I am absolutely loving the ability to use the ‘body_node_head’ scripted animation on many of my activate/use item tag based scripts. It looks ‘almost’ great…yes ‘almost’. Though I have changed every activate/use item 2da to ‘head’ (so the script function can still allow the use of other nodes), hand is apparently hard wired to all those 'Activate/Use 2da’s that had it there originally (It performs the hand forward animation, even though the beam shoots from the head!!!, I have tested this dozens of times!). I’m exasperated as this looks hard coded; however, I am hoping someone has successfully removed the activate/use item ‘hand’ animation and can share how they did it. If so, or you know how to remove it, please post here (Note: I have also tried asterisks, which usu = no animation, and other nodes and it always does the hand animation).
There is a request in the developers’ queue to allow unique power items with no cast animation (not sure whether it will be adopted).
Nearest I could get for now is to tweak spells.2da to reduce the animation play time, but it still looks wonk.
Ok thanks for looking into it!
I tried the new animation replacement function on client enter:
ReplaceObjectAnimation(oPC, "castself", "pause1");
ReplaceObjectAnimation(oPC, "castselflp", "pause1");but it doesn’t seem to work (neither does “idle”).
Can anyone suggest what I’m doing wrong?
Not sure if it will work with this, but to get polymorphing to work the way I wanted, I simply copied the existing 2da line for it, and changed the copy into what I wanted and it worked. I’ve thought about doing this with activate item as well, but I haven’t tried it yet. I have never been able to get the ‘idle’ anim to work, but Jude made some animations a few years back and those worked for me.
Interesting - what did you change, exactly?
The reason overriding the castself animation doesn’t work is that items have hard-coded animations (as explained in the wiki).
So, even though unique power spells specify “self” in spells.2da, this seems to be ignored by the engine, which uses “out” in all but a few special cases.
For unique power items, the following suppresses the animation entirely:
ReplaceObjectAnimation(oPC, "castout", "idle"); // Suppress item activation casting animation
ReplaceObjectAnimation(oPC, "castoutlp", "pause1");The downside is that castout is used, and desireable, for other spells.
I’ll investigate whether it can be suppressed for selected spells only.
I made different characters to turn into instead of the creatures, (for a chameleon like villain).
Unfortunately, as far as I can see, the very annoying Activate Item animation can’t be removed (unless overridden before the item is activated as shown above, affecting many other spells).
I’ve tried spell hooking, but the animation plays before any scripts run, and seemingly can’t be cancelled by ClearAllActions() or a scripted pause animation.
The baseitem.2da lines mentioned in the wiki must indeed be very hard-coded, as I don’t see any field in the 2da that can be tweaked on the lines in question.
Agreed, I’ve been trying to change it for years off an on, and have had 0 success. The best I have ever been able to do is have that standard animation at cast, but then have a second animation (the one I want) in the script on delay. Not optimal at all, but at least I get to see the animation I want prior to the casting of the feat/spell!