Strat Map Animations

I'm currently working on a mod called The Crusades (we have a forum here at the org) and well we are currently trying to wrap up all our loose ends with the strategy map. We have done a few things, one of which is gone with a Battle For Middle Earth style army on the map (Chivlary also has done this.) However we ran into a few problems. Namely that the scene root bone on the named army skeleton doesn't remain staitionary during animations. So when armies hide, or kneel after running out of movement points our army drops below the ground. Seen here:

https://img156.imageshack.us/img156/4278/map4no.jpg


I had breif correspondence with a few people however it has been rather cryptic. Also another person suggested editing the animations that are causing the problems however we want to keep spys and assassins on the map and they share many of the problem causing animations and would look weird if we edit them (espeically the march animation which causes are army to bounce up and down as it moves. if we edit it the marching of the spy and assassin will look very unrealistic). We tried editing the descr_skeleton.txt to see if we could edit the animations the named army skeleton was using (i.e. we switched out the problem animation file lines with an idle animation) however when we loaded the game up it was as if we hadn't edited anything. The armies were still kneeling and causing all the same problems.

This is a big community and I'm hoping people of lots of ideas on what we are doing wrong or maybe what we can do to solve our problem. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

wierd..... never seen or heard of the like I'm afraid.

I'm in no way at all knowledgeable on this score - but I do remember other people discussing problems with descr_skeleton.txt here.

A search under the term may also pull up some ideas.

Thanks Richard.. tho reading that was not very comforting.

Can't you make a new skeleton that adds a new animation set for the armies? And then edit the new animations. descr_skeletons.txt is not used by the engine.

What DJ said.
Just create a new skeleton for the army models and you won't affect the spies/diplomats.