[jarjar]

Hi all, Ben asked me to try and create a program to open end decode these .anm files for you guys, so I decided I would make a topic with what I found to show you how its going and you can input ideas. Not everything is known yet, but all will be soon (I hope).

The format itself seems pretty simple, in Steve-m's RW Analyzer I did some looking through a handful of .anm files, I have posted what I found in one below, each was nearly identical (except with HEX ofcourse):



The file format doesn't have much of a structure, all it is is [0x1B] Anim Animation, and thats all that there is in it's file. Whether this means it would be easier to successfully open and decode or not, I don't know just yet.

Okay, some other stuff, the HEX and the The Tree Structure...

Structure:

CODE

Anim Animation  (53120 bytes @ 0x0C) - [0x1B]

HEX:

--> Too big to post here -->

Now theres nothing much there in the HEX that jumps out at me, but from the weird symbols and odd dot (.) locations, it reminds me of animation flies such as Graphic Interchange Format (.GIF) which looks similar when view in a text editor. Steve-m said to me over PM that it does only contain one section (as stated above), which is the Anim Animation. DexX did some work with the file format awhile back (which work on UV anims) here.

I'll continue to look into this, but I'm not sure how I am going to go about decoding it yet. From what I have found so far, it should end up pretty simple if we're luck.

Thanks,
Jared

[Ben]

Approved.

Thanks Jared . There's a couple of reasons I've asked for this to be done, but mostly because it could prove invaluable to finishing off the cutscene conversion process - namely, the buggy heads and (crosses fingers) the lip sync. Even if it doesn't work out that way, we're at least left with the only format from the 3D GTA's that previously was unknown now being useable (provided that Jared can decode it and make a tool to edit ANMs).

Also, depending on how successful he is at decoding the format, I've also asked if he can whiz up some sort of rough converter to convert the ANM format into a workable IFP - the process need only be rough, as more specific IFP editing can be done in Max/G-Max using Kam's scripts. This should be the really beneficial bit for LC .

By the way, this post and the string of five posts beginning with (and including) this one have some extra (and potentially useful) information relating to ANM files .

[Blackadder.]

Good luck guys! Hope you get it done soon, so Liberty City can sh*t on be as great as GTA III



Edit by Craig on June 19, 2010: MM got the cutscene heads working! I wonder if anybody will look here before it's unveiled with beta 3.2.

This post has been edited by Craig Kostelecky on Sunday, Jun 20 2010, 03:27