[Request] Enable the addition of more animations
AndreaColombo
Member Posts: 5,530
Originally posted on /r/FriendsOfBaldursGate.
THE MOD:
Infinity Animations is a mod which, as its name implies, enables the addition of an (almost) infinite number of animations to the ToB engine. It was developed jointly by Erephine and Miloch, modders extraordinaire.
More on the mod can be found here: http://www.shsforums.net/forum/594-infinity-animations/
THE REQUEST:
In answer to the following question by our very own William Imm: I'm semi wondering if this should be used as part of the BGEE project - I mean, it has some awesome animations (love NWN Pit Fiend and Sucubus), but is it possible to do so?
Miloch replied: Since they seem to be using the ToB engine, they could do so in theory, modifying it as we have done to be able to slot more animations. It would make a lot of sense to do that anyway... not necessarily include all the animations from IWD, PST, NWN etc., but at least enable the engine so that extra animations could be added. Seems to have been just an oversight/unanticipated limitation in the original ToB engine. For that matter, I think a re-released game would be well-served by the modifications/corrections ToBEx has done.
My request is to look into Infinity Animations and expand the ToB engine accordingly, thus enabling an (almost) infinite number of animations to be added without the need for a mod to be installed specifically for this. (I have already seconded Asc64's request to implement ToBEx's fixes in BG:EE, so I won't repeat said request here).
THE MOD:
Infinity Animations is a mod which, as its name implies, enables the addition of an (almost) infinite number of animations to the ToB engine. It was developed jointly by Erephine and Miloch, modders extraordinaire.
More on the mod can be found here: http://www.shsforums.net/forum/594-infinity-animations/
THE REQUEST:
In answer to the following question by our very own William Imm: I'm semi wondering if this should be used as part of the BGEE project - I mean, it has some awesome animations (love NWN Pit Fiend and Sucubus), but is it possible to do so?
Miloch replied: Since they seem to be using the ToB engine, they could do so in theory, modifying it as we have done to be able to slot more animations. It would make a lot of sense to do that anyway... not necessarily include all the animations from IWD, PST, NWN etc., but at least enable the engine so that extra animations could be added. Seems to have been just an oversight/unanticipated limitation in the original ToB engine. For that matter, I think a re-released game would be well-served by the modifications/corrections ToBEx has done.
My request is to look into Infinity Animations and expand the ToB engine accordingly, thus enabling an (almost) infinite number of animations to be added without the need for a mod to be installed specifically for this. (I have already seconded Asc64's request to implement ToBEx's fixes in BG:EE, so I won't repeat said request here).
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Comments
[–]MrManlyMan1 2 points 3 days ago
Looks like a reasonable request. I've browsed the readme but I don't have time to pull apart the technical details. Can someone summarize the changes we want to make on the code side?
[–]AndreaColombo[S] 1 point 3 days ago
Hi Cameron. I'm going to ask Miloch and get back to you with his answer asap.
There are some technical notes here (http://www.shsforums.net/topic/43501-infinity-animations-readme/page__view__findpost__p__487828) on what was done in the reversal process to enable additional animations. Unfortunately, I am not the best person to ask (only the second-best perhaps) and the main author seems to have gone missing. Moreover, I won't be online much over the next couple of months over the summer, as I'll be doing some fieldwork without much Internet access. However, I should be able to answer any questions there might be. The main difficulty is that we did not have the original source code, so the Infinity Animations code is a machine-code reverse engineering project that aims at patching the executable rather than properly rewriting the source code. Since Beamdog does have source code access, they could probably "reverse reverse" what IA did to make the proper changes to the source code. That might actually make some mods incompatible (IA and 1PP for example use similar methods to enable new animations in the executable) so it would be ideal if BG:EE could be backward-compatible with existing mods. However, if that is not feasible, they could let us know what they changed and we could in turn make the mods compatible with BG:EE instead.
Note that the most recent version of the IA code and developer notes will have changed somewhat, since we have enabled the use of standard characters for animation files which will exist on all platforms rather than characters like ¢, Æ, etc. which have exhibited issues on non-Western (i.e. Russian, Chinese, Korean, etc.) games and OSes. There is an update to that code therefore which I can post somewhere accessible if there is interest. Again, it is a reverse-engineered patch since we have no visibility of the actual source code, but ideally a source code enhancement would allow both Western (Latin) non-ANSI and ANSI characters in animation prefixes for backwards compatibility purposes (ultimately we would convert all animations to ANSI standards but that will take some time).
Miloch said he would gladly answer any further questions you may have via email. However, he doesn't wish me to disclose his email address publicly (for obvious reasons), so I need to contact you privately to give it to you.
Thanks, @AndreaColombo, for doing the go-between work on this. Hopefully those technical notes will help the process along...
There have been no news about this. I really hope this is still being considered for implementation. As I said, Miloch is available via email for any further discussion on the matter. If BG:EE enabled the addition of an (almost) infinite number of animations by default, modders would gain a ton of graphical flexibility without the need to throw one more mod onto the pile.
Anyway, @erephine is much more knowledgeable about the technical specs. I just helped make it compatible with mods, which part for obvious reasons probably isn't getting incorporated into BG:EE. But I'd be surprised if the first part (externalising additional animations) wasn't already implemented. The problem with the megamods is that they were all trampling over each others animation slots, because there's a repressively small number of slots even in the ToB engine.