Heya Galactygon

Yeah, still toying with options. I had another idea to just put the 'chunks' animation into several of the creature animations blank files... that way you will always at least see something happen... but not tested to see how it looks.
Rabain and SirBillyBob: Well, all the familiars 'could' be consolidated into a single slot... probably... but you have to remember that all of their animations would have to be rebuilt to use that trick... and it hasnt even been tested. In order to use the weapon slot trick, you need
IWD style animations (which use the E bams), all of the familiars in the game use the
BG style animations: G1, G2, G11, G12, G13, G14, G15, G21, G22, G23, G24, G25, G26. It would not be hard for me to convert them... that is basically what I have had to do with the
PST animations already. And... it would free up 5
BG style slots that are better utilized by an
NPC type animation... and, in some cases, weapon animation can be given to these. I am not sure about the familiar slots though... would need to test it.
On yet another side note: I began to notice that not all Animate.ids files distributed around with mods have the same listings. Tass sent me the ids for
BGT.. and although it has some updated refs, it was also incomplete. I was seriously trying to make sure that all possible slots are actually used. I began looking through all the Animate.ids files I could find... and they are ALL different. Here and there... missing an entry. Some have entries that others do not.
So, taking a break from converting animations... I went on a quest through the .EXE with my hex editor to look for all the prefixes for animations that should be useable in the game. I know that it has been done many times before... but I wanted to see for myself. As I began comparing IDS files for ANIMATE and ANISND... I noticed alot of missed listings on each... so I have a fully repaired Animate.ids and Anisnd.ids. Will upload it soon when I have finished exploring the options.
My findings yielded a few anomalies:
MSAI animation is contained and shipped with BGII... but there is no listing for this animation in the EXE. It is mentioned in another thread here "Have you seen this creature". It may be the BLOB_MIST_CREATURE... but the Animate.ids, Anisnd.ids and EXE list this entry as MMST prefix... not MSAI. So... I am unsure. I havent tested the slot... if tested, it should crash the game to use it... and that is good news if it does. A new animation can be placed into that slot. It uses the
BG animation style of G1, G2, G11, G12, etc.
Dragon slots: It appears to me from looking at the EXE that the engine actually supports 7 dragon prefixes... but I may be wrong. There is an awful lot of ">>>FALSE. MDR7 " going on in the EXE. Will test this out. But also looking at the EXE has got me thinking... without tampering with the byte count... why can't we patch the EXE to give us a few more animation prefixes and slots? It should be possible. I saw several opportunities to unlock or even add prefixes where there was redundancy. But... I am not an expert on that.
Here are the prefixes listed in the EXE that do not seem to have animations: MDR4, MDR6, MDR7. There are at least 7 dragons listed in the Animate.ids... but these mostly all appear to be attached to MDR1 in the EXE. Tons of code about that with the animation profile... then the anomalous refs for MDR4, MDR6 and MDR7. MDR5 appears to be used... as does MDR1, MDR2 and MDR3.
Another ref in the EXE that I could not find in any ids... nor in the game is SSHD. This ref appears right between Sarevok and the Doom Guard... which makes no sense to me... there are no missing bytes in there????:
USAR 0x6404 USAR CGAMEANIMATIONTYPE_SAREVOK
SSHD NOT FOUND
MDGU 0x6405 MDGU CGAMEANIMATIONTYPE_DOOM_GUARD
MDGU 0x6406 MDGU CGAMEANIMATIONTYPE_DOOM_GUARD_LARGER
Please bear in mind that I am old and might be blind... if you have knowledge of these prefixes that I missed. WinHex is fun... but the numbers and characters do blurr after a while of staring at code. Anyways... please correct me if I am wrong on any of my so-called anomalies

Just looking for opportunities to exploit.
Cuv
Also.. if anyone can tell me just how to patch the EXE by replacing bytes with
WeiDU (is it possible?)... then I would be grateful. Want to try a few things out.