by AndiS » Sun Dec 24, 2017 11:27 am
In the end, all are right. You will - possibly - be able to have several sets of hands for a single clock model. They are child objects according to the tutorial. What irritates me is that you need to observe a naming convention in the shape and the order of the child entries should be relevant. That sounds like two means to the same end.
If the child order is indeed relevant, then there is a little chance that the second set of hands are ignored. I.e., the software would be fixed to animating one child for the hour, one for the minutes and optionally one for the second.
If you succeed to make a single clock with several sets of hands, then the game will still animate each hand on its own. So you save on the count of static shapes only, which is not great considering the amount of station clocks per tile.
P.S.: The number of child objects does not seem to have a low limit. But they are all drawn as separate objects, thus adding to the asset count.
What the game does with the child objects is another matter. For certain types of blueprint, certain functions are preformed, like setting the numbers to the signal ID, line speed, or figure entered (in mileposts), or vehicle number, etc. etc.. In some tests I found children to be treated as scenery items no matter how you define them. But then again, signal arms can have their own sounds. But that does not disprove that they are scenery objects internally. By scenery, I mean dumb, animated or not, but without a script, track link, properties fly-out, and all the other fancy stuff.
P.P.S.: When you add several sets of hands to the clock, they way I would do it is this:
1) Fire up that Asset Editor where you place child objects interactively.
2) Edit the numbers of the matrix manually.
Figuring out the rotation matrix can be a pain, but the Asset Editor is a pain for precision. So you make turn all 0.9... into 1s and all 0.1... into 0s.
To simplify your life, put the origin of the clock shape at the pivot around which you would rotate the clock by 90° to show the next face. And make the faces view the various axes. Then the rotation matrix of the hands will be simple.