Animation Install Question

[Spartan198]

I've had SignifierOne's animation pack in a zipped file in my documents main folder (among a whole bunch of other little fixes like new campaign maps,custom battle maps,etc.,that I found likable but just have yet to impliment) for a while now and finally decided to use them in BI & ALX (hopefully),and I was wondering if I also had to place an unzipped copy of the entire animation folder into the two respective main data folders,or do I just place the seperate files into them individually,or do I just place them in the main directory,or what?

None of this was covered in the readme file.

[Makanyane]

I've had SignifierOne's animation pack in a zipped file in my documents main folder (among a whole bunch of other little fixes like new campaign maps,custom battle maps,etc.,that I found likable but just have yet to impliment) for a while now and finally decided to use them in BI & ALX (hopefully),and I was wondering if I also had to place an unzipped copy of the entire animation folder into the two respective main data folders,or do I just place the seperate files into them individually,or do I just place them in the main directory,or what?

None of this was covered in the readme file.

the animations need to be packed in the bi/data/animations folder you should have
pak.dat (that is about 10MB)
pak.idx
skeletons.dat
skeletons.idx

equivalents to those four files. If his set-up included them just back-up your existing ones and copy his (unzipped) into that folder. If not please screenie what is in his pack and we'll try and tell you what to do.

? does his pack say what game its for - BI needs swimming animations....

[Spartan198]

the animations need to be packed in the bi/data/animations folder you should have
pak.dat (that is about 10MB)
pak.idx
skeletons.dat
skeletons.idx

equivalents to those four files. If his set-up included them just back-up your existing ones and copy his (unzipped) into that folder. If not please screenie what is in his pack and we'll try and tell you what to do.

? does his pack say what game its for - BI needs swimming animations....

The readme does mention shield_wall,so it must be BI compatable.
And,yeah,those are the files. But I can't get programs to open them.
I do web searches,and all that comes up for the .dat files is a single program which costs $$$,and the .idx files are listed as unrecognizable.

Or am I mistaken in the assumption that I need to actually "open" the above files,and should just remove and replace the entire animation folder itself,since the files within it have the same identical names and formats?

[Makanyane]

you won't need to open them to use his animations if they came in that format with same names as existing its the right format

just swap them with your existing ones.




You'd only need to 'open' them if you want to combine some of his animations with some from somewhere else. Then you'd need to unpack and repack. The .dat files are CA's way of packing the animations - if you ever do want to unpack them you need Verc's IDX extractor

[Spartan198]

Okay. I'll download that and keep it handy. Thanks,Mak.

BTW,does the name of the folder they're in matter? Can I just switch the file folders back and forth? Since there's no way to tell the custom files from the default ones?

[Makanyane]

the ones you want game to use have to be in folder called

'animations'

so if you put back up ones in folder called say

'old animations'

you can just change names of folders around if you want to swap back....