descr_skeleton

Hello :)

I've today been looking into this file in hopes of deactivating a few more animations, but I've run into a dead end I think.

The problem is that changing an animation (anim) by commenting it out (;) does not seem to make the game recognize this change and the animation is still played both in current and new campaings/battles.

So I wonder whether I actually would have to make each animation refer to the same default file or delete the complete line? What irks me that a commented out anim is played as there does not seem to be another file controlling said animation (i.e. start map slecting a character, the animation that is played) Sounds a bit buggy to me though, what do you think?

Descr_skeleton is used by the game to compile the animation database if its not present, it doesnt do anything else. Says so right at the start of it if I remember correctly. Dunno why you're trying to deactivate animations, sounds like a great way to crash the game.

I wouldn't quite think it would crash the game if I can override current animations with a static non-animation. The purpose of changing the file is to decrease the amount of animations going on on-screen and thus make the game mroe playable on lower end pcs.

What I still don't understand though is why the animations still play after I deactivated (instead of overwriting) them. And possibly which file actually alls for animations to be played if it is not this file (which I think it is).

I don't think changing descr_skeletons.txt will do anything unless
the game can be made to run with no_animdb = true. As long as the
game runs off of skeleton.dat/idx I don't think this file is relevant.
(Don't know this I just think this is likely.) However, best efforts to
date to run with unpacked animations don't work. We've unpacked the
.cas files from pack.dat and the .evt records from skeleton.dat like
Caliban intimated but the game still crashes without the pack and
the skeleton. Still working the problem but descr_skeleton.txt might
not be something that is useful for modding.

The performance improvement you're going to get from this will be negligable anyways. Try resizing textures, should free up a lot more memory.

The animations still play because the game get that info from the idx and dat files in the animations directory, you could go at these with a hex editor but its a lot of work for little gain on the campaign map, and you'd get better results in battles if you edit the lod's

Thanks for the replies guys. Seems like I was wrong about the skeleton file.
I'll have a look at the textures (if I can figure out which ones) and see what I can do about em. Never worked graphic files themselves though, so not sure how that'll go.