The Phrozen Keep

[Phrozen Heart]

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Acknowledgements:

Thx go to TeknoKyo for clearing me up with some of the stuff
and giving me some more accurate infos, and to Apocalypse Demon
for spelling corrections.

Animations Conversions

1.A Getting the Animations
Lets say that you want to replace the foul crows with the hellfire
torch ants, you will need to get the animations of the torch
ants youwill have to download Cv5. It crashes pretty often but
still, it is the only tool to use. Open hellfire.mpq with cv5
(in you hellfire folder or on your hellfire cd) and go to the
monsters folder in it. You will see many sub folders. Go down
to the antworm folder and open it. Take to note that diablo 1
and hellfire dont use the same mode code like d2 and d2x, the
mode code used in d1 and hellfire is the following:

A - Attack
D - Death
H - Get hit
N - Neutral (standing)
S - Skill
W - Walk

As you probably saw there is no corpse, since d1 and hellfire
use the last frame (for the direction) in the D mode as the corpse.The
animations of the torch ant have the following frames:

A - 96
D - 160
H - 48
N - 112

W - 96

Save all of these animations as
ANIMATED .GIF. To save you ALOT of work later, make sure to ALWAYS
load the diablo palette while saving diablo 1 and hellfire animations.
Now you will have to get a decent gif animator, trash like ms
gif animator won't do the job here so get something that is about
as good as jasc animation shop pro which comes with paintshop
pro. Now you will notice that the animations are not ordered
like the D2 animations. The d1 animations are ordered in the
following way: down, down left, left, left up, up, right up,
right, right down while in d2 the animations are ordered as left
down, left up, right up, right down, down, left, up, right. Cut
and paste the
frames until they are ordered like in the d2 animations. Remember
that every directions contains /8 frames of the total frame count
so an animation with 128 frames has 16 frames per direction.
Now change the background color to #AAAAAA so that your animations
won't have a black background. Now repeat this for all the animations.
Now you will have to make a corpse animation, which is easy.
Open the D(death) animation with the gif animator, remove all
the frames
except the LAST frames for each direction and save it as C. Now
to the harder part. Open up d2data.mpq and browse with cv5 to

data\global\monsters\bk\tr\. You will see ALOT of animations.
These are all the foul crow animations so make a list like the
one below because you will find it VERY helpful later on.

A1 88
DD 8
DT 184
GH 40
NU 88
WL 64

Now, as you notice the frames don't match. What you will have
to do is see which part has more frames then the foul crow and
you will end up with this:

nu bk=88 ta=112 and A1 bk=88 ta=96, if we will just go into
the next step the game WILL crash so you will have to first find
a cof file that has more frames than 112. To make your search
easy goto the vulture demon folder (VD) and copy the VDNUHTH.cof
file, rename it BKNUHTH.cof and put it in the BK folder. Do the
same with VDA1HTH.cof and rename it to BKA1HTH.cof and put in
BK folder. (if you dont know why I say put it in without reminding
mpq2k or stuff like this, read the -direct -txt guide you can
find on the phrozenkeep). This problem is fixed for now but now
we get to the harder part. You will have to save the animations
from hellfire as .dccs AND make the offsets match. To do this
select the
bktrlitnuhth.dcc file with cv5 and save it as .dcc. The window
that will appear now will show you alot of slots for offsets.
Copy the numbers in the first one and then save the image but
as .gif, open the gif with a graphic tool and write down it's
width and height. the offsets are the location of the animation
on the play screen. If they don't match, the animation will appear
to float or will not be
targetable and will therefore look screwed up! The best way I
found to get offsets is to do original offsets +new width-old
width which will be like this: If the original offset 20x 20y
and size is 100x100px, the
new animation is 150x150px, the offsets will be 70x 70y. It is
enough to get one offset for ALL the animations (thx to foxbat
for clearing this up that you need only 2 matching offset instead
of 16 ) this is only

correct for d1 and hellfire monsters though! Now that you have
the offset, save the edited .gifs as .dcc with cv5, set directions
to 8, enter the offsets in the 16 slots and then click the save
button on
the .dcc panel. After this is done we can start the hex editing
part. Just before this I will add some useful data about x/y
systems and d2 modes.

The directions in x/y for offsets:

UP= -Y
DOWN= +Y

LEFT= -X
RIGHT= +X

As you probably noticed the MODES for d2 are quite different
and there are much more graphics per monster. Here is a complete
table to explain body parts, modes and sub modes:

HD - head
TR - torso (or entire monster)

LG - legs
RA - right arm
LA - left arm
RH - right hand
LH - left hand
SH - shoulders

S1 - overlay 1
S2 - overlay 2
S3 - overlay 3
S4 - overlay 4
S5 - overlay 5
S6 - overlay 6

S7 - overlay 7
S8 - overlay 8

 

Each might have sub modes:

DT - death

NU - neutral
WL - walk
GH - gethit
A1 - attack 1
A2 - attack 2
BL - block

SC - cast
S1 - skill 1
S2 - skill 2
S3 - skill 3
S4 - skill 4
DD - corpse

KB - knock back
SQ - skill sequence
RN - run

In case that your animation is made off more then 1 body part
and has overlays, you can make 1x1 px animations with #AAAAAA
color in the appropriate length to just make those disappear.

Now to the harder part, this editing might sound scary for
many of the people that read this but it is easy. First I'll
explain the difference between hex and dec numbers: decimal has
10 numbers from the word

DECI 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9

Hexadecimal has 16 numbers from the words HEXA and DECI which
means 6 and 10. 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F the smallest
number is 00 while the biggest is FF (255). Now remember when
I told you to write down the frame counts:

A - 96
D - 160
H - 48

N - 112
W - 96
C - 8

A1 88
DD 8
DT 184

GH 40
NU 88
WL 64

Now we will have to divide all these by 8 which will be:

A - 12

D - 20
H - 6
N - 14
W - 12
C - 1

A1 11

DD 1
DT 23
GH 5
NU 11
WL 8

Those that match in this case DD and C will be removed from
this list since there is no need to hex edit something that matches.
(DUH!)

Now we will need to convert all of these to hex:

A - 0C
D - 14
H - 06
N - 0E

W - 0C

A1 0B
DT 17
GH 05
NU 0B
WL 08

As well as listing .cofs which will HELP alot while searching
in the files later on with your hex editor

A1/A = BKA1HTH
DT/D = BKDTHTH
GH/H = BKGHHTH
NU/N = BKNUHTH

WL/W = BKWLHTH

Now extract animdata.d2 from your d2exp.mpq and load it into
your hex editor. I use Hex Workshop. In the editor search for
the text strings of the .cof names from above. (eg: search for
BKA1HTH now you will see somthing like this):

424B 4131 4854 4800 *0B00* 0000 0401 0000
0000 0000 0000 0100 0000 0000 0000 0000

The frame count is stored in the byte marked with ** as you
see from the converting before A1 has 0B frames and what you
want to replace has 0C frames so edit that byte from 0B00 ro
0C00 repeat this for every animation then save animdata.d2 and
put it in data\global. Now it's time to rename your new .dcc
files so they can be used to replace the old ones. Rename the
A.dcc to bktrlita1hth.dcc the D.dcc to bktrlitdthth.dcc and so
on for the rest (H,N,W,C) and put these into data\global\monsters\bk\tr\
and put the .cofs into data\global\monsters\bk\cof. Now you can
hex edit a palshift.dat file

if you want to change the monsters color to what ever you like
or use what they have now. Since this tutorial deals with graphics
and not sounds I'll add a short but not full sound par. To use
the hellbat sounds go to the monsters/newsfx folder and get the
hellbat sounds, open them in a sfx program and change their type
to 24000HZ 16Bit STEREO and put them in the appropriate folder.

Addendum:

Since first writing this tutorial, I found a very easy way
to find offsets:

WIDTH - (WIDTH-(WIDTH/2)

so if width is 100 the x offset will be -50

For example: 100-(100-50) = -50

Link to this article: Select all

[url=https://d2mods.info/forum/kb/viewarticle?a=171&sid=6dd296e8f137eee3b179fef52a3a30d0]Knowledge Base - Animations Conversion Tutorial[/url]