59 replies to this topic

[Steve]

> That's a bummer. I don't know why they changed it for IWD2 when it was working for BG2, but them's the breaks.

It's probably that the compiler they used is optimizing duplicate strings; you'll need to find and change the pointers to each string in the program.

[Erephine]

^ pretty much that, exactly. The plain text references appear to be just a list, with the actual linking information to the animation slot being stored elsewhere. In the Baldur's Gate executable, they are sorted by weapon size category, and while the category names appear on the Icewind Dale ones too, they are totally chaotic and mismatched. The game still uses the right ones, so it has to be linked from some other place.

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Not much to say. I wanted this one to be good, so naturally everything that could possibly go wrong did go wrong. Anyway. I really hope I haven't messed anything else up (like the installer *cough*).

I hope you enjoy it <3

» download ici «

Edited by Erephine, 20 April 2009 - 03:22 PM.

[Erephine]

I would just like to note that I successfully patched my copy of Icewind Dale II to not only accept separate animations for female mage gnomes/dwarves, but also support them in place of the duplicate halfling animations that were used for the other classes. Since IWD HoW seems similar enough, I should be able to do that, too

I have no idea how to implement this into a patcher yet, as the changes are a little more profound (and I could very well have broken something else). Also I'm not actually sure how versions differ, or which patch version I had installed originally. It would be lovely if someone could PM/upload for me to compare. If possible, I'd like to see the latest patched versions for US/UK (I don't know if they're the same?) and International installs in as far as they differ - I couldn't find any good information on if there's just one international version, or if they're separate by language.

Thanks.

[berelinde]

Cool!

You don't know how happy I am that you're doing this. Are you planning on doing female dwarves in full plate, too?

[Erephine]

Yes of course.

There's still the two plate armour animations missing (fighter/cleric), the thief animations, and all of the mage ones.

That said, I've finished (and included) the patching for IWD II and IWD HoW. The latter was a lot easier to patch than the sequel, so that was nice. The WeiDU installers for the components are really really ugly, but they work and verify everything they patch. The different installers have been moved into subcomponents, with only the appropriate ones being offered. Similarly to BGII there's not that much to enjoy yet, but hopefully not for that much longer.

Note:
There's two versions of IWD II supported, and though the second one says 'EU' I'm not really sure what it is. Use it if the first one fails. The first one matches all official patches for download (both international and English) so it should work for almost everyone though.

The IWD I support includes fully patched HoW (v1.4.1) and TotL (v1.4.2) installs, which in contrast to the IWDII patch are detected by the installer.


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[Erephine]

From a technical perspective, they're independent different animation series? Not quite sure what you mean The female halflings are mostly the same as they were originally, though shifted by one. You can read about it here.

There's four categories (L, M, N, S) the various objects you can equip are rendered for. This means any animation that should make use of them has to 'fit' one of the categories in terms of relative positioning of hands, head, etc. So they're not just roughly the same size, they're exactly the same size, because they all belong to the 'S' avatar category. As you pointed out, the visual difference between males, females, dwarves and halflings obviously is their anatomy.

The gnomes currently use the halfling animations except for mages, where they use the dwarven ones. In the IWD components I posted, all classes of gnomes use the dwarven animations, which I feel are slightly more appropriate (because they wear shoes and don't have hairy feet!). I may change the BGII patching component to this behaviour as well once this is finished (not sure about it yet).

[Erephine]

I won't. Gnomes will either use the dwarven ones, or the halflings.

The male dwarven mages were the only small-sized mage avatars the game had, so they were used for all of them. This is actually a leftover from BG1, where gnomes didn't have their own animation slot at all (they all used dwarven paperdolls and avatars) so the animations included aren't supposed to actually be dwarves but gnomes, just sharing the dwarven naming convention. The only other option would have been halflings but, like dwarves, they can't be mages in BGII and as such not even an animation slot exists for them.

With the 3rd Edition rules in IWDII, the class restrictions don't apply but as the content is copied over from BGII exactly the same animations and animation slots exist. IWD is 'smarter' in that female dwarves were linked to the female halfling avatars but as no mages exist for those, halfling mages end up with the bearded dwarf/gnome mage look as well.

The original unarmoured halfling females look more like they're wearing bodysuits, whereas yours look more like they're wearing dresses or skirts. Is this intentional, or am I looking at different animation series?

Did you read the post I linked to? The original animation series was pretty much off by one armour level. The new unarmoured ones are in fact the 'leather armour' animations that shipped with the game, the leather armour ones are the original 'chainmail' ones (with no chainmail to boot), only the actual chainmail animation itself is new (because there wasn't any).

In other words, the original game had two unarmoured animations, and no chainmail at all. I got rid of the bodysuit one because it seemed more consistent that way.

Understood. Dwarven females should be a bit taller than halflings or gnomes (roughly 4' instead of 3' or so) but there's no way to do this without a lot of hackery, repositioning of weapon animations, and would probably end up looking wrong anyway.

If you really wanted it to be representative, you'd have to add gender height differences as well (they vary quite a bit for different races), not to mention separate series for full and half elves, tieflings, and halforcs.

[Erephine]

But I guess you were saying only they'd have their own paperdolls, not also avatars . I guess I could live female gnomes using the halfling animations. It'd be nice if they had longer hair and shoes, but I've read the issues with the former, and it's not like you can really make out any kind of detail on these tiny sprites.

I guess it depends on the resolution you play in and the size of your screen. If you push the resolution high enough, you won't even need this component

Yeah, I read it, but I don't think I understood it the first time. Bear with me, I'm just a half-orc. I think I get it now. Basically, as per this graphic you deleted the progression on the left and added the one on the right (and is it just me or is the only difference between the two panes the colour?).

Yes, exactly! (and they're different).

Bear with me just a bit more on another dumb question, but is the engine not capable of having *four* animation series for the halfling? Don't some of the other series have as many different "armours"? I think the "bodysuit" series looks a bit more like leather armour than the 2nd skirt series, but it would be nice to have both.

Not the way the original game is set up.

What would you use the second unarmoured one for?

[Erephine]

The plate mail was implemented correctly in the original game

There's one frame error in the cleric plate mail animation which I've fixed but I was too lazy to upload the entire avatar fix files again just for that one frame. I should remember to do that sometime.

Well, like I said, the bodysuit looks a bit more like realistic leather armour to me.

Except it doesn't have any leather armour except some shoulder pads. The rest is clothing.

[Miloch]

The plate mail was implemented correctly in the original game

Oh? Maybe I never checked for halflings. Mine are typically thieves or thief combos (therefore, leather wearing).

Well, like I said, the bodysuit looks a bit more like realistic leather armour to me.

Except it doesn't have any leather armour except some shoulder pads. The rest is clothing.

Well, someone could repalette it to use the leather/armour instead of major/minor colours . Nevermind. I know how hard that work must be, editing all those BAMs. I probably asked you this a while ago, but what do you use for that? A combination of PS/BAM Workshop or something more sophisticated?

[Erephine]

That would be enough for a different topic But yes, it's pretty much a very sophisticated way of very unsophisticatedly editing the files in Photoshop/BAMWorkshop I.

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This one was a bit tricky.

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Progress is going to be a little bit slow, as when I was making the IWD patch I was quite pleasantly suprised by how easily structured the animation slot information is, so I absolutely had to patch something else in (very hush-hush, not telling yet) which requires a fair bit of content too Bear with me.

» download here «

[Erephine]

Maybe.

In any case thanks for pointing it out, I didn't know IWDII updated that by itself.

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I really like how this one turned out. The paperdoll is pretty much new, as the old one didn't fit the animation so well. This would have been finished sooner, but rebuilding the animation the first time around the offsets somehow managed to get messed up, which meant I had to do it twice. If it isn't one thing, it's another

» you can still download here, fancy that! «

[berelinde]

Wow. That's so awesome!

I can't believe how fast you work.

[Erephine]

I usually have a buffer of (half-finished) things, which is probably why it seems that way

So it isn't quite like I started to do this one from scratch after I posted the cleric animations, I already had a rough draft at that point.

Though I do spend an unhealthy amount of time on it

Edited by Erephine, 09 May 2009 - 03:55 PM.

[Leomar]

Though I do spend an unhealthy amount of time on it

Thank you very much for each minute you put in your great work.


Greetings Leomar