115 replies to this topic

[Miloch]

Erephine, on Dec 8 2009, 07:33 PM, said:

Keep in mind the ratio is not consistent for all animations though - the Cornugon animation in BGII is actually larger than its PST original.

Ah, ok. It's not universally true but maybe it is in general. Maybe not, but seems to be for the abishai at least. Anyway, I think they should be resized to what the proper dimensions should be, using PnP resources for reference if necessary. If it's just a matter of a few pixels, it's probably not worth it. But the PS:T abishai is probably bigger even than a BG2 ogre.

[Erephine]

It's not bigger than the ogre, but yes, I agree (within reason, it would be silly to exactly replicate the PnP resources when BGII doesn't).

It just isn't as easy as 'apply this ratio to PST animation and it will fit BGII'. Only character animations are generally consistent, monsters tend to be all over the place when it comes to PST/BG size differences. The abishai definitely isn't either of the ratios you mentioned.

[Deratiseur]

Hello. I've made a kit pack which use all beetles from IWD (druid kit), all zombi, shade, wight and gouls from IWD (necromancer kit), all "winter" monster from IWD2 (ice troll, snow troll, white dragon, remorhaz and blue salamander)(aurile's elu kit)
I will include Mwrag, mweb, mgfos, mcrds from IWD2 and beetle, ants, all insect i can find and all living death i can find from NWN for upcoming update. Do you think i will have conflict with over modules if i use infinity animation ?

[Miloch]

Deratiseur, on 04 February 2010 - 11:02 AM, said:

Do you think i will have conflict with over modules if i use infinity animation ?

Not really. Infinity Animations is designed to avoid conflicts because it has dedicated slots for all animations. So even if you overwrite another mod's animations it's not a conflict unless it's a mod that's not using IA's assignments. In which case you can either require IA first or include the code you need. See Aurora's Shoes v5 for an example of how to do the latter (or v4 for an example of how *not* to do it ). I suppose the smartest way would be to check if the animations you need are in the game first, using a size check or similar. Aurora sort of does this for some animations (in lib/t-goblin.tpa) but not all. Like I said though, it's only an issue if different existing animations exist in the same slots and need to be reorganised, which IA's main component does.

[Drizzle]

Yeah. Though I'm a relatively clueless non-entity (hope I'm not poking my nose in where it isn't wanted o.o) the beauty of IA is that it opens up the potential of making, not just a few mods that modify animations compatible but, potentially (hopefully.. ultimately) making all mods affecting animations completely compatible and leaving open the possibility of future mods playing with the same, not even needing extra work to make totally backward-and-forwards compatible!

At it's most optimistic end-stage, this mod has the potential to make all those mods work together and improve even the basic games themselves (played with no other mods at all) by improving the individuality of creatures which have previously used the same (or a similar/recolored version of..) the same model.

Be under no illusions; this is a lot of work for the people (in this forum, and modifying their own mods) working to make this a possibility, but there is the goal of a point where the hard work is done, new mods are using a slightly modified base-line when using abnormal creatures, and all the hard work is behind people

Proviso: I am not involved in the wonderful work Erephine's done (again) or the work to make this, and everything that's gone before, realise their full potential. I've not deliberately typed falsehoods but I could be mistaken.

*cough* and, erm... as a bit of a postscript; if there's anything I've typed that is misleading, unnecessary or just, plain over-enthusiastic, I would appreciate hearing about it. Anything I've typed there that may do more harm than good, I will remove in a heartbeat.

Edited by Drizzle, 08 February 2010 - 11:08 AM.

[Miloch]

Drizzle, on 08 February 2010 - 10:59 AM, said:

potentially (hopefully.. ultimately) making all mods affecting animations completely compatible and leaving open the possibility of future mods playing with the same, not even needing extra work to make totally backward-and-forwards compatible!

The main component does this already (that was the purpose of the analysis early on in this thread).

Quote

improve even the basic games themselves (played with no other mods at all) by improving the individuality of creatures which have previously used the same (or a similar/recolored version of..) the same model.

And the optional components do this .

[Drizzle]

Wow. I'm absolutely blown away.
I'm told that most of what I considered to be a reasonably arcane, and distant goal is, in fact, implemented already!? o.o

I'm baffled and immensely impressed. I'm sure those pieces of work were not easy, yet they were completed within, say... 3 weeks of my taking a hiatus?!

I'm amazed at what you've all achieved ^^

[ScuD]

Got a question about bugbears from TDD in the Irenicus Dungeon. They all look like bugbears with clubs, but some of them are archers and fire arrows. Is it because there's no Archer animation for the bugbear?

[Miloch]

Not that I know of - just bugbears and bugbear captains. They should get the same animation they do in the original mod (IA just slots it properly to avoid conflicts).

[Chevalier]

I think they use a hobgoblin animation in TDD.

[ScuD]

Yep, but it was a bit unusual to see them standing with clubs (or maces) and doing a ranged damage I think we can ask Hoppy to change them in his revision from archers to melee for the consistency.

[Miloch]

ScuD, on 13 February 2010 - 07:43 AM, said:

Yep, but it was a bit unusual to see them standing with clubs (or maces) and doing a ranged damage I think we can ask Hoppy to change them in his revision from archers to melee for the consistency.

Bugbears actually use throwing maces according to the Complete Book of Humanoids. Not that there's any of those in the game (or mods that I know of) but they'd make a cool addition .

[Hoppy]

ScuD, on 13 February 2010 - 07:43 AM, said:

Got a question about bugbears from TDD in the Irenicus Dungeon. They all look like bugbears with clubs, but some of them are archers and fire arrows. Is it because there's no Archer animation for the bugbear?

ScuD, on 13 February 2010 - 07:43 AM, said:

Yep, but it was a bit unusual to see them standing with clubs (or maces) and doing a ranged damage I think we can ask Hoppy to change them in his revision from archers to melee for the consistency.

Sounds like the Check the Bodies bugbear animations as seen in the Academy of Kuldin are being used for normal sized bugbears that would use bows and such. Does seem kind of silly as the ones in CtB use just melee attacks (is that the IWD animation anyone?). TDD bugbears are used in a lot of areas for TDD specific quests. I don't remember you asking me anything about it or I may have overlooked the question if you did ask so it was unintentional. At this point I am not really sure what route I should take in animation changes for TDD et al.

[Miloch]

Hoppy, on 31 March 2010 - 06:48 PM, said:

Sounds like the Check the Bodies bugbear animations as seen in the Academy of Kuldin are being used for normal sized bugbears that would use bows and such. Does seem kind of silly as the ones in CtB use just melee attacks (is that the IWD animation anyone?).

The CtB ones are fine (except they overwrite goblin and myconid animations, but Infinity Animations fixes that). As Chev said, the TDD ones use hobgoblin animations, which is rather silly (the resemblance is minimal). But there are only 2 bugbears in TDD: bugbear.cre and bugarch.cre. The IWD bugbears have hardcoded maces (or clubs/morningstars) on their animations. Bugbear.cre is ok - it has an undroppable sword, but you're not really going to know what kind of weapon it has. So the only problematic one for the bugbear animation is bugarch.cre, since they clearly don't have bows (and don't really use them anyway per PnP resources). The CRE's name is just "bugbear" so I'd suggest giving it some sort of thrown weapon. In absence of throwing maces, then throwing axes, hammers or maybe darts. And then give it a mace or morning star instead of a droppable sword, then it'd work fine with the IWD/CtB animation. I can give you the code for this if you want, or we can just stealth it into IA (IA has to deal with all the messed-up mod animations anyway when it slots them properly).

[Hoppy]

Miloch, on 31 March 2010 - 10:23 PM, said:

Hoppy, on 31 March 2010 - 06:48 PM, said:

Sounds like the Check the Bodies bugbear animations as seen in the Academy of Kuldin are being used for normal sized bugbears that would use bows and such. Does seem kind of silly as the ones in CtB use just melee attacks (is that the IWD animation anyone?).

The CtB ones are fine (except they overwrite goblin and myconid animations, but Infinity Animations fixes that). As Chev said, the TDD ones use hobgoblin animations, which is rather silly (the resemblance is minimal). But there are only 2 bugbears in TDD: bugbear.cre and bugarch.cre. The IWD bugbears have hardcoded maces (or clubs/morningstars) on their animations. Bugbear.cre is ok - it has an undroppable sword, but you're not really going to know what kind of weapon it has. So the only problematic one for the bugbear animation is bugarch.cre, since they clearly don't have bows (and don't really use them anyway per PnP resources). The CRE's name is just "bugbear" so I'd suggest giving it some sort of thrown weapon. In absence of throwing maces, then throwing axes, hammers or maybe darts. And then give it a mace or morning star instead of a droppable sword, then it'd work fine with the IWD/CtB animation. I can give you the code for this if you want, or we can just stealth it into IA (IA has to deal with all the messed-up mod animations anyway when it slots them properly).

Ahh OK, this makes sense. There may be an additional change by BP for TDD's creatures for weapons and stuff because I think they get poison arrows too (undroppable). I can implement some changes in TDD in a release in a couple months (waiting for Italian translation) and see how things go from there.

Do the bigger bugbears have a thrown weapon animation or are they pretty static?

If you can give the code that would be cool and we can give the TDD creatures a mace and some thrown axes. Also if you want to include in IA and I'll make sure when I do it in TDD it won't interfere.

I was going to try and implement some of the animation changes for TDD 1.13 but I couldn't wrap my mind around it fast enough. I will play around with some things in my test install and get an idea of changes I can make without having conflicts.

[Miloch]

Hoppy, on 01 April 2010 - 09:52 AM, said:

Do the bigger bugbears have a thrown weapon animation or are they pretty static?

No animation really has a thrown weapon animation - it just takes it from the actual projectile BAMs. The reason arrows look silly is because you can tell they don't have bows, but you wouldn't necessarily know they didn't have throwing weapons.

Quote

If you can give the code that would be cool and we can give the TDD creatures a mace and some thrown axes. Also if you want to include in IA and I'll make sure when I do it in TDD it won't interfere.

Split this into 2 blocks:

COPY ~TDD/CRE/BUGARCH.cre~ ~TDD-CRE~
     ~TDD/CRE/BUGBEAR.cre~ ~TDD-CRE~
  SAY NAME1 @20198
  SAY NAME2 @20198

The first one for the archer:

COPY ~TDD/CRE/BUGARCH.cre~ ~TDD-CRE~
  SAY NAME1 @20198
  SAY NAME2 @20198
  REMOVE_CRE_ITEM ~helm01~ ~helmnoan~ ~bow03~ ~sw1h01~ ~arow01~ ~shld03~ ~ax1h04~ ~blun04~ //Animation consistency
  REPLACE_CRE_ITEM ~helmnoan~ #0 #0 #0 ~NONE~ ~HELMET~ //Helmet (No Animation)
  REPLACE_CRE_ITEM ~ax1h04~ #10 #0 #0 ~NONE~ ~WEAPON1~ EQUIP //Throwing Axe
  REPLACE_CRE_ITEM ~ax1h04~ #10 #0 #0 ~NONE~ ~WEAPON2~ //Throwing Axe
  REPLACE_CRE_ITEM ~blun04~ #0 #0 #0 ~NONE~ ~WEAPON3~ //Mace
  WRITE_BYTE 0x6e 0 //Large swords (was 3)
  WRITE_BYTE 0x70 0 //Bows (was 1)
  WRITE_BYTE 0x72 1 //Blunt weapons
  WRITE_BYTE 0x74 3 //Axes

REPLACE_CRE_ITEM and the fact we're also first removing the stuff we're adding makes sure this would be compatible with redundancy (using the code in more than one mod).

For the normal bugbears, might as well fix them up with morning stars - more realistic to get blunt damage from them.

COPY ~TDD/CRE/BUGBEAR.cre~ ~TDD-CRE~
  SAY NAME1 @20198
  SAY NAME2 @20198
  REMOVE_CRE_ITEM ~helm01~ ~helmnoan~ ~sw1hbug~ ~shld03~ ~blun06~ //Animation consistency
  REPLACE_CRE_ITEM ~helmnoan~ #0 #0 #0 ~NONE~ ~HELMET~ //Helmet (No Animation)
  REPLACE_CRE_ITEM ~blun06~ #0 #0 #0 ~NONE~ ~WEAPON1~ EQUIP //Morning Star
  WRITE_BYTE 0x6e 1 //Large swords (was 3)
  WRITE_BYTE 0x70 0 //Bows (was 1)
  WRITE_BYTE 0x73 3 //Spiked weapons