The reason I'm asking this question is because I want to create a clothes line which can be dragged from one wall to another and where you can either have no clothes or different clothes on each section of the clothes line!

So why using a fence?
Fences have posts which can be used as the wall attachment for the clothes line, fences can also be curved by lowering the tiles underneath which can be used to create curved clothes lines like this:


The pie menu is gonna be used to change between different clothes and no clothes on each section of the clothes line!
The bhavs is for changing the mesh & texture on the desired section of the clothes line to what's selected in the pie menu!

I may be over my head here, but I can see so many advantages in using a fence instead of objects for a flexible clothes line, so is it possible to add a pie menu & bhavs to a fence?
Any thoughts & ideas on how to create a flexible clothes line are more than welcome

When you create a fence, does it have an OBJD that you can see, and a GUID?

Unfortunately fences don't have OBJD as normal objects does, the guid is in the XML file - This is the resource tree for normal fences when cloned:

Hmmm I wonder... If you felt like experimenting you could add an objd using the same GUID in the objd as it is in the xml, and a TTAB and TTAs. You put the number of the TTAB inside the OBJd. And obviously at least one BHAV to test whether your menu does anything. I don't think you need worry about the OBJf and Init BHAVs as I guess fence initialisation happens internally. I would love to know what happens!

Thanks for the info Inge, I never really thought of such an approach, it might even work
I'll try it out later when I get the time and post my results here

UPDATE:
Dang, it didn't work Inge!
The Fence(Clothes line) shows up in the catalogue & works exactly like a fence should, but that's it!

I added an OBJD file,TTAB, TTAs & a BHAV to test the pie menu, but the pie menu didn't show, it seems like fences just ignores OBJD files( and possibly all other non standard fence files)!
I double checked that the pie menu was correctly set up and it was

Well it was worth a try, I'm gonna put on my thinkin' cap to see if I can figure out another way to create my clothes line they way I want it to be :D

Frillen did you definitely put your TTAB instance number in the OBJD?

Yup Inge, my TTAB had the instance no. 0x00000001 and I put it in the Interaction Table ID of the OBJD file as it should (This works for those objects I've tested it with)

I've attached the test-fence which I've added BHAVs, OBJD & pie-menu to as you suggested in case you want to check it for possible errors

Well, I would not think that the game would make use of both an XFNC and an OBJD. The XFNC points to three CRES names and lacks a lot of the parameters that are available for an object, like the room flags. The OBJD requires a "Model - Names" STR# with instance 0x0085 pointing to the CRES (I can no longer remember if the STR# name itself was important, too, or just the instance value). So they generally serve the same purposes, that of a descriptor for an object (in the sense that an entity that has a named CRES plus is some kind of 3d object).

Of course, objects don't work the same as fences, fences use the fence tool for placement and assembly. I looked through a lot of the XML based object identifiers (XNGB, XOBJ, XFNC and so on) and none of them seem to have any parameters that might point to an instance for a TTA.

My one idea would be for you to define an invisible object to place on the clothesline, the clothes controller. If you look in the games files, you will find a CRES that has a name with null in it. You could build your object from the STR#, the OBJD, all the TTA and BHAV stuff you want, and make the STR# point to the null cres. Thus the object would have no mesh, no texture, nothing but a pie menu.

Now I didn't make one here, so I don't know if you can overcome any footprint issues without using a cheat. And it's not as elegant as your idea, but it might work.

<* Wes *>

I had tried hard to add a few different parameters from other xml types like recolour xml files to a terrain-paint xml file, and nothing happened. The parameters were ignored.
I did that to an object recolour and it happened to cause a blue flashing effect.
Now, I'm curious about the others... :D

If an object can hold or call up another selectable and recolourable object to show up in-game, then this may work, right? Just wonder.



Related thread linkage for partition-products modding:

Partitions:
Modding InfoCenter - Partitions: walls, fences, fence arches
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=106473


Fences:

Is it possible to add bhavs & pie menu to a fence?
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthre...highlight=fence

New fence-need help!UPDATE 24/1 post#24
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=216472

Remeshed Fence
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthre...highlight=fence

What're the known links or references to correlate bhav, pie menus, OJBD, audio references, etc?
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthre...highlight=fence

Fences in lot package file:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showpost...6&postcount=513
http://www.modthesims2.com/showpost...6&postcount=517
http://www.modthesims2.com/showpost...6&postcount=532
http://www.modthesims2.com/showpost...1&postcount=466
http://www.modthesims2.com/showpost...5&postcount=534
Continuous/Contiguous No Vertical Post Fences?http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=193824



Fencearches:
modding - Fence-arch: infos-sharing, ideas-mingling, etc...
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthre...light=fencearch

Most of what we do know how to do came hard.
Sometimes I feel it's like trying to spear an apple in a barrel of ink. Just poke here and see if anything happens...
<* Wes *>

Wes: What you suggest sounds interesting, however I'm not sure how I would do it - I'm not even sure that fences can be controlled through a dummy object, I have a feeling that fences are extremely static and can only be changed through buildmode!
It seems like whatever I try to do or add to a fence will be ignored by the game!

At this moment I'm creating my clothes-line without posts(by referencing a nullModel cres for the post), I suddenly remembered that fence-posts next to walls won't show

Originally I was gonna use the fence posts to illustrate the wall attachment of the clothes line(it looks a bit strange when the clothes line goes right into the wall), now I'm considering creating a fence with some kind of wall attachment at the end of the mesh - Fences are rotated 180 degrees when drawn from right to left or left to right, so I only need a left or right version of it
Fences like walls are much darker than normal objects when looked at from the shadow side, this bothers me a little - Don't know if this can be fixed through the material file, except making the texture bright!

The below pic illustrates it:


My clothes line mesh is divided into 3 subsets:
1 for the pegs, 1 for the clothes line & 1 for the clothes!
The clothes is drawn on a 8x4 divs plane which I duplicated and mirrored the copy, so the clothes would be visible from both sides.
I dragged the vertices back and forth on the z-axis to give it a bit more 3D & crumbled look!
At first I tried using a single plane for the clothes and editing the stdMatCullMode to none in the material definition to have the texture drawn on the backside of the plane also!
This produced a strange effect, when I dragged the fence from left to right, the texture was bright on both sides like on sunny side view of the picture, and when the fence was dragged from right to left it became dark on both sides like on the shadow side of the picture - Does anyone know why this happens?

More comments/suggestions are more than welcome - In the meantime I'll continue exploring/exploiting the posibilities of fences :D

So true, so true :D

My best guess, it's that the fence-drag direction is predefined as the front or the back to the shadowing shader.
Since "stdMatCullMode none" is to force the game engine to draw the "texture" (material) on both sides of the mapped, it may have equated both sides for the shadings (also materials) as well.
But, this's just my guess only, but not a formal answer.

After all, one thing to confirm is if this will also happen to other meshes with that parameter.

Walls are also affected by the wall shader and the cell shader as well.
You can brighten the textures with "stdMatDiffCoef = >1,>1,>1"
http://www.sims2wiki.info/TXMT/Para.../stdMatDiffCoef

You're always amazing with lot-building and ideas. I'm definitely looking forwards to your new creations.