As a result of this thread:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,20351.msg201668.html#msg201668...I now declare that I officially request the following feature:
please make it possible to loop an object sequence, so that you don't have to copy identical objects to fill the length of a whole animation.
And:
please implement an offset feature for object sequences in populations (and in single objects of course). I know that someone (I think it was Matt) once said, that it's quite complicated to create an offset feature, so that each instance of a population has a random starting point.
At least to me it would be OK, to have
one offset for all instances. You could get enough variation by using several populations with different offsets.
Imagine you have an object sequence of a human character walking loop. Let's say 25 "frames". If each object has 2MB, which seems realistic for a low poly character, you'd have a total of 50MB for the whole sequence. If we'd have the feature, I've requested, we wouldn't need anything more to get thousands of people randomly walking in one direction.
At the moment we'd have to copy the sequence twelve times for a 300 frames animation, which makes 600MB. For only one population! For an offset loop, we'd have to copy the whole thing over and over again. If we'd have five populations with different sequence starting points the whole thing already has 3GB!
I really don't know, but is it very complicated to make TG handle object sequences as described?
In the animation curve editor it's possible to select "move by value" and add a number to it. Isn't something like that a way to treat existing object sequences? It may sound naive, because I have absolutely no idea of programming: something like "Galloping_horse_0000 to 0024" - "Move by value" +5 or something like that...