Switching Infantry Death Animations

[Militintti]

Hey all!

There's a small tweak to the SWBF 2004 original that I've been wanting to do since I started playing these games on PS2 as a kid: the frontal death animation of infantry units (where they fall backwards into an awkward "twisty" pose on the ground is jarringly bad in my opinion. I have been playing around with the idea to switch it up, preferrably to the death animation when hit from the model's right (the one where they fall ontheir back, arms outstretched).

Now, my limited knowledge and experience in programming and modding tells me "I only need to open the files and switch frontal hit death animation to the hit-from-the-right one, and all will be well!". However, I cannot find the animation hooks anywhere in the game files -- the place where "hit front = frontal death anim" could be changed to "hit front = right-side death anim". I am beginning to suspect the animation hooks are baked deeper into the system.

Can anyone here give some advice to achieving my quest, point me in the right direction, or better yet, show me if someone's already done a mod that tweaks death animations for infantry? 

Thanks for your time!

-Militintti

[Dark_Phantom]

I am not the best person to ask about this since I'm still not amazing with animation hierarchy, but you should be able to look in the mod tools for the animation files and get familiar with them.

The only portion I'm sure of is that the animation banks are stored in the common.lvl and are named based on action like "human_rifle_die". The game stores the names of these animations to determine how it should react.  Human - has a rifle - and dies - use this animation.  However, they're all compiled in zaabin/zafbin files.  We have all the source for those in the mod tools, but they're a pain in the butt without a lot of documentation other than what the mod tools say.

As far as only doing a text change, you're out of luck.  I think the game does something silly like AnimationName = "all_inf_snowtrooper" which just makes it default to the human banks for any animations it needs.