Jagged Alliance 2 LOBOT - new sprites and animations mod

[PanteraNera]

Who needs JA3 anyways?

 

[cretin]

Who needs JA3 anyways?

thats fucking incredible. Someone finally figured out how to edit sprites and animations for JA2? Thread worthy in itself tbh.

 

[spectre]

Damn, how did i miss this? The LOBOT thing I mean. It's probably the best thing that's come out of this JA3 shitshow.
Seems like it's been added to the 1.13 trunk this year with support for all merc body types, just needs a few animations.
Keeping my fingers crossed for this.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Any possibility of LOBOT opening creative floodgates, like openXCOM did with UFO: Enemy Unknown?

 

[spectre]

Any possibility of LOBOT opening creative floodgates, like openXCOM did with UFO: Enemy Unknown?

Who knows, the problem is that IIRC, making animations is a rather painstaking business, done frame by frame with a whole bunch of anims for melee, unarmed, swimming, jumping, etc. 1.13 modding was always lacking in animators, but also artists in general.
Best thing about is that it's enough to make an old game feel fresh again.

 

[Maggot]

Any possibility of LOBOT opening creative floodgates, like openXCOM did with UFO: Enemy Unknown?

Who knows, the problem is that IIRC, making animations is a rather painstaking business, done frame by frame with a whole bunch of anims for melee, unarmed, swimming, jumping, etc. 1.13 modding was always lacking in animators, but also artists in general.
Best thing about is that it's enough to make an old game feel fresh again.

What they really lack is good coders.

 

[Asdow]

Any possibility of LOBOT opening creative floodgates, like openXCOM did with UFO: Enemy Unknown?

Who knows, the problem is that IIRC, making animations is a rather painstaking business, done frame by frame with a whole bunch of anims for melee, unarmed, swimming, jumping, etc. 1.13 modding was always lacking in animators, but also artists in general.
Best thing about is that it's enough to make an old game feel fresh again.

Heya, most of the new animations for JA2 were made by me. The animations themselves and rendering new sprites are done using blender, so doing manual sprite editing by hand is not needed for LOBOT. Making a new animation in blender and setting up and rigging a new prop require some manual work but rendering and converting the outputs to sti files is done via scripts. The whole rendering setup is up on github precisely in the hopes of other people wanting to join in and take advantage of it. Just a disclaimer though, it is currently undocumented, and any competent coder will laugh at the jank I've managed to piece together for the scripts. I am planning on cleaning it up and documenting it after we have a whole set of anims replacing all the original ones.

What they really lack is good coders.

Too true. The LOBOT code written by bio sat almost completely functional for 10 years or something like that because nobody took a look at the xml parser code to figure out the structure for two missing xml files. I'd forgotten the whole thing until another forum member mentioned it and had got it working for his own build. After that I merged it with his help to the then current SVN revision and debugged a couple of issues (one of which related to the blitters hand written in assembly).

 

[Nutria]

The animations themselves and rendering new sprites are done using blender, so doing manual sprite editing by hand is not needed for LOBOT.

Does that mean you can work faster than the people who made the original game back in the '90s?

 

[Asdow]

As far as I know, JA2 originally had a similar approach to sprites, where they had an animation rig which was used to render sprites out of. Tools and hardware is better now than back then so that helps. It takes a couple of hours to render all the animations done so far so you can have a new prop ingame and working within a day pretty much.

What we (JA community) lacked was someone autist enough to remake all the game animations for the animation rig, because those had to be made from scratch. But then along came me!

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Any possibility of LOBOT opening creative floodgates, like openXCOM did with UFO: Enemy Unknown?

Maybe? The big thing JA2 mods have been missing, at least in my opinion, is a new campaign. Everything is either unfinished, or if Urban Chaos holds any weight, just the base game with a fancy coat of paint on it.

The whole rendering setup is up on github precisely in the hopes of other people wanting to join in and take advantage of it.

Do you have a link? I definitely couldn't fix it, but I'm very curious as to trying it out myself.

 

[spectre]

So, what we need is to establish a "have an autist play Jagged Alliance 2" day and hope to get some into modding.

 

[Asdow]

Do you have a link? I definitely couldn't fix it, but I'm very curious as to trying it out myself.

Sure, here you go. https://github.com/Asdow/JA2-Character-Animation-Photobooth


The folder batchscriptdata and renderScriptBodies contain the data driving the rendering process. The animation text files are just simple lists that contain the animation name in the blender file, the end frame for said animation, and the eventual filename after it's converted into an .sti

Python scripts in renderscriptBodies contain the logic for setting up the .blend file before blender is called to render animations. They're not complete on their own, and the createBatchRenderScripts.bat is used to create completed python scripts that can be used as an argument when calling blender via commandline. That batch script just calls the JA2-BatchRenderCreator.exe file with the amount of files you want animations to be divided into, what text file to read the animations from (those text files in the batchscripdata folder) and what python script template to use.

"Batchrender - ..." named bat files are then used to start up as many instances of blender as there are finished python scripts and will wait until all of the rendering is completed. You'll need to modify the blender and blend file paths that are defined inside these to match wherever you end up extracting the project.

After rendering is done, the rendered frames are saved in output/animation-name folder and named accordingly whether they're a part of the base body or a prop. Then converting them to sti files is done via the makesti - master.bat script with the exception of specific animations which have only 4 directions instead of the regular 8. Those have their own dedicated batch scripts.

The most up-to-date blender file is inside the .7z file in the repo because I hit the github file size limit and it was the fastest (read, laziest) way to go around it. You'll also need to extract the make_script.7z that's in there to have the sticom.exe and imagemagick's convert.exe which are called from the scripts to convert rendered .pngs to .sti files

 

[mondblut]

What's wrong with original sprites and animations though?

The big thing JA2 mods have been missing, at least in my opinion, is a new campaign. Everything is either unfinished, or if Urban Chaos holds any weight, just the base game with a fancy coat of paint on it.

Yeah. How's that "big maps" project doing? Been waiting for it for, like, 8 years? 10?

 

[m_s0]

What's wrong with original sprites and animations though?

Well, for one example I'd really like a proper stance and animation for an aimed shot on a muscular body type. It's a fun callback the first time around, but it needs to go.

But I'm interested as well: what's the reasoning behind re-doing everything, Asdow?

 

[Maggot]

So, what we need is to establish a "have an autist play Jagged Alliance 2" day and hope to get some into modding.

It's not enough to just be autistic, they also have to be able to comprehend 20 years of third world spaghetti code to the point where it doesn't resemble the original game.

 

[mondblut]

Well, for one example I'd really like a proper stance and animation for an aimed shot on a muscular body type. It's a fun callback the first time around, but it needs to go.

Uh... JA2 1.13 community sure has strange priorities

 

[Asdow]

But I'm interested as well: what's the reasoning behind re-doing everything, Asdow?

Necessity. We don't have the original animation rig or animations, so to be able to render new sprites that can be used in place of the originals all the animations must be redone for our Blender rig.

 

[RNGsus]

Why is this in GRPG?

 

[mondblut]

Why is this in GRPG?

To repel VN readers back where they belong.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Why is this in GRPG?

To repel VN readers back where they belong.

Isn't that General RPG?

 

[m_s0]

Well, for one example I'd really like a proper stance and animation for an aimed shot on a muscular body type. It's a fun callback the first time around, but it needs to go.

Uh... JA2 1.13 community sure has strange priorities

I wouldn't say that specific niggle is top priority, but as long as everything's getting remade anyway... And it looks like that's already implemented or about to be, so - finally - there's proper aimed shot animations for everyone.

But I'm interested as well: what's the reasoning behind re-doing everything, Asdow?

Necessity. We don't have the original animation rig or animations, so to be able to render new sprites that can be used in place of the originals all the animations must be redone for our Blender rig.

Ah, that makes sense. I really like the work thus far, and I'm getting that JA2 itch again, so: thank you and keep up the good work

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

What's wrong with original sprites and animations though?

The big thing JA2 mods have been missing, at least in my opinion, is a new campaign. Everything is either unfinished, or if Urban Chaos holds any weight, just the base game with a fancy coat of paint on it.

Yeah. How's that "big maps" project doing? Been waiting for it for, like, 8 years? 10?

I got nothing on big maps, but what I'm interested in with new animations is having martial arts animations for someone other than the default male bodytypes.

 

[mondblut]

I got nothing on big maps, but what I'm interested in with new animations is having martial arts animations for someone other than the default male bodytypes.

"Whoa! Ivan's got a brand new squatting animation! Time to replay JA2 again!"

...I just don't get it.

Now, new melee gameplay instead of the dumbed down crap that vanilla has, this is something I can imagine getting behind. But animations? Jesus.

 

[octavius]

At least you don't get romancing mods (or do you?).

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

"Whoa! Ivan's got a brand new squatting animation! Time to replay JA2 again!"

...I just don't get it.

Now, new melee gameplay instead of the dumbed down crap that vanilla has, this is something I can imagine getting behind. But animations? Jesus.

But in this case there's an actual tangible benefit to it. If I'm not mistaken (its been a while) you can't have martial arts on the bodybuilder body nor any women. And I'm pretty sure none of the other skillset types that have been modded in work like the base game's MA precisely because of that reason. Plus having the ability to actually show whatever it is your trying to convey in your new melee system is something usually appreciated by people working on it and playing it. Having actual animations for it is a good thing, rather than the hacked together stuff I imagine the developers were doing before.