[FF7PSX/PC] Animation Indexes for Proud Clod / WallMarket (2009-12-10)

[Bosola]

Edit: Now includes data for the PC version.

As I've been doing a fair bit of modding, I've decided to create a spreadsheet properly detailing animation indexes and how to reach them using player spells, enemy skills, and enemy attacks. I've therefore added a spreadsheet in xls. format (see below). It has two sheets: the first details the absolute animation indexes for every attack. The second tells you the index you need to reach those absolute indexes in each case. For convenience, all numbers are in hex.

Instructions:

Let's say that you want to use Diamond Flash as the animation for an Enemy Skill. The sheet named 'Indexes' tells us that the Absolute Index of Diamond Flash is FB. The 'Obtaining' sheet tells us that if we want to reach Absolute Index FB with an Enemy Skill, we need to input the relative index C5. Insert and... lo and behold, you've an Enemy Skill that looks like Diamond Flash (burgeoning white fire, then a massive white beam).

In each case, the steps are the following:

1. Go to the 'indexes' tab
2. Find the absolute index for your chosen animation
3. Go to the 'obtaining' tab
4. The black column has the absolute indexes. Find the value you're looking for.
5. The green column has the relative index you need to insert for a spell, blue for an enemy skill, purple for an enemy attack (PSX), pink for an enemy attack on PC. A dash means the animation cannot be used for that class of attack.

Find NFITC1's post on "relative animation indexes" (search for the term) to understand how this all works. Basically, offsets are applied to relative indexes, so that one-byte animation numbers can refer to animations in a pool of over 255. 36h (54 in decimal notation) is applied to enemy skills, for instance, so that the relative indexes 0-255 can refer to 54-309 (0+54 to 255+54). Thus, enemy skills cannot refer to absolute indexes less than 54.

The files:

Here's where you can find the file:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Avv5n_dvnE2jdFVMUEpqNm5jVFk3SUYwdnI4S1JXTlE#gid=0

Mirrors:
SOURCE 1: http://www.angelfire.com/space2/jimmy_breck-mc_kye/Animations2.html

SOURCE 2: http://www.mediafire.com/?tzdu0mi23oi]http://www.mediafire.com/?tzdu0mi23oi Dead link ~Covarr

For further details, see here: http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=8195.0

[Aali]

Are they different for the PC version? Your data seems to check out quite well with what I could grab from the battle script engine. Also you should know that there are no less than 7 different "contexts" for animation indices; all slightly different, some overlapping. In total there's 540 different combinations but alot of them map to the same animations.

[Bosola]

The files have been updated to deal with the PC animations.

Tell me more about these 'contexts'. Is this what determines whether the color of animation Abs. Index AE (PC) - Red Dragon Breath / Blue Flame? They share the same animation indexes, but I'm pretty sure they take different colours. Does the 'context' deal with things like that?

[Kudistos Megistos]

Ah, good.

It's nice to have a convenient place to point people when they ask how to do this kind of thing (since it comes up quite a lot). However, I'm sceptical about that mediafire link working for anyone but you

Now, if we could just have a thread telling people where the character limit break data is...

[Bosola]

Urk. Thanks for pointing that out.

[Aali]

Nah, the "contexts" are simply different lookup tables used to map the animation index to the right animation. I will dump the full tables for you if I can find the time. Different coloured animations are most likely done by changing the palette of the texture.

:EDIT:

Did some more digging, the different lookup tables are; items (when you use an item like a potion), magic (only your magic), enemy skills, summons, attacks, limits and throw. They appear in this order in the .exe and most of them have less than 255 entries, so you can in theory access some animations that you're not supposed to. This may have some negative effects though and you should really try to change to the right lookup table instead.

[nfitc1]

Tell me more about these 'contexts'. Is this what determines whether the color of animation Abs. Index AE (PC) - Red Dragon Breath / Blue Flame? They share the same animation indexes, but I'm pretty sure they take different colours. Does the 'context' deal with things like that?

Nope. Red Dragon Breath is as Blue as Blue Flame. Not quite sure why though.... Probably should have used Flame Thrower's animation for this.

I'm assuming contexts are going to be things like "target is ranged", "target is multiple targets", "target is to caster's left", etc. Stuff like that. These do seem to make certain animations act differently. This may be why 0002h flag in the attack data got dummied out. It got replaced by these "contexts".

[Akari]

Where this "context" is set?

[Aali]

Tried to figure that out myself, haven't made much progress.
Seems you can't set it from the script, in fact the only thing you can do from there is set a magic (player magic) animation to be loaded.
The script I'm talking about is of course the stuff in the ??ab files on the PC version, the script engine for these seems to be the only thing that is accessing the animation loader.

Maybe it's some kind of static data loaded from those files, maybe it's stored somewhere else or maybe it's just hardcoded to different situations.

[Akari]

Tried to figure that out myself, haven't made much progress.
Seems you can't set it from the script, in fact the only thing you can do from there is set a magic (player magic) animation to be loaded.
The script I'm talking about is of course the stuff in the ??ab files on the PC version, the script engine for these seems to be the only thing that is accessing the animation loader.

Maybe it's some kind of static data loaded from those files, maybe it's stored somewhere else or maybe it's just hardcoded to different situations.

At least can you tell me attacks with same effect animation id that looks different? I can try to search this thing.

[Bosola]

Oh, thought I'd include details on this, too: you can see a gallery of enemy attacks here:

http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Final_Fantasy_VII_Enemy_Abilities

Scroll down, and you'll see them in thumbnail view. Useful when looking for replacement animations.

[halkun]

why don't you upload this spreadsheet to googe docs?

[Bosola]

I suppose I could do, but I don't have an account, and I can't see the advantages to making one.

[halkun]

Advantages is it's super easy up upload/download data
Here you go...
HTML
Excel

[Bosola]

I'll stick that link in the first post. Thanks.

[nfitc1]

If there's no attack named, does that mean there's no attack with that animation? What about the ones that have blank first attacks? Some of these probably need to be named "No name" or "Unused".


It also occured to me that changing item animation indexes beyond the current max range (4E I think) might look different too. Can someone test this?

[Bosola]

If it's unnamed, it isn't used, and will crash the emulator. Blank first attacks are just a side effect of lazy editing!

[nfitc1]

There are attacks that don't get their names displayed (like "(Report)" and the like), but now that I think about it, they are all character-specific animations and have an animation index of NULL (FFh).