Wouldn’t a scaling factor just hasten
or slow down the inevitable?
It would, except that I am using the SetRelativeLocation function instead of the AddRelativeLocation function. So the location corresponds to the value of the curve rather than the cumulative sum of the values at each tick so far.
the Timeline appears to function
without anything connected to its left
side, in other words, with no
initiation. So what does that say
about Timelines? Are they updating off
the tick or what?
Your timeline will function without anything connected because you have the Autoplay checkbox checked. In the example I gave I showed how to start the timeline without that checkbox in case you didn’t want the pipe to start moving until some event. Once a timeline receives a play/play from start/reverse/reverse from end, it begins sending out pulses on the update port on every tick until it reaches the end of the curve (In your case it will never end because you have the Loop checkbox checked). At each pulse, the value of the VectorCurve pin will be whatever your curve specifies it should be at the current time. So while you don’t know when the tick will happen, you do know that when the update pulse happens the VectorCurve will have the correct value for that time.
I thought this thing was going to
continuously read values along the
curve and feed the z change deltas
into the component position.
It doesn’t give you the deltas, but rather the actual value of the curve at the specified time. For example, consider a curve that is a straight line from time 0 value 0 to time 1 value 0.5. If I trigger the timeline to play at global time 1, then at global time 1 the timeline time will be 0 and the value will be 0. At global time 1.5 the timeline will have a time of 0.5 and the value will be 0.25.
If you need the deltas you can always track the last value and calculate them each update.