Animations .... what can we do with them?

[KnightErrant]

Revisiting: got a jog in and cleared the cobwebs. Not thinking
big picture enough. You don't want animextract, you need a bigger
and better exportskeleton function. Let's say the .skeleton file
now includes the pose vectors AND bone names. So with a tail
it is now 21 lines long with the last entry having the bone_tail
pose info.

You also need an ASCII hierarchy file to read like the above post with
correct parent/child. Now when it reads all the .cas files in a directory
that you've moused to, it puts in the updated hierarchy tree, time ticks
stay the same (haven't changed the animation), it writes the bone section
but adds the new bone name at the end and duplicates the quat frame
number integer, duplicates the anim frame number integer, calculates a
new quat offset byte count, a new anim offset byte count, does a int 0,
an int 1, and a final byte 0 to complete the bone section.

It then replicates all 20 quat blocks for the regular bones, adds a new
block of Nframes of 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0 which are base pose quats for the
tail. Then replicates all 20 anim blocks for the regular bones, adds a new
block of Nframes of 0.0 0.0 0.0 deltas for the tail bone, then does
the new skeleton pose data with the new bone, then adds the usual
footer. Scaling of the anims could also be done here just like the
regular exportskeleton function.

Now all the anims in that directory should be ok, its just that the tail
isn't animated beyond its base pose.

The problem as you've noted are the stock animations like knifeman
and crew. We ignored this for the Dwarves but if they ever start swimming
they'll pop back to full size. For units with a new bone, they might crash
the game. Probably one would have to copy the stock anims into the
new directory and rewrite descr_skeleton.txt so that the new anim section
there points to the copies of crew and knifeman in the new directory where
they will receive the extra bone and animation data when
"biggerandbetterexportskeleton" is run.

Without too much thought on the subject, it seems like the above could
be generalized to adding more than one bone at a time. Of course, someone
is going to have to animmerge these into Milkshape to make the tail
move and some anim families like MTW2_Mace has 185 anims, MTW2_Halberd
has 205, MTW2_2H_Axe has 215, etc. from my survey.

Does that sound like a reasonable automated animation modification?

[GrumpyOldMan]

Hi KE

Haven't got much time today but a few thoughts on adding bones. Bones can only be added at the end of hierarchy table in the mesh and anim because otherwise you have to do a lot of reassigning verts because of the change in bone indices.

With the new method you're proposing, you may have to go to a template system - eg extract and merge all Mace anims with tails and wings skeleton with number of frames by 0 position and rotation values for the new bones. Maybe a dropdown or list with available options. Possibly the templates could be extracted from a Milkshape master. Maybe you could use a generic figure for merging purposes.

@Bwian - Scaling doesn't add anything to what's stored on the HD but the anims are recalculated and stored in memory for each different scaling when the game runs

Cheers

GrumpyOldMan

[KnightErrant]

Yes, yes, what GrumpyOldMan said. Let's do this experiment
this coming week. Convert a likely unit, preferably one that
doesn't use an anim type that you had nonconverting files with.
(I've had problems with HR_lance and HR_sword due to short
footers.) Add a tail bone and associated mesh to make a new
.ms3d file. I'll extend exportskeleton to process a copied directory
to add in the new bone, quats, and anims. Then let's try using animmerge
to bring in the walk animation and make the tail wag in Milkshape.

Then put back in game and just make them walk around to see what happens.

[medieval lord 10]

hey please research duald wield animation too for me.

[Bwian]

There is no need to research dual wield animations ... they can be made now. All that needs to be done is to re-write all the attack animations to move the left hand as if it was holding a weapon. It's a lot of work, but possible.

The game is not going to actually 'use' the second weapon, since the combat power and effectiveness is set by the stats. You would just increase the attack values in the unit to represent the extra weapon, and the animation would make it visually there. No special bones etc. are needed to do this.

Unfortunately .. there is no shortcut way to do this other than by re-writing hte animation movements.