> > > the rest have everything linked to nothing or linked to something called DUMMY and i have no idea what this means. i really need 3dsmax users to tell me quickly what it means, what is it for? am i wasting my time coding for a 3ds feature that 3ds users don't want to use?


> > A dummy is an object that does not consist out of polygons. It is like a fake object.
> > Its use however can be very helpful, especially when animating. By linking one or more object to a dummy, you can manipulate several object at once.

> > for example:
> > The animation of a rotating earth round the sun: you put a path controller on dummy so it follows the circle around the sun. Link the earth to the dummy so it also orbits the sun. now apply a rotation animation on the earth its self. This would be impossible to do without the dummy as once an object has a “path controller”, you no longer can animate the axe rotation..

> > Look at a dummy as a sort of "manipulator" object...

> ok thanks again Flyby. i've redone that code to use the hierarchy chunk data in the tree instead of the meshes to allow for those DUMMY things to be in the tree. unfortunately it is going to be very difficult for me to verify if my code is working correctly because the model i used for testing has the meshes labelled strangely. i'll go and look in my vast collection of test models again to see if this time i can find another one suitable for testing.

ok i found only one other 3ds model i could use for testing this. it was the ED-209 model from 3dcafe.com. it helped me find a bug in my code. only the turret mesh was being seperated instead of all the connected meshes as well. it seems there was something wrong in the documents, i dunno maybe i misinterpreted something. anyway, now i think it's fixed. i'm going to work on getting the turret into a seperate file now. i anticipate that something i may have trouble with is getting the turret to rotate from the correct point altough it will be positioned correctly when looking straight ahead, but i think maybe i have an idea on doing that as well. ok so well, let's see if i can solve this and maybe get this auto turreting feature finished finally. i think i will take a nap first though :cool: