Potential for custom animation support?

[RageLeague]

Are there going to be support for custom animations in mods in the future? Right now, we can customize a lot of things (such as new cards, new quests, new images, and new sounds), but custom animations are very hard, if possible.

There are two things that makes custom animation hard. First, the animation format used in the game is hard to make without the right tools, and we don't have access to the right tools yet. Another thing is, even if we somehow manage to get a valid animation file, we can't actually load it in mods (it will always say "Missing file"). I tried using aliased path (something like "TESTMOD:anim/test.zip") and global path, and both does not seem to work.

I have two questions: Can we get a way of loading custom animation into the game via mods (this way, at least we can replace existing assets and use that as animation)? And can we get a way to make custom animations? Ideally, both should be possible, but the second one may be harder to achieve. Even if the first one is achieved can unlock a few potentials.

[rooks]

We have no plans at this time to support custom animations.

However, the path lookup issue should be fixable.  Can you provide more details about your mod structure and where the anims exist?  I tried copying an existing game anim into a mod folder and seemed to be able to load it using an aliased path name.  In the console I ran:

print( engine.asset.Anim( "TESTMOD:anim/test.zip" ))

to verify it could resolve the aliased path.  In the mod folder was a subfolder named 'anim', and in there was 'test.zip' copied from an existing game anim.

So your intuitions are correct -- perhaps there is a gotcha somewhere we can track down.

 

[RageLeague]

This is basically what I did:

I have a mod aliased "DAILYLEADERBOARD" (I was testing some leaderboard interaction, but that failed, so I used this as my test mod). Basically, the structure is this:
 

DailyLeaderboard
|- whats_the_matter_exe.zip (A crude edit of the bat dog thing in the plax editor)
|- test_anim.lua
|- modinit.lua

This is the content for test_anim.lua. It is loaded in modinit.

local test_modded_build = CreateCreatureBuild({

    dialog_build = "DAILYLEADERBOARD:test_anim.zip",
    dialog_anim = "DAILYLEADERBOARD:test_anim.zip",
    combat_anims = { "DAILYLEADERBOARD:test_anim.zip", },
    portrait_anim = "DAILYLEADERBOARD:test_anim.zip",
})

Content.AddCharacterBuilds({test_modded_build = test_modded_build})

This is what happens when selecting it in the build tester.

Clicking on it crashes the game and tells you that you are missing files.

(Okay this one I didn't do any modification. I just copied the bat dog thing's anim and put it in the same place as before and changed the name to "literally_beast_dial.zip")

Also, when I tried your print statement, except I changed it to my file path, this happens:

[rooks]

Can you try DM'ing me a zipped copy of this DailyLeaderboard mod?  I'll try reproducing with its exact contents.