156 replies to this topic

[Erephine]

Posted by: Erephine

Looking for:

a small team of people with a personal interest in seeing this happen
· with a bit of time
· with a bit more of patience
· ideally with rudimentary coding skills
· even more ideally with rudimentary knowledge of BGII animations
(but not necessary)

input from other relevant mod(s)
· ideally approaching standardisation

Details:

About me:

Previous mod experience: currently prolific author of 1pp
Have been modding IE for about five years off and on (whoa)!

What's going on:

While editing certain aspects of my (above) mod I spent some time working with the internal structure of IE animation slots, and was delighted to find them relatively comfortable to work with. Of course, after having successfully implemented the changes that affect my mod, that knowledge was nagging at me - it opened up quite a few more possibilities.

To cut a long story short, I've been annoyed by the animation slot problem before and know I'm not the only one, so I looked into it.

It turns out if you know what you're doing adding extra animation slots seems to be a relatively simple and straightforward task. I thought about doing things on my own but ultimately came to the conclusion that I don't think this is
· inside the scope of my mod at all, which I'd like to continue investing my time into
· something that is personally worth it for me on a large scale

So I'm basically asking if there is (still) anyone interested who does find it worth their while and would be willing to collaborate with me.

I imagine this should be most interesting for mega modifications looking to add animations, but also projects like the IWD to BGII port, which could natively support the animations missing in BGII.

I know there is a few people about who previously worked with porting animations to BGII using various workarounds such as the weapon animation method, which were far from perfect.

If you fit any of the above, or are involved in a mod that might benefit from this, or simply would like to have more animation slots in BGII, this is your chance to get in on the act and help make it happen.

So where do things go from here?

If we can get a few people interested in working on this, the next step would be looking into hosting (either here or elsewhere, I'd be flexible for this) so we have a place to discuss/share. I'd be willing to handle some of the coordination, write up a detailed step-by-step process for things (and providing back-and-forth support where it falls short!), convert animations where necessary, intermittently contribute some content myself, and anything random that pops up.

While this is very open-ended in scope and possibility, I'd like to see this project stay focussed on what would feel like an addition to the game, and I'd also like for any additions to be generally on the same level of quality of the original games.

Ideally this could also be a chance to have an open conversation with various larger mods that currently add animations to try and approach a standardised implementation.

What needs to be done:

· Decide which animations to include
· Organise, rename and if necessary convert them
· Writing the patch for the executable (sounds much scarier than it is, I assure you!)
· Create an optional BGII/TuTu mod that makes use of them where applicable
· Implementing all of the above into an installer
· Provide documentation

I'm mainly looking for people who can contribute with #2, #3 and #4 of that list, so if you feel you'd like to help out with any of them that would be lovely!

I'd just like to mention again the actual editing is very straightforward, so please don't be intimidated. <3

Expected development time:

A few hours per animation at most, which can be spread out among people.
Possibly a bit more to familiarise yourself with the process at first.



****


Naturally, because people wouldn't believe me I'm awesome, I'm not asking for help without anything to show for it. I've attached a proof of concept adding the human-ish Yuan Ti from IWDII to a new BGII animation slot.



The installer is ToB only, which needs to be patched to v26498. It is also very stupid and will overwrite your animate.ids and anisnd.ids files for NI to be able to cope with the new animation, so be sure to back them up. After installing, simply set a character of yours (or anything else) to IC_YUANTI4 in NearInfinity and loooooook.


If there's anything that doesn't make sense in this post, feel free to ask and I'll update it accordingly!

Attached Files

•  poc_yuantiA.rar   2.05MB   374 downloads

[Miloch]

Oddly, I've been working on this on the sly for some time, in continuation to Cuv's work and other conversations I've had with Galactygon, and also my analysis of existing slots and animations for BG2 and mods here.

I haven't talked about it much outside of the Aurora workroom (and not much there) because there didn't seem to be much interest after Cuv left in that first thread. Concrete interest, that is, as in folks actually wanting to help with this, not just "see it done." And it is as you say - it shouldn't take a whole lot of knowledge, just some commitment and direction. And you'd think the megamod/BWP people would be volunteering like mad, because frankly, I don't know how they play their games in the current state, what with animations being overwritten all over the place so that your goblins look like abishai and your cyclopes like driders and who knows what else.

What I've done so far is stack all the BG2 and IWD goblins and gnomes in a single slot, the "Goblin Axe" slot in BG2 (MGO1).

MGO1 Stacked Slot (Goblins and Gnomes)


It includes the following creatures, along with the weapons they need to display properly:

MGO1A	Goblin Axe - axe
MGO1B	Goblin Bow - bow (MGO2)
MGO1C	Deep Gnome (No Axe) - club, crossbow
MGO1D	Deep Gnome (Axe) - dagger
MGO1F	Goblin Elite Axe - flail (MGO3)
MGO1M	Rock Gnome (No Axe) - mace, morningstar
MGO1H	Rock Gnome (Axe) - halberd
MGO1Q	Goblin Shaman - staff
MGO1S	Goblin Elite Bow - swords, spear, sling (MGO4)
MGO1W	Goblin Leader - hammer

The "rock gnomes" are IWD svirfneblin, and the "deep gnomes" are the same animations I recoloured to look like actual svirfneblin. As we know, BG2 does not have animations for gnomes, and gives them dwarf or halfling animations instead.

Another reason I haven't hyped this about yet is because it has a few glitches still (like this one, but it turned out be unrelated to the actual animation stacking) but I should have those resolved shortly. Then I'll probably release this as a patch that includes a minimod installable in both Tutu and BG2/BGT (as a proof of concept the animations work). Either that or it'll be a library other modders can grab from Aurora (which is how this came about, since I needed to add the svirfneblin animations somewhere it wouldn't mess other things up).

Now there are essentially three drawbacks to "stacking." The first is the mandatory weapon thing. It may seem stupid, for example, for a pickaxe-wielding gnome to have a dagger. Well that is resolved fairly easy - you just put an undroppable dagger as his equipped weapon and an unstealable axe in his inventory so it all looks realistic when he's killed. If you want, you can even clone the axe and give it a dagger animation. Missile weapons work similarly - in fact you should be able to code a bow as using a "sword" animation, which is how the elite bow slot works out. This is the biggest drawback because you have to patch any creatures that use the existing animations, including in the vanilla game and mod-added ones.

The second drawback is the shared death animation you need in a stacked slot. And for that, you want to stack animations that are similar. As you can see, the creatures above are fairly similar. So this slot uses the generic gnome without axe (now in MGO1M), and it looks pretty realistic when they die, even on low resolution where the sprites are bigger. Half the time these guys get chunked anyway, because they don't have many HP to begin with.

The third drawback is that selection circles are hardcoded to animation slots, from what I understand (via Galactygon). So you want to a) make sure everything you stack is roughly the same size, and b) that what you're stacking matches roughly the existing selection circle.

In theory, this opens 3 extra slots (MGO2, MGO3, MGO4) but in actual fact, it opens only MGO2 because Check the Bodies uses MGO3 for a Bugbear (ignoring the fact ToB and SoA already have goblins there) and Region of Terror uses MGO4 for an abishai (ignoring a ToB goblin there). I have resolved the goblin issues here too, though for now I've left the mod-added creatures there.

Now it appears you have patched the .exe to add MYU4, which is very interesting and might make the whole approach above obsolete, in theory. Who wrote this patch? I asked Taimon whether it was even possible recently, and he didn't come back with anything concrete, so I figured it was either impossible or incredibly difficult. I don't know much about engine patching, but yours appears to look for a whole bunch of blank offsets just to add a single slot. So I have doubts though as to whether it is extensible to add a whole bunch of slots, which would be necessary just to resolve the existing mod conflicts.

It is also very stupid and will overwrite your animate.ids and anisnd.ids files for NI to be able to cope with the new animation, so be sure to back them up.

This, at least, is easily resolved. Just INCLUDE this t-anims.tpa action macro in your tp2 and it will patch both animsnd.ids and animate.ids to add any missing slots, including your new one. I did not add the other yuan-ti because those slots are already there in SoA and ToB.

[Erephine]

Now it appears you have patched the .exe to add MYU4, which is very interesting and might make the whole approach above obsolete, in theory.

This is exactly the point of this thread.

Who wrote this patch? I asked Taimon whether it was even possible recently, and he didn't come back with anything concrete, so I figured it was either impossible or incredibly difficult. I don't know much about engine patching, but yours appears to look for a whole bunch of blank offsets just to add a single slot. So I have doubts though as to whether it is extensible to add a whole bunch of slots, which would be necessary just to resolve the existing mod conflicts.

I wrote it

We do appear to have a nice bit of space, and additional slots of a same animation type will take less space to patch. If we do run out of space, it should be possible to relocate this into an external file, although admittedly that would be more difficult to work out.

This, at least, is easily resolved. Just INCLUDE this t-anims.tpa action macro in your tp2 and it will patch both animsnd.ids and animate.ids to add any missing slots, including your new one. I did not add the other yuan-ti because those slots are already there in SoA and ToB.

This is just an example, so I'm not sure if it warrants a proper installer

[Miloch]

Now it appears you have patched the .exe to add MYU4, which is very interesting and might make the whole approach above obsolete, in theory.

This is exactly the point of this thread.

Yeah, well now you tell me, after I spend an entire week of vacation on the beach patching goblins .

We do appear to have a nice bit of space, and additional slots of a same animation type will take less space to patch.

How much space, exactly? If it's enough for a few dozen new slots or more, then sign me up, tell me what to do, and I'll at least work it out for the 6 added animations above (in addition to the existing 4) because frankly, some of the glitchy things with stacking are getting to me. If, on the other hand, there's only space for a dozen, or if what we're patching in the .exe might cause unforeseen issues, I might stick with the stack, because I can probably work out the issues (at least for this series) and wouldn't want to take up finite space unnecessarily. Though I'm still interested in seeing (and helping with) adding new animations, and plenty of them, including all sorts of humanoids from PS:T.

If we do run out of space, it should be possible to relocate this into an external file, although admittedly that would be more difficult to work out.

Ascension64 was looking into this at one point (using something like an external .dll) but I don't think he produced anything concrete. From what I understand, it would be a lot of work.

This is just an example, so I'm not sure if it warrants a proper installer

Well, it's the addition of a single line of code and .tpa (which has additional benefits) but whatever. I'll take your word the new slot works, since you've got a screenshot. As to other new slots, ???

[Erephine]

How much space, exactly? If it's enough for a few dozen new slots or more, then sign me up, tell me what to do, and I'll at least work it out for the 6 added animations above (in addition to the existing 4) because frankly, some of the glitchy things with stacking are getting to me. If, on the other hand, there's only space for a dozen, or if what we're patching in the .exe might cause unforeseen issues, I might stick with the stack, because I can probably work out the issues (at least for this series) and wouldn't want to take up finite space unnecessarily. Though I'm still interested in seeing (and helping with) adding new animations, and plenty of them, including all sorts of humanoids from PS:T.

A conservative guess would be at least 30.

I wouldn't know about unforeseen issues, as they are always unforeseen.

Well, it's the addition of a single line of code and .tpa (which has additional benefits) but whatever. I'll take your word the new slot works, since you've got a screenshot. As to other new slots, ???

Feel free to try for yourself. I don't think you actually need the .ids files, it's just so you don't have to manually set an 'unknown' in NI.

[Chevalier]

And you'd think the megamod/BWP people would be volunteering like mad, because frankly, I don't know how they play their games in the current state, what with animations being overwritten all over the place so that your goblins look like abishai and your cyclopes like driders and who knows what else.

I am a bit of a smart person, but I have little patience for coding (better with GUIs) so I stay away from projects that need it. Our 'Big World Project' friends might be willing, but they (Leomar seems to read all the forums), like myself, always hear its hardcoded or crappy death animations. With new mods still coming out, like FFT, a standard seems to be hard to find that all mods will work together. Letting people know, like you have done, that the hardcoding can be over come and working to setup a standard will get peoples interest.

[Taimon]

I asked Taimon whether it was even possible recently, and he didn't come back with anything concrete, so I figured it was either impossible or incredibly difficult.

I haven't had the time to really take a closer look, but from my perspective it looked like there is a function that assigns a specific animation structure to every id. And it's gonna be difficult to generalize/externalize this function.
The exe patch modifies the compare for MYU*, and pushes the new compare instructions into an unused part of the executable. (I usually refrain from doing those things - it's a bit messy .)

/Edit: To clarify a bit, the part of the executable is clearly unused (as it's an alignment section) and the code won't cause any trouble there. It's just that I don't like jumping around in the executable.

If we do run out of space, it should be possible to relocate this into an external file, although admittedly that would be more difficult to work out.

What information would need to reside in that file?

Edited by Taimon, 01 June 2009 - 11:07 PM.

[Erephine]

It isn't really linked to MYu* specifically, it's just grouped that way in the .exe. The IWD style animations form one large group which is then broken down to smaller ones, like the Yuan Ti here, which in turn resolve to individual animation slots. The IWD style group all shares the same animation code with different settings (movement rate, etc.) by subgroup and individual animation slot.

And yes, it's a bit messy

[Miloch]

Feel free to try for yourself. I don't think you actually need the .ids files, it's just so you don't have to manually set an 'unknown' in NI.

Right, they're mainly for modding convenience, but they're no trouble to patch at all (and it beats overwriting them). However, I will need the .exe offsets to give it a try myself.* I have no issue with the "messiness" as long as that part of the .exe is "clearly unused" as Taimon says. If it's too technical/lengthy to post here, feel free to PM it.

If, on the other hand, you need more specific info about the goblin/gnome animations to provide the offsets, I can provide that too. Offhand just looking at the file names, I'd say they're pretty similar (pretty much identical, being from IWD) to the yuan-ti animation you added, having the same series at least. The archers, I've noticed, use an A4 instead of an A2 animation series, for what that's worth.

*Edit: I should clarify, offsets other than those you used for the yuan-ti... wouldn't want to use the same ones that've been used successfully for something else already.

Edited by Miloch, 02 June 2009 - 12:18 AM.

[yarpen]

My friend who is old non-weidu modder (Aurelinus, creator of NTotSC) got exe file with unlocked something like 5-8 new animation slots. I'll ask him about it, but it was made by someone else (Welverin) and polish .exe file will not help you I think.

[Erephine]

Not that simple, Miloch, as no other offsets exist until you add code for them to the .exe.

Let's see if we can get a few people interested and keep things in one place (as different .exe patches will almost certainly be incompatible, which would defeat one of the main points). If there isn't enough interest I'll be sure to write up and post a tutorial or something.

What information would need to reside in that file?

The simplest case would be pretty much the same as is added to the main .exe, but the good thing about using external code would be that you can be more flexible. For instance you could reroute the entire set of compares/slot assignments to keep everything in one place (once for each animation type group would make most sense). As space wouldn't be a concern you could also replicate the entire settings for each single animation slot, which would make it easier to individualise other settings (e.g. movement rate) that are currently set once per subgroup.

[Sam.]

When you add a new animation slot, can you set whether or not it can use an inventory paperdoll (or the style of inventory paperdoll, for that matter)? For exampse, by going outside of the exe and so having no limit on space, could one remake the "U" series animations so that they can use inventory paperdolls or is that not in the scope of this topic?

Edited by Sam., 02 June 2009 - 05:32 AM.

[leahnkain]

Maybe the CA Team can help, SirBillyBob has added a lot of new animations for Classic Adventures. I know he and Cuv had talked about this topic somewhat before in the past. I am in need of female Hill Giants, female Frost Giants and Female fire giants soon and may actually modify or create a new animation for it.

[Taimon]

What information would need to reside in that file?

The simplest case would be pretty much the same as is added to the main .exe, but the good thing about using external code would be that you can be more flexible. For instance you could reroute the entire set of compares/slot assignments to keep everything in one place (once for each animation type group would make most sense). As space wouldn't be a concern you could also replicate the entire settings for each single animation slot, which would make it easier to individualise other settings (e.g. movement rate) that are currently set once per subgroup.

I don't know enough about the animations (that's why I asked), but I know a bit or two about assembly, so let me know if I can help you there. But I guess we'll postpone this.

By the way, in your .exe patch you are using some bytes in the data segment, where you can't be sure it's really unused.
(Although I'd agree that it appears to be so.)
There is a library reference some couple of bytes above and the code at the reference uses indexed adressing mode, so I'm not 100% sure it's really unused.
You can avoid using the data segment at all by simpy using the stack to pass the string to the CString:operator= call.
Something like that for "MGo1":

push 0x00000000; push a dword here (zero-terminate the string)
push 0x316F474D; "MGo1" in little endian
push esp; pointer to our string on the stack
...; here the pointer to the CString object gets moved into ecx
call CString:operator=
add esp, 8; clean up the stack (the two dwords we used above)

[Erephine]

Indeed I do

Using the data segment should hopefully be okay though, as there is more than enough unused space available where the original references are called. You just have to make a little room for it, which I... was too lazy to do for this purpose (do you see a pattern here?).

And thank you very much for the offer, if this does work out I'd definitely appreciate any help/advice, especially as you seem to know what you're talking about I certainly can't say the same about myself, I do not know much (in fact, hardly anything) about assembly at all so there's probably going to be better ways to do things.

[Sam.]

EDIT: I was complaining about a spammer, but those posts have been deleted so....

Edited by Sam., 02 June 2009 - 03:45 PM.

[Sir BillyBob]

Maybe the CA Team can help, SirBillyBob has added a lot of new animations for Classic Adventures. I know he and Cuv had talked about this topic somewhat before in the past. I am in need of female Hill Giants, female Frost Giants and Female fire giants soon and may actually modify or create a new animation for it.

Right now we are using Cuv's hard work in grouping like creatures together (all wraith/ghosts animations in one slot, etc). I would love to be able to just use every animation from IWD2 or PST without having to micromanage each animation slot. And as Leahnkain pointed out, we want female giants for the up coming "G" mods to package into CA. So we do want to go beyond the animations already available in the Bioware games.

I can definitely help out by testing your work in our mod or seeing if anything we already did helps you out. Animations are a serious pain and I have had many fail to work because of mismatching frames per cycle and other issues. So if you can eliminate those problems, that would be great.

[Erephine]

Right now we are using Cuv's hard work in grouping like creatures together (all wraith/ghosts animations in one slot, etc). I would love to be able to just use every animation from IWD2 or PST without having to micromanage each animation slot. And as Leahnkain pointed out, we want female giants for the up coming "G" mods to package into CA. So we do want to go beyond the animations already available in the Bioware games.

I can definitely help out by testing your work in our mod or seeing if anything we already did helps you out.

Well, if you have animations for them...?

Basically yes, any nicely ported animations would be great if you have a full set (with their unique death animation). Testing isn't really needed at this point (there's nothing to test anyway), I'm mainly looking for people to help actually implement the content.

What is "aaaaaaaaaaaa" by the way?

Yeah, at least have the decency to make a grammatically correct sentence, such as Ái á Á á á í á - Á?

See, that isn't so hard.

[Choo Choo]

What is "aaaaaaaaaaaa" by the way?

Yeah, at least have the decency to make a grammatically correct sentence, such as Ái á Á á á í á - Á?

See, that isn't so hard.

It's a spambot and it's been taken care of.

Edited by Choo Choo, 02 June 2009 - 11:10 AM.

[Miloch]

Well, if you have animations for them...?

Cuv's animations are here. They should all have individual death animations - they just have a shared one at the higher level. I'm not sure if he resized any except maybe the ghosts and wights though. The PS:T animations will be larger than BG2 ones. There is a utility for that here though I don't think it resamples all that elegantly. There is also an IWD animation importer there, but as far as I know, nothing special needs to be done to IWD animations to get them into BG2.