Wow, a lot more activity than I'm used to. Damn, I hate being so lazy.
Alright. Thank you for your thanks. I honestly am really egotystical. I merely make stuff for myself, and when it's not so embarassingly bad, I release it for others. Somehow, someway, many people tend to actually like some of my crappy moddings. This is envigorating. Really.
I have tried my hand at manual blocking and... Nope. I just can't. Don't have the reflexes, and nowadays I barely have the time to keep them up (especially since most days I leave home about 7am and only come back after 9pm, so I need to: eat, sleep, shower, write essays, articles, whatever, unwind, try to have some fun, and occasionally try my hand at some coitus. Being a grown up is so much unfun.
Nate884 said:
I see your post mentioned you made animations for VC??? I have just started making a personal submod for Viking Conquest and would love to have some new animations for it!
I was actually planning on trying my hand at putting some of these into it manually, but if you happen to have a file already I would be eternally grateful
Well, actually I do. I will work on setting it up for uploading this thursday. I am far too tired right now to do it. (Sorry, I feel like a 70yr old these days...)
Also, I am new to modding and have not touched animations for this game yet, could you give me a few pointers perhaps?
Well, it will seem daunting, but there are some neat tutorials out there. I learned through them. Do forum-search for them 'animation tutorial' or something. Until then, there are some simple stuff you need to understand about the animations in the game:
Animations.txt is a text file. (No ****, sherlock) There are essentially 3 kinds of things inside the text: the "Animation Set" keys, the animations per se, and the NUMBERS. There are
A LOT of numbers.
ready_thrust_onehanded 1679884800 1679843338 1
0.350000 attacks_thrust_onehanded 5 13 7 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
Animation set keys: they define what is your action in-game. Stand, Walk, Run, these are pretty self-explanatory. The 'complicated' ones are the combat anims: they follow the same principle of ~3 sets per group of linked actions.
Ready-the animation that plays when you click/hold to raise your weapon,
Release-the animation of the swing/stab/whatever;
Release_continue-Supposedly the animation that plays after the attack has ended, and the char brings the weapon close to the body. If there are more than one of them, the game will choose one at random to play, that's why there's only one of each you'll notice in the native files.
The animations: most of them are either
animhuman or some other random name with with some numbers before and after, the numbers I left for last because they're complex. If you look at my modded actions, you'll see plenty of different animations names. What are they? These are the actual references to the animations inside the resources folder. If you go and open any animation resource (.brf, with Open brf), you'll see there are plenty of animations there, and the game looks into actions.txt to go after those specific animations. If you look at taleworlds files, there'll only be one animation, a huge one with thousands of frames. Somehow for them it's better to have one animation with thousands of frames, and they order Actions.txt to find those specific frames (numbers... the DAMN NUMBERS). That's all for the text itself.
Les nombres: What are they? How do they work?
The First and most important number: the last one on each line of Animation Set.
ready_thrust_onehanded 1679884800 1679843338 1
This one tells how many animations this set contains. THEY MUST MATCH. in this example, there's only one, let's take a look at my anim:
unequip_spear 0 184549446 3
0.30 equip_arms 15 10 1 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
0.33 equip_arms 15 10 1 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
0.36 equip_arms 15 10 1 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
There's 3 animations, so it must be 3 in green there. If it's wrong for ANY REASON, the game will crash on the first loading screen. So BE SURE TO ALWAYS CHECK, or else you'll have to check count ALL the animations in all the >600 sets. I've done this countless times. Now I keep a daunting number of backups for each save, so if it's ever wrong, I simply count it as a loss and try to redo what I changed so I don't have to check each set.
The TIME numbers: These set for how long in
Seconds the animation will play. 1.0 = 1.000000 = 1 Second. 0.5 = 0.50000 = Half second.
0.85 equip_arms 253 276 1 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
0.350000 attacks_thrust_onehanded 5 13 7 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
The number of zeros means nothing. I wouldn't go over 6 because I'm afraind, and you really don't need such Formula 1-specific timing for animations. This game allows this. So what this number means is that the animation will play for this much in seconds.
An animation has no specific time in this game, they have a set number of frames, so what this does is tell to play those frames in
### seconds. If there's only 1 or two frames and you tell it to play for 3 seconds, it will take 3 seconds to go from frame one to the last one.
The game compensates the space between each frame by smoothing out the animation, so the animation can literally contain two frames of an arm set like this: Frame 1: | ; Frame 2: __ ---the game will fill the gap by making something like Frame 1.5: / so it looks 'natural'. So the animation may contain a thousand frames, or 1, this number will make those frames play in the specified amount of seconds.
Some animations (like death anims) have a specific set limit of 3~5 seconds. So if you tell the animation to play for 15 seconds, it will calculate the frames to play for 15 seconds, but the game will stop the animation after the 3rd or 4th second, so it'll be like a statue there. That's why many of the death animations look awkward sometimes.
The FRAME NUMBERS: The easiest. It tells the game which frame is the
starting frame of the animation, and which is
the last one.
0.350000 attacks_thrust_onehanded 5 13 7 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
So the animation has frames 0, 1, 2, 3...15, 16, 17 ,18, 20, 35. It doesn't need to be linear, nor continuous. If you tell to play from 0 to 35, it will fill play all the frames, it doesn't need to be from 0 to 35 in perfect order, the game knows how to 'fill the gaps'. If you tell it to play from 5-15, it will play from 5 to 15.
If by some reason you want to invert the animation, you can simply alter the initial and final frames:
0.350000 attacks_thrust_onehanded 13 5 7 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
The game knows it will have to play it backwards. Pretty neat, huh?
Now the other numbers I have virtually no idea what they are. Never messed with them, as far as I know, they barely messed with me, so we leave it at that and no one gets hurt. Not so much, at least.
Basically, I want combat to be a little slower and more deliberate, I am working on changing weapon and damage stats to ensure that no one is 'invincible' just because they wear armor, and I want every engagement to be a risk (I hate hack and slash)
That's why I like many of your animations, they extend the time between swings and blocks, but could you tell me where I should look or what gets edited to control attack speeds with different weapons?
So about the timing: have you tried to change the in-game option of Combat Speed to slowest? This is not what you want? I haven't messed too much with this because I really messed it up some long time ago.
One thing you COULD do is to change the time of ALL the ready animations to something bigger than 0.3-0.35 or 0.4. My advice is DON'T give different numbers, it'll screw ALL the attacks, even more so if you don't know which will play. So you bulk edit it to something like 0.9 and test it in the arena or something and see how well it plays.
Don't overdo it, and remember that if you use long ready animations, you'll be unable to make combos, because you'll have to keep the mouse button pressed for this long for the attack to be ready.
You could, mayhaps, try to mess with the Release_continue animations (increasing their times), but I haven't tried it, and it may not work as you want it to. You gotta try it to get it, though.
One last question, sorry, I'm asking a lot, but is your VC animations the same as 1257? Or did you modify them?
It's technically the same, but with a lot less awkward ones, and maybe some other new ones that fit well. I couldn't possibly say the real difference, however.
No, thank YOU. I just spent one hour and a half writing this, and I feel so good. Thanks, mate.
I'll see about uploading my current VC animations.