-Adding Animations: Well, ok, shouldn't be a problem. I don't know if the game will like that change, though.
Regarding this, I've been playing around with adding in some of Sephiroth's missing animations, so I figured I'd share what I learned -- I'm sure you, Borde, know a lot or all of this already but I'll start at the beginning in case others want to know.
I used a hex editor to modify the **da file, specifically sada. This great guide is very helpful for understanding the format:
http://wiki.qhimm.com/FF7/Battle/Battle_Animation_(PC)
First off, animations appear to come in pairs. For some reason there is the body animation and then the weapon animation. The body animations all come first, then the weapon animations all follow. You can differentiate between body and weapon animations by the bone count in the first DWORD of the FF7FrameHeader.
The index of the animation determines how it is used in battle, for example animation 9 is "use item" -- meaning the 10th animation in the file is the body animation for using an item and the 10th weapon animation corresponds to that (indices start at 0).
So if an animation is missing, there is a place holder in that position, signified by a dwChunkSize < 11 (usually 4). Both the body animation and the corresponding weapon animation have place holders.
So for example, Sephiroth is missing animation 15 (hit by attacker), so I copied over animation 5 (missed by attacker). To be precise, I copied the entire 6th animation over the 16 byte place-holder at the 16th animation slot, and did the same for the weapon animations. Kimera liked the file so I tested it in game and it worked.
One thing I'd like to investigate further: Sephiroth is missing both animation 9 (use item) and animation 15 (hit by attacker). When you are playing as Sephiroth and use an item, he is lying on the ground for a second while it plays the missing "use item" animation -- this makes sense because Nibelheim Sephiroth never uses items. However, if I remember correctly, even Nibelheim Sephiroth gets hit sometimes and just doesn't animate at all -- he definitely doesn't lie on the ground. I wonder if this difference is encoded in the unknown DWORD of the placeholder.
Another thing that is strange to note is that Sephiroth's death animation (6?) was the same as his "start to cast" animation for some reason. I just changed that out to a placeholder and it sufficed to put him on the ground at least.
Anyway, long story short, this would be a very handy addition to Kimera for those who want to play as a character who wasn't designed to be played and thus is missing some animations. If Kimera could copy an animation over an existing one or in to a missing animation slot, it would be very useful. Creating a new animation instead of copying one would probably also be useful to some, but is much more work than just copying an existing one and possibly tweaking it to fit the new animation.
Here is where it gets tricky though... Sephiroth has no animations beyond animation 30 -- all the body animations are just place-holders after that, which is fine. The weapon animations on the other hand, don't even have the place-holders -- they just end at 30 (meaning there are 31 total). I was trying to add in animation 31 (deathblow). I overwrote the placeholder for body animation 31 like usual, added on the new weapon animation at the end of the file, and incremented the file's total animation count at the beginning. Kimera didn't load in the new weapon animation though, so I poked around the saaa file and found the number 31 there. I incremented that to 32 and Kimera successfully loaded the file and animation 31 looks good, BUT in game it doesn't appear to have an effect. So it appears I am missing something else here and don't yet know how to add a new animation on the end.
Whew, sorry for such a long post...hopefully it is helpful to someone... Thanks, Borde, for your great tool, and I hope we'll see this new feature at some point in the future =)
