I may have discovered how to animate player ships.
I think it has something to do with the animation time, start frame, fire frame and end frame.
I havn't had any luck, but feel free to give it a shot, I think the D3 universe would love to see animated player ships.
Wow, that is extremely weird, seeing Gamtool looking like that. It's like an old friend you haven't seen in years, and he's changed his hair color, eye color and skin color, gotten a nose job and had a couple vertebrae removed. And then it's 1:00 in the morning, he rings your doorbell and says "Hi, Alan!" in exactly the same voice he always had.
I think a while back a few people tried to get ship animations working, and eventually decided that it was probably a feature that Outrage had planned but never finished, and they just didn't bother removing the fields from the table file format. But it would be really cool if you did get it working.
You can use it for custom robots.
i.e. you build a bot which is animated to
move a gun outside it's body into a fire-position,
fire the gun and move it inside the body again.
Then you would start this action in the bot-ai,
wait for that fire-animation position,
fire.. and move the gun back into the body again.
This is done in your bot ai which you will need to program.
I'm pretty sure it cannot be done. Whenever I have tried to use a Ship model with animation frames, the game will instantly crash whenever switching to the 3rd person view (the byebyemonkey thing). or whenever it came into view (mirrors, cinimatics, etc.). At least without some sort of mod, it is pretty certain that it won't work. The gamtool does have the fields for animation in the ship pages, but it was probably somethin gthat was either never finished or abadoned ( like the Weapon index thing, it is a useless field ).
That is someting i've always wanted to do as well. But of course you could make a seperate generic object with your ship model that has animations for use in cinematics. Simply make sure the actual player is out of view and unghost the fake model.
its a continuous rotating subobject like the powerups are using. well it works, probably with scripting it would be possible to make user-interactive rotating.