A custom model that can crouch

This is Apoli 1.91.0: one fix, one small piece of housekeeping, and a new compat page for the mods that replace the player model out from under you.

Everything was fine until they pressed shift

The report: a player running Fresh Animations' Player Extension on top of Entity Model Features had an apoli:custom_model_render rig that tracked perfectly, until they held shift. Then the overlay skin, the emissive eyes and the geometry all came away from the body at once and hung in mid air at standing height.

EMF animates a CEM model during the render. The first part that draws runs the pack's animation expressions and writes the result onto the model's parts. It only does that once per pass, and it decides whether this is a new pass from a counter that EMF steps once for every render layer on the entity.

apoli:custom_model_render is a render layer. Its texture mode draws the player model a second time with your overlay texture on it, which means that second draw looked like a new pass and ran the pack's animation again, from a pose that had already been animated.

For most poses that's invisible, since the same expressions on the same inputs give the same answer. Crouching is the exception, because that's where a pack has to work out what the player is doing. Fresh Animations recognises a crouch by the exact numbers vanilla writes for one:

var.sneak2 = if(!is_gliding && body.rx==0.5 && body.ty==3.2 && head.ty==4.2, 1, 0)

After the first animation, those three values are the pack's own crouch pose, not vanilla's. So the second run decided the player was standing, undid the entire crouch, and drew the overlay on the standing pose while the body underneath was still crouched. The geometry ran next, read the same pose that was now standing, and went with it. Hence "textures and models, everything, all at once".

Apoli now holds EMF's animation for the length of any extra draw it makes of a model it doesn't own. The overlay is drawn onto exactly the pose the body was drawn with, and the geometry reads that same pose afterwards. The pack animates once per frame, as it expects to.

This wasn't specific to crouching or to the player. Any CEM animation with a variable that refers to itself or is smoothed was being stepped twice a frame under a texture overlay, Fresh Animations' mob animations included.

The reference pose is vanilla's again

geometry mode poses a bone by measuring its body part against a rest pose and applying the difference. That rest pose was baked through the game's model set, which is exactly the call EMF intercepts. With a CEM pack installed, Apoli was asking EMF to build a second, entirely unnecessary copy of the pack's player model, in the middle of a render, just to read seven numbers off it.

It now builds the vanilla player mesh directly. The numbers are the same, there's no detour, and there's one less way for two mods to trip over each other's static state.

New page: Custom Entity Models

The compat section has a page for EMF and ETF now. It covers what follows what, and the two notes worth having in front of you before you build a rig for an animated player: the pivot rule matters more under a pack with a wider range of motion, and a power that re-poses the body or the head can change what the pack thinks the player is doing.