I haven't got any clue how I would extract the animation data from the java and into my code, but that's a problem for the pub.
Anybody got any better ideas?
It would be a pity to only do half the job, and just looking at a static mesh isn't as much fun as animating it.
