repacking third age animation files.

[alexgold]

heloo to you all, with special regards to any third age creators that may view this post

1) great job with this mod, i am a lotr fan and i like it very much because it gives me the ability to mount my own war of the ring )

2) please do not be ofended by the fact tha ti want to make some tweaks to it, it is for my personal use and i intend to make them myself.

3) the issue at hand.

i can't repack the animation files. and i need this because i want to remove the kiling moves of the dwarves hobbits goblins both the ones when they attack and the ones when theire attacked. i'm sure that the developers are well aware of the fact that units with smaller skeletons change to a normal size when involved in a kiling move. my "great" change would be to remove from the skeletons the dieing cycles and the finishing moves. it would reduce the diversity of moves but the dwarves will stay small as they should.

i've unpacked the animation files(pack.idx, pack.dat) using the replacemen of the 16 bites and using vergingetorix idx extractor. i left the skeleton files(skeleton.idx, skeleton.dat) as they are. i can't make the game to repack the animations. i get a ctd after i start the game. some suggestions please, i might have allready tried many of them but still tell me.

i've posted here because i want to know how did u when making the mod in the first place pack the animation files.

[Ngugi]

Hi alexgold

This kind of question is not a TATW matter per se but it fit better and you are far mor likley to get skilled help if you make a post in the Mod Workshop http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=272
(King Kong and the other modellers/animators of TATW are not active in this forum as it is)

[Curufin]

Well the thing is sega released unpacked versions of their animations, so kk and co all they had to do was add their own and repack. The problem is there arent any unpacked tatw animations, so you have to hex edit (like you've done) but they can be problematic, i had the exact same problem as you with ctds, couldnt wprk out the problem sadly :/.

Also before someone points out theres a link to unpacked tatw animations in the sub mods forum, hey arentt the unpacked animations, its just the same packed data as in he tatw folder for some reason.

[paradamed]

If you used vercingetorix tool to unpack the animations, they can only be repacked using the same tool.

[alexgold]

thanks guys for the reply. i am also posting in here http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=590001.
i also posted on this forum however because i thought that tatw had something special about my issue that i wasn't aware of.


paradamed are u sure about what you've said. i tryed repacking then with vercingetorix's tool but didnt work. the console said ''failed to open and then the name of the file" for every file , at the end it poped up a miserable 1 kb file (actualy there were 2 one .idx and one.dat), which obviously didn't work. for some reason the game doesn't rebuild the animations and neither is vercingetorix's tool.
if u've got any ideas i would like to hear them also.

[ElvenKind]

Have you tried with this tool?

[alexgold]

hello all.
as the title says it's about the unpacked animations of tatw. i know there is supposed to be some unpacked animations released by king kong but the download is't working anymore and anyway i've read that the anims in that respective archive were the same packed ones as fount in the mod folder. it is impossible to get viable animations with the tools we have today believe me i've tryed for some days know for some hours a day and the animations that come out when unpacked with vercingetorix idx extractor are broken.

i need these animations to try to remove the finishing moves from dwarves, goblins and hobbits because with the animations we now have when performing such a animation the dwarf suddenly becomes the victim's size. same goes for when the dwarf is the victim of such a finishing move . i am sure that anyone would agree that this reduces from the battle's visual quality.i've tryed completing this projecy on my own but i can't. this is the discussion i've started and somewhat of a log of my attempts, as i've said there i can't recreate all the animations that set TATW apart from the vanilla animations.
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=590001

i've posted on king kong's wall but he hasn't been active for some months now. so it would be great if someone from the TATW team would release them or give them to me in some form or another.

if i succeed i will be more than happy to upload somewhere(maybe here on the twc center forum) the finished packs for other people to enjoy them as much as i would certainly do.

[leo.civil.uefs]

does anyone has the original TATW vanilla animations unpacked? The old link posted by King Kong is broken.

[alreadyded]

heloo to you all, with special regards to any third age creators that may view this post

1) great job with this mod, i am a lotr fan and i like it very much because it gives me the ability to mount my own war of the ring )

2) please do not be ofended by the fact tha ti want to make some tweaks to it, it is for my personal use and i intend to make them myself.

3) the issue at hand.

i can't repack the animation files. and i need this because i want to remove the kiling moves of the dwarves hobbits goblins both the ones when they attack and the ones when theire attacked. i'm sure that the developers are well aware of the fact that units with smaller skeletons change to a normal size when involved in a kiling move. my "great" change would be to remove from the skeletons the dieing cycles and the finishing moves. it would reduce the diversity of moves but the dwarves will stay small as they should.

i've unpacked the animation files(pack.idx, pack.dat) using the replacemen of the 16 bites and using vergingetorix idx extractor. i left the skeleton files(skeleton.idx, skeleton.dat) as they are. i can't make the game to repack the animations. i get a ctd after i start the game. some suggestions please, i might have allready tried many of them but still tell me.

i've posted here because i want to know how did u when making the mod in the first place pack the animation files.

He never uploaded the unpacked ones so the link never worked, pretty sure he didn't want people to have them. Not the kind of thing he or anyone else would do on accident. I assume he didn't want people 'watering down' his detailed work and throwing the word 'overhaul' around even more (he really did hate modders using that word and I agree with him completely). I have the unpacked files, but I liked KK more than any of you, so I will not share them unless he wants to. Mak might have them, I may have accidentally sent all of them to her instead of just mine long ago, if she wants to share them its none of my business. I don't know if that is against TOS but that isn't my business either.

Edit; There is an unpacker somewhere, but I never used it so no clue if it works. I have heard it doesn't work. Anyone that worked on animations just got them from KK, and he got some of them from others unpacked so I doubt he ever used the unpacker. The game packs them up all by itself on startup, no program needed. Also the animations never cause crashes, even if they are bugged they just look really weird while the game keeps working. I have no clue who made these unpackers or how they went about making them. The game developers certainly never used one, they had the unpacked files already same as me, so I don't even know how anyone would go about making one. You can't even use reverse engineering since there is no packer, the game just does it, it is in the game engine not the game code you see which is simplified and therefore not even real.

[Ngugi]

King Kong did in fact upload them for submodders to utilize, alreadyded; as late as 2012, and that's the upload that's no longer avilable so if you have them they're valid to share: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...ATW-Animations

[alreadyded]

He uploaded the packed files that everyone already has, not the unpacked ones. The link was useless from the beginning was my point, which means no one has them unpacked from downloading that link. I don't expect you guys to believe me, just saying. He probably only posted the useless link so people would stop asking, this is how I got them after all , by asking him. Only reason he sent them to me was because I wasn't re-hashing old stuff but trying to make new stuff, pretty sure he even said as much.

Edit; If someone is actually making new stuff I will gladly send them the unpacked files, KK gave them to me for this reason after all. Personally I don't care about the files being shared but KK may still (I doubt it but I don't know) and others whose work is in there may still care. I only know that I don't care, but I spent almost no time at all making all of my animations, so I have no reason to care if people use them for whatever they like.

Edit; I just checked an old PM from him about this...

Hey ho,

actually I would have suggested that you just unpack them, but I'm not 100% sure if it's even working, so I'm sending you the unpacked files:
http://www.filefront.com/17227879/TATW 2.0 animations.rar


Hope you get it to work and really looking forward to see some of your creatures in action!
And sorry for my late response, holidays are always a busy time, but if I can help with anything, just let me know.


Regards

The actual link is broken now of course. I can't believe he called me a ho.

[Ngugi]

If you say so, the difference between what's "the unpacked animations" and "the animations shipped with the game" that can be unpacked is admittedly unclear to me.
Only know that for DCI I unpacked the animations that comes with TATW, added new animations from EB2 and then repacked it all without any problems, so assumed they were the same, as any tweak to the shipped ones would gone into my repacking as well.

[alreadyded]

Did you ever download them from that link you posted? I just remember him posting the packed not unpacked ones is all I am saying. Whom has the unpacked ones I don't know, I have them so I never had to find out. If you unpacked them then there is a unpacker out that works apparently, I don't know this either, I asked KK. Assuming you did use an unpacker I would be surprised that there are no bugs as a result simply because I can't imagine how one would go about making a proper unpacker. That doesn't mean someone hasn't made a proper one, you guys would have to tell me.

Leo sent me a PM about this recently so I am just posting what I know, so if anyone knows a working unpacker maybe post a link to it? I don't even know if you guys are talking about the actual TATW animations (animation files for trolls, etc.) or just changing code and such, not the same thing. I only needed to add in my own and I never had to pack them again, nothing else I did required packing them.

[Ngugi]

While it was not what he meant ofc, someone just gave himself a new nickename hehe

What I did was to unpack the .idx-files and .dat-files in TATW's animations-folder, added animations from another mod, edited some coding and repacked the files, using this unpacker/packer: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...Unpacking-Tool
As noted in it's description, it should cause issues with TATW's Dwarven and Goblin haleberd animations; the former we don't noted any problems with after repacking and the latter we don't use. We've not edited any animations so it may a reason. Repacking the .idx- and .dat-files have not caused problems with other animations for us (as we noted after a few years testing but knock on wood, hehe).
If it is so that unpacking do not provide animations that can actually be modded I take your word for it, merely describe what I did.

But to rewind;
Patch 3.2 was published on ModelDB the 4th June 2012. The same date, 4th June 2012, King Kong posted the thread I linked to above where he shared to submodders, quote, "the unpacked animations of TATW", unquote.
Now, you say it is a difference between 1) the animations in TATW 3.2 and 2) the unpacked animations of TATW King Kong posted at the same time and 3) the unpacked animations he provided to you directly. That may very well be the case, in fact I do take your word for it as I am not proficient to determine that; merely note that it do sound a bit surprising King Kong did not share what he wrote that he did [the unpacked animations of TATW for submodders].

[alreadyded]

I was just saying what Curufin already posted above, that the uploaded animations were not unpacked but the same files everyone already had, and gave a few guesses why.

The code is setup so you don't need to pack them with most things. It uses a family tree thing, so as long as the parent file is there you can edit children (which is just code that references the parent file, so it isn't a new animation but an edited animation using code) to do different things without needing the parent file. So it depends on what you are doing. Scaling to new sizes, adding actual new files, new bones, new etc. require the originals to be able to make and then pack the files.

Adding in the bowstring requires adding in bones and new code for them (no existing parent to use for the string so it has to be added, but everything else like walking etc. can use existing parents), this requires packing new files to know the bones are there and what they do. Once it is added you can reuse this for any unit by adding the bones to the model without having to pack the animations since the game knows what to do already with those bones, you just assign them properly in the mesh and all done. So I assume the ones you added were edited to look new but actually used old stuff from M2TW, I have done this myself no shortage of times and it works just as well as making new ones and is A LOT easier. Actually adding new stuff sucks, I did it as little as possible. There was only guy I know that was into spending his time adding new stuff and he quit modding before I even started. A lot of his work is used in TATW that is the only reason I have his unpacked files.

Edit; Most things can just use a pre-existing parent file and can be edited to look and act quite different (like adding unit that uses a whip/ball and chain), so no need for all the unpacked files. Any creatures I made that where the same height use the same parent, but the child code is different for each, so the game doesn't need to know anything new in terms of animations and how they should work. If I wanted to give Ents a throwing animation I would need the current Ent files (which are scaled up from specific M2TW files) and scale up the M2TW throw animation the same way to add it in and pack it. Once that is done any unit the same height can have a throwing animation just by swapping some code. No units that height have it so I will need the unpacked files for that if I get around to it. Obviously my memory is not to be trusted, I haven't dug through the files in awhile. And I haven't slept for a few days now... I'm getting too old to be doing that...

[Araval]

AFAIK the animation unpackers do it in a way that you can take an animation from a mod to another but in an uneditable form. And you would have to repack the animations with the same tool.