Animations

[KnightErrant]

I think you're right, the data in events.dat seems to be file names for .wav
and .mp3 files in the sounds directory (although really in sounds.dat).
Looking at descr_skeleton.txt which seems to have much of the real
data in skeletons.dat shows the _basepose.cas, a lot of the _idle .cas's,
and the weapons entries with _Primary don't have evt associations.
I guess weapons and soldiers not doing anything don't need to make sounds.

[Casuir]

Aye and a lot of them would make the same sounds, looking at the engine evts a few of them are blank, if the game requires the evt files to run then theoretically you could get away with copying these and renaming to the required names. I do think they're packed in the skeleton.dat file sans headers, theres definitely stuff in there that matchs up with bits in the events.dat

[Casuir]

Mkay, just been reading some of the old threads on rtw animations problem and hoping someone can explain this a bit better to me, .evt files are missing and the game wont run with the animations extracted because of this? Looking at this post by Jerome it seems the evt files are in the skeleton.dat and this has been known for some time. Vercs extractor doesnt extract them though so I'm wondering if this is an oversight or theres some other problem.
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showp...0&postcount=13

Heres the relevant part of skeleton.dat

First byte in yellow is the number of entrys, next byte in purple is the sound catagory, I've identified 01 for SOUND, 02 for SOUND_BANK, 04 for SOUND_VOICE, 05 for SOUND_AMBIENT and 03 must be shockwave, doesnt seem to be any of those types in it though. Next bit in green are the start and end frames in green, followed by the lookup tag. Theres an 00 01 after some entries here which isnt always present, Im guessing this is used to identify the sound as random? Theres also a looping tag in some of the evt files in the effect_evt folder

[KnightErrant]

@Casuir
I've unpacked the cas's in pack.dat and the game won't run
with these alone using the no_animdb = true switch that Caliban
told us about. The jpg of his unpacked /animations directory showed
evt files present so I'm wondering if this is required but I don't know
this. We know that skeleton.dat ISN'T unpacked on his system because
he didn't find any of the type names present for any file extension.

Not really a big problem because its easy to repack the cas's after
modifying them, it's more of a "if it can be done then try doing it" thing.
GrumpyOldMan suspects that the no_animdb switch may not be present
in the retail version and that could very likely be the case.

Missed your post re strat_navy and fs_camel. These are the handles
or type names for different groups of animations. They extract out of
skeleton.dat just like the cas's come out of the pack but they don't
seemed to be used that way. That's why I asked for the experiment
to be done, to see if they were really filenames or just handles like
GrumpyOldMan thought. (I picked those two because the corresponding
cas's aren't named that way, so we could avoid a bunch of false hits
to have to sort through.)

Thanks for digging up the old post by Jerome, there's some food for
thought there. I'll to dig again with this new info.

[Casuir]

The problem here is vercs script doesnt properly extract from skeleton.dat, it just does a binary dump of the different entries taking the name from skeleton.idx. The actual file itself is compiled by the game from descr_skeleton, if it was extracting correctly it should be outputting that and the evt files at the very least. I think GOM is right about the type files being handles, I dont see anything suggesting they are files, am I missing something here? As for Calibans jpg, if hes got the evt's extracted then he's definitely got the skeleton.dat unpacked, becase jerome clearly says they're in there and if we look, we can find data matching their structure.