If you don’t know what a sound sounds like, just test it out with your animation and find out. Experiment with the codes if you need to.
Oh, there’s one thing the doc might have missed out on though. There is a special code that works like this: “S####”. ‘S’ stands for ‘sound’. It’s a sound code. Xeld made a special hack that made a new code that will play any sound. “####” is the hex of the sound. Oh, and it can play music, too. If you need to know the hex of the song or sound or whatever, just look it up in a music list that comes with Nightmare Modules.
Last thing—if your attack has multiple hits, you CAN’T USE C1A. So you have to use C51, which is like a ‘fake hit’. It makes the screen flash white, but it doesn’t add those blue things. But oh well—it’s still cool. Using C51 and C1F in conjunction will give the illusion that the enemy is being hit. The idea is like so:
ATTACK FRAME
ATTACK FRAME
C51
C1F
JUMP FRAME
RAISE SWORD UP
SWING DOWN FOR THE BIG FINAL CRUSH
C04
C1A
C1F
Where the “C04 / C1A / C1F” is the final hit, where the HP finally depletes.
Now that mode 1 is done, comes explaining the rest of the modes, which will be easy.
Mode 2 will be done for you.
Mode 3 works the same as the critical, except instead of C1A, it uses any value from C08 to C0C. I usually just use C08 because I know it works and while I don’t know what the other ones do, I am guessing that it is just a difference in the color of the critical hit effect.
Mode 4 will be done for you by FEditor Adv as well.
Mode 5 is the ranged mode, as we know. Instead of a hit with C04 / C1A / C1F, you put “C05”, which loads the spell animation. And that’s all there is to it—C05 will take care of the spell/ranged weapon or whatever.
Mode 6 is the above, but the critical. You know how to put frames together and add in codes to make it look and sound cooler, so go do that.
Mode 7 and 8 will probably be the same, since they are dodges, and most people don’t really care to make their dodges different. Put the actual dodging frames after C0E, and the return-to-standing frames after C01. Remember that the frame before the C01 will be the frame that the sprite stays on until the move is “completely dodged”… if that doesn’t make sense, don’t worry about it. Heheh…
Modes 9 through 11 can be some animation, but just know that the animation is just the idle frames, so it shouldn’t be anything special. I usually just keep it as my standing frame, which makes 3 modes automatically done, because all the template does is use standing frames in the first place.
Mode 12 can just be a copy/paste of mode 1, but with the attacks taken out. Meaning that, if you have multiple attacks, you need to put the C04, which will make the enemy do their dodge, during the first attack, or else it’ll look like *slash slash slash* *dodge the final slash, no damage* and it’ll just be wtf.
So if your animation looked like:
C03
C07
ATTACK FRAMES
C51
C1F
MORE ATTACK FRAMES
C04
C1A
C1F
OTHER ATTACK FRAMES
C01
RETURN TO BASE
C06
C0D
----------
It’d turn into
----------
C03
C07
ATTACK FRAMES
C04
MORE ATTACK FRAMES
C01
RETURN TO BASE
C06
C0D
-----------
If you didn’t notice, I moved the C04 back to BEFORE the first attack (remember, an attack can also be C51 / C1F), and I got rid of the hit sounds and hit effects, or else it’d look and sound like they were being attacked even though they dodged.
With mode 12 done, your animation script is done! Save everything and check for errors. You may have written something and forgot to comment it out, or you may have accidentally forgot to press enter and might have something like “C51C1F” on one line instead of two lines. You may have also typed “c23” instead of “C23”, which matters—the “C” in commands MUST BE CAPITALIZED. Also make sure you typed in all the file names for your frames right.
With the proofreading done, you can now insert your animation, which you already know how to do, because you once tested the very basic animation in the previous chapter. Insert it, and test it, and see how it is.
Is it too fast? Make the timings larger. Is it choppy? Well, you’d have to add more frames, so that’s a spriting issue. Do the sounds work right, and how well are they timed? Try playing around with the order and timings of things to fix that. Are there too many effects, or not enough? Delete/add commands as need be—the 0x85 command usage list found in FEditor Adv’s doc IS YOUR FRIEND. Lastly, are the frames aligned well? If not, go back to the frames in MS Paint and try and figure out what’s wrong.
Touch-up your animation and make sure it’s looking nice and spiffy. Be sure to test out the attack, critical, dodge, ranged, and ranged-critical animations, and anything else that might need testing.
Mine looks pretty nifty. He looks like he’s having a staring contest with the Dragon! D=
Wait! There’s ONE LAST THING!
Your animation needs a disarmed animation. I’ll just tell you how to do it—now that you’ve done the main animation, you already have more than enough skills to code the disarmed. Simply make the disarmed frames based off of the standing frames, and then keep the bear bones to every mode, while replacing all standing frames with the disarmed standing frames, and making sure to remake the dodge frames into the disarmed dodge frames. Since there are no attacks, you’ll save yourself trouble if you just make the attack modes just have one frame of your character standing there disarmed—no one will know, and it saves space and time (since FEditor Adv doesn’t have to process all the attack frames and codes).
That’s all there is to it. I know I say that and you’re like “that’s all? that took forever!” but once again, even a complex animation with 50 frames could only take a few hours once you know how to do it. I’ve probably (I never timed myself) done animations in less than 30 minutes, or even quicker, for short ones that only have a dozen or so frames—so it’s really not that bad, and in the end, it’s worth it, because there’s nothing like enjoying your awesome animation in-game and sharing it with others who play your hack. ^_^