How do you add new creature animations for EE games?

[Allbrother]

Hi.

 

Long story short, there was no available animation for a creature I need, so I prepared a bam file for the job, I found a default animation to copy the ini from and now I don't know what's the next step? The ini's resref leads to 2 as best as I can tell identical bams (g1 and g2), so I assume I'd have to give my bam the same treatment and I know my new ini has to be named as the first column of the new entry in animate.ids, but how do I do that?

 

edit:

Somehow I stumbled my way into getting it to work but... no idea how or why. So if anyone has any documentation or knowledge on the inis and bam setup and naming conventions for the creature animation, I'd appreciate it

Edited August 1, 2023 by Allbrother

[Allbrother]

Okay, I worked out how to add the new line to animate.ids and name the ini correctly and now my animation is available for selection. However, ingame it's showing a completely different asset than the one I provided.

The ini I copied had a 4 letter resref that pointed to two 40 frame bams with g1 and g2 suffixes so I set up mine the same way. I didn't change anything else in the INI. I don't get why it isn't working. I also tried just using a single bam with the exact same name as the resref in the ini, but that didn't help either.

[Allbrother]

Somehow I stumbled my way into getting it to work but... no idea how or why. So if anyone has any documentation or knowledge on the inis and bam setup and naming conventions for the creature animation, I'd appreciate it

Edited August 1, 2023 by Allbrother

[Graion Dilach]

Most of the animation setup information was scattered within Infinity Animations' forum in SHS.

IESDP has a copy - https://gibberlings3.github.io/iesdp/file_formats/ie_formats/ini_anim.htm combined with https://gibberlings3.github.io/iesdp/appendices/avatarnaming.htm - but it is worded fairly technically.

The main aspect to know is that there are different creature frame/art setups and you need to assign your animation a slot which matches with your own animation setup. I think the issue that it works randomly over there is because you ended up mixing monster with monster_old and have a setup for one, but used the slot of the other one.

II hope you use FIND_FREE_ANIM & co. from the macros thread, you can specify ranges with them for simplifying the additions and there are some fairly big ranges available (7300-73FF for regular, 7600-76FF for _old).

Edited August 2, 2023 by Graion Dilach

[Allbrother]

This is great, thank you. I understand now why my initial attempt didn't work and how I accidentally fixed it.

Yes, I used FIND_FREE_ANIM (along with TO_HEX_NUMBER) after I found it digging through another mod's cellar, but didn't execute it properly for my use case.

 

One thing specifically that's still unclear to me - under most animation types, there's animation scheme that defines which suffix covers which sequences. But in it, each sequence code is followed by "=*number range*. For example type 2000 has this:

Spoiler

Animation scheme: [resref][wovl]?[seq].BAM, with
seq:
- G1: WK=0-4, SC=8-12, SD=16-20, GH=24-28, DE=32-36, TW=40-44
- G1E: WK=5-7, SC=13-15, SD=21-23, GH=29-31, DE=37-39, TW=45-47
- G2: A1=0-4, A2/CA=8-12, A3/SP=16-20
- G2E: A1=5-7, A2/CA=13-15, A3/SP=21-23

 

What are those number ranges? My initial assumption was orientation, but that's noted separately and the numbers for it don't reach as high

Edited August 2, 2023 by Allbrother

[Graion Dilach]

The index of the used frame cycles in the BAM. It does overlap with orientation on most cases though.

Edited August 2, 2023 by Graion Dilach

[Allbrother]

So for example

 

Spoiler

- G1: WK=0-4, SC=8-12, SD=16-20, GH=24-28, DE=32-36, TW=40-44

 

Will use frames 0-4 for walking, 8-12 for ready/head turn etc? What happens if the bam doesn't have enough frames? Will it loop or will some of the sequences cause the creature to go invisible?

[Graion Dilach]

Not individual frames, but frame cycles. But probably yes, the missing ones will go invisible (or miight even crash). TBH I never tested incompatible sequences. And I don't really want to, either.

Edited August 2, 2023 by Graion Dilach

[Allbrother]

Ah, right, got it. Thank you so much