156 replies to this topic

[Erephine]

I'm fairly sure Cuv's animations have no female giants.

[leahnkain]

I was thinking of making something original using photoshop.

[Qwinn]

I don't have a lot to contribute here unfortunately, except possibly that if you would like a macro that makes engine patching fairly easy and convenient, I've got one for my PS:T mods. Shouldn't take much to alter it for BG2 (I'd think just pulling out the stuff that does size checks for the 2CD or 4CD version of PS:T and replacing it with checks to determine which version of the BG2 exe is used.)

Course, you can just do direct writes too, and if it's all in one area of the .exe maybe it wouldn't be worth it. But if you do wind up having to do lots of little patches in different areas of the .exe, let me know and I"ll try to hook you up.

Qwinn

[Erephine]

Sounds good, lots of little patches in different areas is exactly what's going to happen.

How does it work?

[Qwinn]

See my first post on this thread.

http://www.shsforums...showtopic=40991


If that looks like something you'd want to use, what I'd suggest is just downloading my Fixpack and taking a look at PST-Fix/tph/EngineFixes.tph. Tons and tons of engine examples as applied in a real modding situation there.

Qwinn

[Erephine]

Thanks

I had a look but from what I understand it's most useful if you have some pattern searches/replacements, so I don't know how useful it would be. My current process is a simple compare/replace, which is convenient (for me) in that it's readily automatable.

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Doesn't seem to be a lot of interest currently in any case.

[Sam.]

Doesn't seem to be a lot of interest currently in any case.

I think that there's an enormous interest in seeing it done, just a great deal fewer people that feel they have the skills, knowledge, or time to be useful or otherwise be able to contribute. And while I would be willing to help in any way I can, I'm afraid I'm lacking in all three areas, primarily the first (and most important) two. I am not artistic at all and have a record of being extraordinarily bad when it comes to WeiDU codeing, but I do have a rudimentary knowledge of other types of programming and can handle tedious but simple tasks... for what it's worth.

Edited by Sam., 04 July 2009 - 08:27 PM.

[Erephine]

I think that there's an enormous interest in seeing it done, just a great deal fewer people that feel they have the skills, knowledge, or time to be useful or otherwise be able to contribute. And while I would be willing to help in any way I can, I'm afraid I'm lacking in all three areas, primarily the first (and most important) two. I am not artistic at all and have a record of being extraordinarily bad when it comes to WeiDU codeing, but I do have a rudimentary knowledge of other types of programming and can handle tedious but simple tasks... for what it's worth.

That's all you'd need really, but if confidence is the problem I guess people could always contribute in this thread (if it's less intimidating? )

For a start, it would help if we had a list of all animations that are added by the various mods or which have been made, preferrably with a frame snapshot since animation names might be misleading. A comprehensive list of other IE animations that aren't in Baldur's Gate II would also be helpful (this would be pretty much all PST animations, etc.)

[Chevalier]

Is this any use? BP Animations Scheme as setup by King Diamond.

[Sam.]

Is this any use? BP Animations Scheme as setup by King Diamond.

This is probably also a good place to start. If it's possible, I would recommend that we keep all of the new animation slots outside of the .exe so that an indefinite number can be added and so that we aren't competing for the same space in the .exe as other mods (assuming that others have or will use it for something).

[Erephine]

It's definitely possible, but I'm not sure it'd be possible for me personally.

The lists are a bit confusing, but a good place for someone to start going through them and putting together a general list with references. Ideally we should have something like [image] [game it is from] [original prefix] [is this used in a mod or not] [original animation style] [name]. With animation style I mean the general setup of the animation files (for instance IWD style animations have A1, A1E... GU, SP, WK, ... files) and whether they are paletted or not (with standard BAM colours).

[Sam.]

The lists are a bit confusing, but a good place for someone to start going through them and putting together a general list with references. Ideally we should have something like [image] [game it is from] [original prefix] [is this used in a mod or not] [original animation style] [name]. With animation style I mean the general setup of the animation files (for instance IWD style animations have A1, A1E... GU, SP, WK, ... files) and whether they are paletted or not (with standard BAM colours).

Where all do you want a table of the animations from? BG1, BG2, IWD, IWD2? Animations have been gotten from NWN too, right?

[Erephine]

Everything that's been done (and that's not normally in BGII) would be best. BG1 doesn't have any that aren't present in BGII as far as I remember, and IWD shares a lot.

It's easier to sort out which to add if you can see the larger pattern.

[Miloch]

Everything that's been done (and that's not normally in BGII) would be best.

The list Sam linked should have all that. It includes King Diamond's list, Galactygon's and Cuv's (NWN/PS:T) work and anything else I was aware of. I also have it in a spreadsheet if someone wants to improve it. The only update I know of is the MGO1 slot for added goblins and gnomes I listed on the previous page here. As for the animation style, most of these are IWD style I think, but that should be confirmable by cross-checking the animation BAMs with the IESDP.

[Erephine]

Does it include things like these?

[Sam.]

OK, here is the better part of the IWD: HoW & TotL animations. I couldn't find anything that correlated the animations to their associated prefixes (or even a list of the prefixes for that matter), so I had to pull them from the IDMain.exe manually, which took a while. I haven't filled in the remaining prefixes because they seem to differ slightly from the BGII naming scheme and I was hoping that, with your intimate knowledge of the quirks behind "Female dwarves use male dwarf avatars but retain unique paperdolls. Gnomes use halfling animations for all classes except mages where they use male dwarven animations. They, too, retain unique paperdolls." type thing that you would have an easier time of figuring out who is what, Erephine. If you can fill those in while I extract the pictures and determine the palette scheme, that would save me a few hours.

A couple of notes:

The spreadsheet may not be 100% accurate, sorry. (I'm only human after all .)

The 4-character prefixes that have an additional [_**] only actually have .BAMs for the base prefix, so I'm guessing that there's hardcoded stuff that generates the other versions?

When getting the prefixes form the .exe, I came across UDRZ, UELM, USAR, and UVOL (for Drizzt, Elminster, Sarevok, and Volo) like there are for BG1/2 but they have no entry in ANIMATE.ids and no .BAMs, so are these unused slots or what?

Edited by Sam., 03 August 2009 - 06:07 PM.

[Erephine]

Don't worry, there isn't any need to fill that out anyway because they all exist in BGII. We don't need duplicates, just the ones that aren't in Baldur's Gate II

You can easily tell if they're paletted or not by looking at any frame of the animation (in NI for instance). If they have the default BAM colours (grey, teal, pink, yellow, red, blue, green) they are - most IWD animations are not.

-edit: for the sake of clarity:


(left: is; right: is not)

The 4-character prefixes that have an additional [_**] only actually have .BAMs for the base prefix, so I'm guessing that there's hardcoded stuff that generates the other versions?

Sort of, these are the animations that have a base animation with different palettes (but without the use of colour gradients) - the bear animation is an example with MBER using the corresponding palette bitmaps (MBER_BK.BMP, etc.)

Edited by Erephine, 02 August 2009 - 08:11 PM.

[Sam.]

Don't worry, there isn't any need to fill that out anyway because they all exist in BGII. We don't need duplicates, just the ones that aren't in Baldur's Gate II

I just figured that it would be nice to have a complete database, regardless of whether it is useful in this particular application or not. And since I was doing most of it anyway, why not be thorough? Hopefully someone else will find the information useful also. If you don't then I'll get around to it eventually.

[Sam.]

What's the difference between something like CLERIC_FEMALE_DWARF and CLERIC_FEMALE_DWARF_LOW ? They use the same set of .BAMs, right?

Edited by Sam., 03 August 2009 - 07:31 AM.

[Erephine]

These were used by Baldur's Gate I style character animations - the _LOW animations did not make use of the extended .BAMs (e.g. A1E) but instead mirrored the normal files. This is standard in Baldur's Gate II, so there's no difference.