Animations and Skeletons unpacker/packer.

[leo.civil.uefs]

The Vercingetorix's IDX toll does not work properly.
This thread is for sharing a working tool for unpacking animations and skeletons.
The Holy Pilgrim is the source of this tool, though I don't think he is its creator. Anyway, for some obscure motivation, it seems that he never shared this tool with other member by creating a thread, but keept offering the tool on posts saying he could send the link via PM... ...

So here we go:

TOOL DOWNLOAD

Instructions:

Extract the all of the files and folders inside the downloaded tool to your "mod_folder/data/animations" folder. In order to extract skeletons, just run the "Extract_skeletons.bat" file. To extract the animations, just run the "Extract_animations.bat" file. Doing so will give you all of the raw data files of any mod.


When you extract the skeletons, a file called "list.txt" will pop up. This list contains the name for every skeleton that is in the current skeleton.dat file. Whenever you add a skeleton to the mod, you must add the file's name to the "list.txt" file. When you are ready to repack your files, delete the "skeleton.dat" and "skeleton.idx" files and run the "pack_skeletons.bat" file. This will create a new "skeleton.dat" and "skeleton.idx" file.


The same thing goes for animations. There will be a file called "anim_list.txt." That is the file that contains the path of every animation that will be included in the new "pack.dat." When ready to repack, just delete the "pack.dat" and "pack.idx" files and run the "pack_animations.bat" file. It will then proceed to pack all of the animations from the paths specified in the anim_list.txt." It will also create a new "pack.dat" and "pack.idx" file.


The animations and skeletons obtained via the unpacker will only work if you repack them using the packer in the tool. If you try to repack the unpacked animations via the M2TW engine it will not work. You also need to keep the exact same entry used in the original animation pack.


nevermind.

the only tool realy working for extracting animations/skeletons is this one.

All the other ones are bugged and will cause some animations to bug.

[leo.civil.uefs]

this should be stickied.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Please see this post.

[leo.civil.uefs]

if it is the same tool then his post should be stickied and my one closed.

Im just trying to help.

[AnthoniusII]

Leo what about replacing animation files with same name?
Example:
In my animation pack Marka death animations exist , there for they will be in the list this tool will create.
Lets say that i want to overwrite death animations with new ones that will have the same names.
Should i write the "new" files in the anim.list too?
Question 2: Should i have vanilla animations files also?

[leo.civil.uefs]

I have no idea.

At the moment Im trying to learn such things, like you.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Leo what about replacing animation files with same name?
Example:
In my animation pack Marka death animations exist , there for they will be in the list this tool will create.
Lets say that i want to overwrite death animations with new ones that will have the same names.
Should i write the "new" files in the anim.list too?

No. M2TW CAS animations such as produced by the various tools are not the same thing as the animations packed into pack.idx/pack.dat. There is a conversion step necessary which transforms the M2TW source animations (in the M2TW CAS format) to the payload format used by the pack.

As of right now, the purpose and value of the last 12 or so bytes of that file format remain unexplained; though setting them to zeros will work.

Question 2: Should i have vanilla animations files also?

It's a bit of a trick question. In theory, no: skeletons are technically independent of animations in their packed forms, and fail-over works in M2TW (Kingdoms 1.5, at any rate) so the game only requires you to supply modified or custom animations in the pack. In order to build the skeletons the M2TW engine uses the CAS files extensively in order to extract meta data (for example bone names and basepose) which means it will not rebuild the skeletons for you if some animations are missing that your mod depends on (including Vanilla ones). Unfortunately for that skeleton rebuilding step no such fail-over provisions appear to be built-in, which means you must supply all Vanilla animations your mod's skeletons depend on in your mod in order for the engine to rebuild skeletons correctly. This has the added unfortunate side effect of including all animations in the animations pack as well, which tends to push up the file size of the pack considerably compared to the bare minimum.

However, afterwards, once the skeletons have been (re-)generated you can substitute minimal animation packs.

[leo.civil.uefs]

Well here I am posting a doubt on my own thread.

I did everything said in this tutorial.
But my game always CTD when I open it. The log gives me nothing.

What exactly I need to change after making thje pack/unpack thing?

Maybe some text file? What is likely to be causing the ctd?

[Tellos Athenaios]

Well here I am posting a doubt on my own thread.

I did everything said in this tutorial.
But my game always CTD when I open it. The log gives me nothing.

What exactly I need to change after making thje pack/unpack thing?

Maybe some text file? What is likely to be causing the ctd?

See my previous post. Having a tool that can pack/unpack animations is nice but it's not even close to half the battle. What you are attempting to do is to "take ownership" of the animations pack. That's a smart thing to do because the game doesn't generate portable packs, but you cannot take ownership of the animations pack easily without also taking responsibility for the skeletons.

So that leaves three options, you can:

• Avoid modifying any skeleton at all, which means you can copy Vanilla skeletons.idx & .dat over to your mod and just generate animation packs. You are limited to animations which match the M2TW file names, you are limited to Vanilla skeletons, etc. Basically this option will work as long as you are only looking to customise a few animations and nothing fancy.
• Coax the game into regenerating the skeletons for you. This requires the exact same setup as what you need for regenerating animations. There's probably in-depth tutorials that cover this more extensively. In this scenario you could opt to re-generate animations manually afterwards so you can trim down the final size of the animations pack. Not useful for development. Useful trick for people looking to distribute their mod, though, since your users won't get a duplicate copy of Vanilla animations with your mod and you don't have to spend bandwidth on all that duplication, either. This is basically state of the art as far as I am aware of it.
• Write your own tool to generate skeletons, use the packer to pack them. Please release it, and pretty pretty please with-cherry-on-top make it run & build properly on a Linux server 'cause that would advance the state of the art and we could definitely use it for EBII. Fair warning, though: attempting to write such a tool may drive a man to drink, despair or render him incapable of normal human communication etc.

And that's basically only half the battle. The other, though immeasurably easier part is hooking up a tool to convert your M2TW source animations (i.e what you think of as an animation) to what M2TW actually considers to be an animation. Because that converted result is what you should be packing in your animations pack with XIDX. Attempting to pack the original source CAS files as animations is guaranteed not to work since the two file formats are different. Also the last 12 bytes of that different file format are still unknown so if you happen to figure them out, please, do tell.

[leo.civil.uefs]

Im simply taking animations and skeletons from a mod and moving it into my mod. Im making no edit in any file.