Animation.cfg issues and questions

[Aeon]

Hi there.

 

I'm sort of a newbie modder to JK2... but i know the basics.

 

What i'm interested in right now is changing some of the animations... namely, i want to extend the time the saber is held in the defensive positions.

 

What i mean by this is that sometimes NPC's will block an attack by raising the saber horizontally... and it will remain there for a moment. I believe it is possible to make PCs do the same thing. Ostensibly all you have to do is change the values for frameCount or loopframe or something for that animation.

 

However, this is where my knowledge ends. What i would like from the modding community here is a little information:

 

1. What are the names for the blocking animations? (e.g. both_walk1 is the name for how the weapon is held while walking forward) and

 

2. Which value should be changed to lengthen the duration of the animation? (i.e. fameCount, target frame, framespeed or loopframe)

 

Thanks in advance for any assistance y'all can provide,

Æon

[idontlikegeorge]

i think the framespeed value would do it; i cant help you with the animation names, looking thru them in modview, i cant tell

 

one thing i did notice, is that when i set blocking to be manual, when i held down my block button, the saber would be held out defensively like the reborn do

[Aeon]

Framespeed is the variable i'm looking for. The problem is that even when looking at the animations in modview, i can't seem to translate the standing block animations to animations.cfg (i know they're all in the order that they appear in modview). See, the problem is that when you're playing it's much more difficult to judge which is which than when you're looking in modview.

 

So maybe some animation expert can answer some quick questions about positions:

 

What do P1, BR, BL, TL, B, R, L, S1 (especially), T1, T2, etc. mean?

 

Also, when it reads something like Both_T1_BL_BR or Both_T1_BR_S1, what does it mean? I know these are animation sequences, but if i only want to alter framespeed on the part where he blocks (which, i'm assuming, is the BR part), how do i do it?

 

Thanks again,

Æon

[Aeon]

Anyone at all?

[idontlikegeorge]

im pretty sure the numbers are for the stance styles: yellow/blue/red/desann/tavion 1/2/3/4/5

 

after looking thru it smore, i still cant make heads or tails of it; all ive figured out is the first saber sequences, BOTH_A1_BL_TR etc., seemed to be linked to eachother;

 

like _B1_BL___ merges with _BL_TR which goes into _D1_TR___; it starts at bottom left, goes to top right, then stops

 

im assuming the letters (in this set of animations atleast) are Beginning, Attack, and Done; B then A then D seems to be the order in which those are linked

 

and i think the other letters are top, bottom, left, right; T, B, L, R

 

i dunno if that would be of any help, it might be obvious to everyone already; im not a modeller or animator so i dont need to study this stuff to much

 

BTW: the nekkid jan skin is really great for watching all the thousand sequences in the animation.cfg

[Aeon]

Yeah, this helps a bunch. I'm not an editor or anything either; i just wanted to improve my JK2... i knew enough to know there was a way to do it, but not enough to go about doing so.

 

Thanks again.

 

Oddly enough, none of the "real editors" so much as replied to say they weren't going to help me. Thank God for people like you that actually spend time with laypersons such as myself.

[idontlikegeorge]

yeah well im a layperson too, helping people helps me learn the topic as well

[Harukaze]

Sadly, the reason no one's responding, is because it isn't currently possible to make changes. Don't ask me why, I didn't make it that way : ( Even changing animation.cfg doesn't help, because it's been done to no avail.

 

Note I said currently. People are trying to work around our current limitations, and I won't point you in their direction if I could remember where it was exactly *sheeps* Check for a thread mentioning gla.

[idontlikegeorge]

yeah you can make changes, atleast some - i even made some dumb changes (like making force jump into the DFA leap - but the saber isnt toggled to damage on it so it doesnt do anything lol)

 

Aeon isnt asking to add or change animations; just wants to have it so an animation sequence is a little bit longer

[Harukaze]

Right but from what I've seen, making changes to the animations.cfg doesn't actually do anything.

[idontlikegeorge]

did you read my post?

 

force jump/"advanced jump" (where the character holds arms out and "flies") is now the red stance 1.02 whore special move (where character leaps forward and slashes saber down)

 

all done in animation.cfg

 

basically all those mods changing the rolls to different acrobatic stunts, all by just tweeking the animation.cfg

 

so what exactly are you talking about?

[Harukaze]

Yes but isn't that MP? The original poster was talking about NPCs, which is definately a Single Player issue. As far as I know, the game doesn't seem to load the different animations.cfg file for a model in SP.

[Aeon]

Actually, i was talking about Kyle, who uses the animation.cfg that's located in the models/players/_humanoid directory.

 

And yes, you can make changes to this and affect single player Kyle movement (if i'm not mistaken, changes here also affect Kyle multiplayer). For example, i've made it so that sideways movement+tapping jump gives you the cartwheel, while moveing sideways+holding the jump button give you the regular flip (in-air roll) animation. That way, unlike the mods that are out now, the sideways ground roll doesn't have to disappear.

 

What i was looking for is a way to stop the end of a block animation, so that Kyle does sort of what the Reborn will do when going to block your strikes, holding the saber at an angle. The Reborn will do this even if your saber never makes contact... i was figuring that making some changes to one of the variables would do this.

 

That's all.

[idontlikegeorge]

actually, no it wasnt in MP harukaze

(i hate JK2 mp - if i wanted to play quake i woulda bought quake!)

 

anyway, i have it work fine in SP - i put the edited .cfg file into ext_data in the mod folder; it could be possible that jk2 doesnt like an edited .cfg in base that aint paked...?

 

aeon, ive seen what you are looking for in a few instances: like mentioned, when saber defense is set to manual, kyle will hold the saber out; also ive seen it when there's long range fire (blaster or bolts) coming, but missing kyle - he'll still hold out the saber to block it (that may be only with higher arc defense levels);

 

then one wierd time i scripted it so the player would have no force powers; but still spawned with a saber - that made some wierd things happen - like i could still use blue and yellow stance until i switched weapons, then back to the saber i could only use the stance i last used heheh - also, reborn attacks would be blocked (if they were right in front), and kyle would hold the saber out for a longer period of time

 

anyway, those are wierd circumstances; the hardest thing for you aeon, is to find out which sequences are the blocking sequences; once you find those out, you should be able to tweek them to your needs - good luck

 

(sorry but im messing with my own stuff and aint interested in the animation.cfg anymore so i probably wont be of any help from here on out)

[Aeon]

Hey, thanks anyway. I'm still searching for those blocking anims, but the animations.cfg file is very long, with very many frames (Modview desperately needs a way to target specific frames for view), and the animations in question - the standing blocks - are very short and seem hidden among the other ones.

 

So right now i'm just going to concentrate on replacing useless animations with useful ones... i.e. replacing the taunt gesture with something like FJSS or Deflectslash... there are lots of cool unused animations that could poitentially make this game as deep as any full-fledged fighting game.

 

But i prattle. Thanks again, and good luck.

[idontlikegeorge]

the problem with "useless animations", is that giving it an animation with use, it wont necessarily do its use - like if you change the taunt to a saber move the saber will do no damage/have no blocking ability

 

just like how i said force jump into force leap = saber didnt do anything; the only way to make new attacks is to replace current attacks

 

but primarily visual things, can be changed (like rolls, jumps, etc.)

[Aeon]

I ended up finding those block animations. However, you're totally right about the "useless animations" issue. I figure the best thing to do would be to find anmiations like the jumping slash (where you simply jump up and slash down/left/right, or maybe the lunge animation (which i absolutely abhor anyway) and swith them to cooler stuff.

 

BUt yeah, you've definitely got a point there.

 

Edit: Looks like those animations i just mentioned may just be in-air versions of normal standing slash animations.

 

Oh well.

 

The sad part is that when ol' Mike et al. get around to releasing that animations package, i won't have the foggiest about how to go about doing anything with it. Not to mention the fact that dopwnloading a 650 mb file is totally out of the question for me, lol.

[idontlikegeorge]

dont got cable eh? hehe (course even with cable 650 megs d/l will sift out ppl who arent seriously interested in animation)

 

yeah well actually i think the jedimoves or jedistyle or one of those things replaced the lunge with one of those "tornado" animations

 

the red special move is called forceleap or something like that, and the blue lunge, well i forgot but it wasnt hard to find

[Harukaze]

Okay, one quick last question and I think I'll finally understand what you're talking about. I see that this is indeed for SP, which makes me happy [i feel the same way about MP for the most part as Idontlikegeorge]; but is it possible to change the animations using the config file for just one npc entry? It sounds like you're saying, and forgive me if I'm wrong, that only Kyle [or, more accurately, the player character; it doesn't matter who that's set to really] is doing something a certain way, but other characters [in this case the Reborn] are doing something else.

 

So is making a change to just one character possible?

[idontlikegeorge]

i dont think you can harukaze, cuz i have no clue where the animations are toggled from; its probably in the sp code somewhere that tells the AI to do this animation when evading, etc.

 

the closest thing you can do is change all around moves; like the reborn, for instance, use a butterfly move for evasion; you could just tell the butterfly moves to use the frames for roll, and reborn will roll instead of butterfly

 

but i dont see how you could make it so this reborn can butterfly and this reborn rolls... besides heavily scripting the npc's moves

[Harukaze]

Well thanks for the feedback. If I ever hear about someone figuring it out, I'll let you know, but I'm thinking you're right. It would have been nice though; The specific thing I had in mind is for the recently created Maw model, but it could have expanded to so really interesting things outside of just that. Like you said, how the Reborn do their own thing, but if just one of the Reborn could be changed [say, for example, the acrobat] it would have at least made things more interesting.

 

Sorry if I pulled things off topic from your original thread, and best of luck to getting that working.

[ihavedirt]

hey,

 

this is just a really big back(stab) in the dark but if you are altering the animation.cfg in the models\players\_humanoid directory, doesnt that affect all of the humanoid players including reborn, jedi and other npcs in SP?

 

i seem to remember seeing other NPCs doing cartwheels etc when I was using a mod that altered some of the moves, not just the acrobat reborns. i could be mistaken though

 

~* beau *~

[razorace]

There's GOT to be a way to make new moves. Raven make new moves when they made the game. Has anyone tried "working backwards" by finding an attack move and find where it causes damage? Hopefully, you can edit the move assignment attributes without the SP source code. If not, you could at least figure out where the attributes are by looking at the MP source code.

[idontlikegeorge]

Originally posted by razorace

There's GOT to be a way to make new moves. Raven make new moves when they made the game. Has anyone tried "working backwards" by finding an attack move and find where it causes damage? Hopefully, you can edit the move assignment attributes without the SP source code. If not, you could at least figure out where the attributes are by looking at the MP source code.

yeah its being worked on; lookit this thread!

and the part about working backwards - well, im pretty sure, the end result would be in currently unavailible code; and as for check mp on the subject; sure, go for it (like said i dont like mp so im not about to look at c source over it)

 

ihavedirt, your post gave me an idea, i guess im gonna mess with the animation.cfg file more than i thought

 

if my idea is successful, ill post it; if it fails, ill post it too - so people dont make the same mistake (lol someone else probably tried this idea and failed already lolol but oh well gives me something to do before work )