**DA files and weapon animation data

[Zyrrahx]

Hi, I've been largely absent from the ff7 modding scene for a few years due to work obligations but I recently started working on some old projects again.

I've been editing some animations for one of my projects and have hit a bit of a roadblock, at current moment I'm adding new animations to the SAAA skeleton specifically the ones that are missing and I've had a lot of success, using some resources online specifically the wiki.ffrtt and the work of borde and L Spiro. At current moment I'm working on animation #6 the 'death' animation that the SAAA skeleton is missing. It works in game and functions exactly as I want it to apart from one thing. For some reason the weapon is not where it should be and I cannot open the animation in Kimera, I assume this is because weapon animation data is stored in a separate file or a separate place in the **DA file, i've been looking online but can't find any information on the topic and I thought that maybe somebody more experienced would have an idea of where I should look.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT
So i've found something strange, editing the value at offset 40(decimal) in the **AA file seems to effect which animations have a weapon in them, for instance in my case I have added animations 6, 10, 16, 17, 18, 22 & 34 to the SADA file. Changing the value to 01 removes the weapon from all but animation 0 and 1, but when I do this I am able to edit these animations in Kimera without causing a runtime error. If however I keep it at the default value these animations are unable to be edited.
Basically I'm just curious if the weapon animation data is inside the **AA file(Though i doubt it due to it's length).

EDIT
Alright finally got back to this after a few months.
So, if I was a smarter man I would have used scripts to organise all the animations in a database, I could have written a tool to do this of course but that would take weeks or months and this is more of a hobby that I come back to every few months.
So yeah i'm not breaking new ground or anything but i'll keep a link for my current SAAA & SADA files if people want to get further along with it, also i'm not an animator and I don't have animation software so the animations I added are terrible and were only made in Kimera THEY ARE INTENDED TO BE REPLACED IN THE FUTURE.
BTW, everything was done here with a Hex editor and Kimera, so yeah, very crude I know.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1nJYkunPyBgQFBfznKS0CKSX-GKmKGYHO

[Sega Chief]

Hi, I've been largely absent from the ff7 modding scene for a few years due to work obligations but I recently started working on some old projects again.

I've been editing some animations for one of my projects and have hit a bit of a roadblock, at current moment I'm adding new animations to the SAAA skeleton specifically the ones that are missing and I've had a lot of success, using some resources online specifically the wiki.ffrtt and the work of borde and L Spiro. At current moment I'm working on animation #6 the 'death' animation that the SAAA skeleton is missing. It works in game and functions exactly as I want it to apart from one thing. For some reason the weapon is not where it should be and I cannot open the animation in Kimera, I assume this is because weapon animation data is stored in a separate file or a separate place in the **DA file, i've been looking online but can't find any information on the topic and I thought that maybe somebody more experienced would have an idea of where I should look.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT
So i've found something strange, editing the value at offset 40(decimal) in the **AA file seems to effect which animations have a weapon in them, for instance in my case I have added animations 6, 10, 16, 17, 18, 22 & 34 to the SADA file. Changing the value to 01 removes the weapon from all but animation 0 and 1, but when I do this I am able to edit these animations in Kimera without causing a runtime error. If however I keep it at the default value these animations are unable to be edited.
Basically I'm just curious if the weapon animation data is inside the **AA file(Though i doubt it due to it's length).

There are people actively working on animations (and tools related to them) on the Qhimm discord; they might be able to help out.

[Kaldarasha]

Yes you should look what's going on on discord. Quantumpencil is working on a tool which also allows new battle animations for the characters.

[quantumpencil]

Hi, I've been largely absent from the ff7 modding scene for a few years due to work obligations but I recently started working on some old projects again.

I've been editing some animations for one of my projects and have hit a bit of a roadblock, at current moment I'm adding new animations to the SAAA skeleton specifically the ones that are missing and I've had a lot of success, using some resources online specifically the wiki.ffrtt and the work of borde and L Spiro. At current moment I'm working on animation #6 the 'death' animation that the SAAA skeleton is missing. It works in game and functions exactly as I want it to apart from one thing. For some reason the weapon is not where it should be and I cannot open the animation in Kimera, I assume this is because weapon animation data is stored in a separate file or a separate place in the **DA file, i've been looking online but can't find any information on the topic and I thought that maybe somebody more experienced would have an idea of where I should look.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT
So i've found something strange, editing the value at offset 40(decimal) in the **AA file seems to effect which animations have a weapon in them, for instance in my case I have added animations 6, 10, 16, 17, 18, 22 & 34 to the SADA file. Changing the value to 01 removes the weapon from all but animation 0 and 1, but when I do this I am able to edit these animations in Kimera without causing a runtime error. If however I keep it at the default value these animations are unable to be edited.
Basically I'm just curious if the weapon animation data is inside the **AA file(Though i doubt it due to it's length).

1: Yes, that's because weapons actually have their own animations, for player model characters they are offset by 0x34 within the **da files (and this is, unfortunately, how the battle engines finds them). If you want the weapon to animate, then you will need to repack a corresponding weapon animation at index 0x6 + 0x34.

2: That dword is the number of weapon models, it need to always be 0x10 for player models in the vanilla game or weapons with model ID's greater than that will fail to allocate properly, since the code that loads them checks that the weapon model ID (gotten from the low byte of a field in the kernel.bin for the equipped weapon) is less than that value before allocating and initializing the polygon file and bone for the weapon

[Zyrrahx]

Ahh thank you so much, Just fixed the death animation with this information, help is much appreciated.

[quantumpencil]

No problem, any time =)

Make some cool 4x cut animations for sephiroth =D