New death animation?

Neverwinter Nights 1 Custom Content
1

greetings!

i’m looking for a way to stop death in its tracks – and the pc that dies as well! :wink:
okay, more specifically, i’d like to know how to change the death animation so that the creature will simply return to its normal standing position upon death ; i don’t want humanoids to fall down and start drooling, i don’t want vermin to flip over upside down legs all a-quiver, etc.   i just want them to stop. or maybe stop and just stand there. i want this to be the default for all of these types of creatures.

in addition, if possible, i’d like to be able to control triggering of the death animation programmatically, so i can have a creature go through its death throes if i need to.

now here’s the problem: i don’t know how to do this… :roll_eyes:
i’m guessing one of the models (a_ba? a_fa?) might have some sort of built-in death animation, and i’m hoping i could just take it out and ‘transplant’ it into a_ba_non_combat or something, and possibly make it a custom animation? (as you can see, i’m shooting in the dark here…).

anybody have an idea as to how i could go about doing this?

2

Can it be done with scripting? I mean, at point of a creature death, maybe something like SetImmortal and Effect CutsceneParalyze() when creature would die?

Sounds like you have something very particular in mind. :slight_smile:

3

There are specific animations somewhere, it depends on the model where they are located (a_ba, b_ba or any other “include” like this or even in the model itself.) Animations on creatures are the high art of 3d modelling, something I don’t dare to touch … :slight_smile:

Just having a creature automatically raised after death, can be done by scripting.
This goes into the OnDeath-event of the PC

void Raise(object oPlayer)
  {
    ApplyEffectToObject(DURATION_TYPE_INSTANT,EffectResurrection(), oPlayer);

    effect eBad = GetFirstEffect(oPlayer);
    while(GetIsEffectValid(eBad))
      {
        if (GetEffectType(eBad) == EFFECT_TYPE_ABILITY_DECREASE ||
            GetEffectType(eBad) == EFFECT_TYPE_AC_DECREASE ||
            GetEffectType(eBad) == EFFECT_TYPE_ATTACK_DECREASE ||
            GetEffectType(eBad) == EFFECT_TYPE_DAMAGE_DECREASE ||
            GetEffectType(eBad) == EFFECT_TYPE_DAMAGE_IMMUNITY_DECREASE ||
            GetEffectType(eBad) == EFFECT_TYPE_SAVING_THROW_DECREASE ||
            GetEffectType(eBad) == EFFECT_TYPE_SPELL_RESISTANCE_DECREASE ||
            GetEffectType(eBad) == EFFECT_TYPE_SKILL_DECREASE ||
            GetEffectType(eBad) == EFFECT_TYPE_BLINDNESS ||
            GetEffectType(eBad) == EFFECT_TYPE_NEGATIVELEVEL ||
            GetEffectType(eBad) == EFFECT_TYPE_PARALYZE ||
            GetEffectType(eBad) == EFFECT_TYPE_DEAF) RemoveEffect(oPlayer, eBad);

        eBad = GetNextEffect(oPlayer);
      }

    effect eVisual = EffectVisualEffect(VFX_IMP_RESTORATION);
    ApplyEffectToObject(DURATION_TYPE_INSTANT, eVisual, oPlayer);
}

void main()
{
  object oPC=GetLastPlayerDied();
  object Life=GetItemPossessedBy(oPC,"xx_Lebensversicherung");
  if (Life!=OBJECT_INVALID)
    {
      DelayCommand(3.0,Raise(oPC));
      SendMessageToPC(oPC,"This Insurance is worth every penny.");
      return;
    }
  DelayCommand(3.0, PopUpDeathGUIPanel(oPC, TRUE, FALSE, 0, "Another one bites the dust."));
}

If the PC has an item “Live Insurance” in it’s inventory, it will raised automatically after 3 seconds in full health, otherwise the death panel will be displayed. Raising NPC’s should be quite similar.

4

thanks for your reply, jfk. yes, it’s true that the visual effect can be obtained w/cutscene paralyse, but there are all sorts of ‘bookkeeping’ activities that take place when a pc dies that can’t be circumvented, and these won’t fire off if the character is actually still alive. also, a dead character won’t be affected by most spells & effects that will affect a living character, so it would end up being ‘really really hard’ to mock death. so in short, death is… ‘special’. :smiling_imp:

5

hi mmat, thanks for your post.

do you happen to know what they’re called, if not where they are located?

i think there might be a misunderstanding here; in my case, a ‘raised’ character would be one that is ‘raised’ only in the physical sense [i.e., standing up], not one that’s restored from the dead. in fact, the character should remain dead – but be standing up.

6

I had a problem with the reindeer, which I posted 2 years ago. From it I learned that the relevant animations are “ckdbckdie” and “cdead” (in this case). The reindeer has it’s animations in it’s own modelfile.

Butchering these animations out of the model should cause the desired effect. The Character will not drop to the ground on death.

If there is a supermodel like a_ba the the things will get a bit more complicated. Give me an example and I will see what can be done.

7

You could possibly edit the default OnDeath script to make the body invisible upon death and bring in a stand-in NPC or placeable that has the appearance of the original creature. Or instead of invisible, just destroy the original body. The stand in would be set to PLOT and be cutscene immobile or something. Did you still want them to be lootable or just drop their stuff?

8

there’s some good info and some great ideas here, thank you. i’ll try out a few things tomorrow and post back.

9

thanks for your input, everyone. w/your help i was able to identify the death animations in all the models & develop a workaround.   i realised tinkering around w/the death animations wouldn’t be nearly as easy to do as i’d originally hoped as there are so many of them.   i did finally decide to use a sort of ‘sleight-of-hand’ approach after the pc is killed that seems to be working for the moment. thanks again for your ideas.