After getting your tools, we'll dig into the core rules that govern all the animation of Diablo II.
Launch CV5 and open d2data.mpq. Navigate to the data/global/monster folder.
Here you'll see a lot of folders named by a two alphanumerical caracters code.
This code is known as the Monster Token. It helps the game to locate and identify
the correct animations to play for a given
monster. Take a quick look at monstats.txt, in the column 'Code', you'll see
the same code as in this screenshot.
Now open the BH folder. It contains three folders itself.
What's the contents of these folders ?
If you look at another token folder, you'll see many other folders like RH,LH,SH
etc ...
Whats the meaning of these codes ?
If you look at some animations like the Corrupted Rogues, you'll see that their
RA and LA folders contain
different weapon animations. By selecting one of these, Diablo II generates
all the variations of the Rogues
we all know. From now, we'll call every monster that has only one bodypart
folder a One-Part Monster
and all monsters that get several body part folders will be called Multipart
Monsters.
Back to our Blood Hawk, open the TR folder.
Look at the first file : BHTRLITA1HTH.DCC.
We recognize in this name the token BH and the body part TR.But
what does the rest of the name stand for ??
Quickly: it contains the armor type, the animation mode and the weapon class the animation
uses.
- first code is the monster/character token;
- second code is for body part;
- third code is armor type. They are lit=Lite armor, med=Medium armor, hvy=Heavy
armor;
- fourth code is monster/player mode;
- fifth is the weapon/hit class.
Here is a list of the codes you can find :
| Player & Monster Modes: | Hit & Weapon Classes: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
You can get these lists in PlrMode.txt, MonMode.txt, ObjMode.txt, HitClass.txt, and WeaponClass.txt.
Note that we could find dcc animations in the following MPQ files :
Now we know where to find animations and how they are buildt, we gonna take a look at the animations specifications.
2.2.1 Directions :
Every Diablo II animation is composed of several directions. Each direction is facing a different point in
the virtual 3D isometric space. Commonly, we can find animations with 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 or 32 directions.
Here we look at one of the Clay Golem's [G1] animations. As we can see, it's composed of 8 directions :
South-West, North-West,North-East, South-East, South,West,North and West.Here's an indexed list of the directions by framecounts :
2.2.2 Framecounts:
For every direction an animation has the same number of frames. For example, a 96-frame animation with 8 directions
has 12 frames per direction. REMEMBER THIS!!! It's very very important to remember this point because one
of the many, many errors that people do when converting animations is to remove or add a frame at the wrong spot, thus
violating the Frames per Direction rule.Further discussion on the framecounts is held in Chapter 4.
2.2.3 Offsets :
When Diablo II displays an animation on the screen, it must know where to display it. In other words, the game keeps in its
memory the position of the monsters in a virtual map. Classicaly, it holds their bottom-left corners. For having a neat looking
animation on your screen, the game must calculate by how much pixels the animation must be drifted. This is the
purpose of the all mighty offsets.With all these informations in mind, we'll hop to the Next Section : Converting Animations - Part I.
