Hi Casuir

Quote Originally Posted by Casuir
I'm not talking about differences in format between the games I mean differences in formats between verc's extracted .cas's and CA's original ones. What looks to me is happening here is verc's extractor is taking a binary dump from the pack and saving it as a .cas which his script can read and his tool can repack. The actual game itself when it tries to recompile the files parses the descr_skeleton and writes the idxs and dats. If we look at the skeleton.dat the first thing in there is bones, presumably the basepose? It has to be getting these from somewhere and the .cas's left unpacked all have them at the start of the file.
Agreed but if you have a look at the basepose cas files they are basically empty data, all quat values are 0,0,0,1 and all bone positions are 0,0,0, the values at the start of the unextracted cas files are the quat rotations. What's really telling now is that the cas files in m2tw don't have the bone names included, so the idx and dat files must be getting them from somewhere, the question is where? I've written to Caliban along these lines and we'll see if we can get any answers. I've seen some values right at the end of the basepose, but there are figures that have no basepose cas and use a normal cas for their default pose . At the moment, I could extract bone positions from a normal cas file but there is nothing I've seen that includes bone names or flags that indicate which skeleton should be used. If the no_animdb works and creates a new skeleton idx and dat then that information must be stored somewhere, hopefully somewhere accessible.

Quote Originally Posted by Casuir
Verc's dont so when the game tries to run without the dats or repack them it craps put. I think the exporter CA uses exports from max with bones in the file then the game discards them on packing as it already has the skeleton in skeletons.dat.

Dunno if this confirms or debunks this
We have to find out where the bone names and positions are being stored, or which flags are used to notify the system to use a paticular skeleton.

Cheers

GrumpyOldMan