Oops, I looked over the XML:TRAM page to refresh my memory. I had a feeling that Extents were not for collision, but my memory was rusty. Extents are for warning the AI that it is within reach of an incoming attack and that it should think about dodging/blocking. So, while you need to match the number of extents to the number of attacking frames in the animation, as Paradox mentioned, an attack cannot hit invisibly because the collision is in fact determined by bone-to-bone collision. If there isn't physical contact, the attack won't land (as opposed to games that use hitboxes) .
Okay i'm understanding now
Anyway, if you want the attack to end more quickly, I think you have two options: recreating the animation with fewer frames at the end (which is quite hard), or deleting existing data from the end of the TRAM, which may harm the appearance of the animation. Looking at a TRAM that Loser shortened, it looks like he simply deleted the last 36 frames of data, but I don't think this crude approach would work for many animations if more than a few frames were deleted.
Out of the two options, i'm warming towards deleting, simply due to inexperience. It seems like the transition back to the default standing stance would look a lil janky. I would only want to shave off a few frames so perhaps it won't be too bad. The overall recovery of attacks feel okay to me. Definitely don't feel anything needs to be cut down anywhere near as much as 36. I'll give it a good look tomorrow. Appreciate the support guys, thanks for bearing with a novice >_<
]]>Anyway, if you want the attack to end more quickly, I think you have two options: recreating the animation with fewer frames at the end (which is quite hard), or deleting existing data from the end of the TRAM, which may harm the appearance of the animation. Looking at a TRAM that Loser shortened, it looks like he simply deleted the last 36 frames of data, but I don't think this crude approach would work for many animations if more than a few frames were deleted.
]]>Also, what are the other animation sections I need to keep in mind whilst making the adjustments? Trying to avoid making accidental invisible attacks in the future. In other words, which section handles the move animations so that I know what to match the attacking data with. I kinda worded this badly lol
]]>However, moving the impact significantly earlier will cause the hit to be out of sync with the animation (e.g., a kick landing invisibly before the attacker's leg reaches the opponent).
]]>Alternately, if you are extending the length of the animation, you'll probably want to re-calculate new Extents tags using the old first and last ones as endpoints. Paradox and I once did something similar, using a spreadsheet to create interpolated numbers between the new Start and End frames for a TRAM we were modifying. It's not hard to do, assuming that the Extents data for each frame progresses in a linear fashion. In our case, we were modifying position, not extents, and had to reproduce a motion curve (acceleration and deceleration), which was trickier.
With me so far?
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