Alright, so, cross-posting this here...I'm aware that it's been about a year since this thread's been posted to, and I read
this thread regarding necroposting; I'm honestly not sure my post deserves its own thread, and it's very clearly about using the Paragon utility and hacking FE Fates, so I'm going to hazard that it's OK to post this here. If it isn't, and I was supposed to make my own thread instead, my apologies in advance.
So, to start: I have a keen interest in getting the Yato, and its derivatives, to make 'magic sword' ranged attacks using some of the game's magic animations (essentially copying what the Siegfried and Raijinto do by default). It's honestly the reason I started messing around with Fates hacking in the first place; it really irritated me that my 'toon didn't get a crazy 1~2 sword, too.
Now, the aforementioned big-brother-swords each have some sort of pointer set-up in the game data where they already force a class's 'discharge' animation to play instead of their 'shoot' animations when making the aforementioned ranged attacks (they've also already got pointer arrays set-up somewhere for what particle effects they use and what magic spell animation they actually cast but that's beside the point for the moment). As far as I can tell, nobody's found this data yet.
However, it's entirely possible to
manually force this animation change (as well as force a magic animation of choice) on a class-and-weapon-model basis by using the ROM4 and Animation Set modules in thane's Paragon utility. It just follows (for the most part) what the developers did to give Ike's Ragnell a ranged attack in his DLC (there's more to it than this when it comes to the Yato, but this is the basis for the process).
Problem: You need to create a new ROM4 asset for every single sword-using class, for each gender, and for each individual weapon model of interest. Well, Yato has SEVEN variations, and when counting up all of the appropriate classes with sword-specific animation routines...you get 37. So you have to create a total of
252 ROM4 assets for this darn sword.
I just bit the bullet and did it, along with making the ~20 or so new animation sets for forcing the discharge routine without sacrificing other sword-wielding animations. This took
hours, and now my ROM4 has just about quadrupled in size; I'm watching to make sure the game still runs OK (seems to be thus far).
This DID work, btw; Corrin's been happily assuming the 'magic sword' stance and tossing Fire at range now with his various Yato swords (this is the magic I specified, not the 'default'; I checked to see if other spells worked and they did). All the different classes I've had him in, the animations look great. In fact, when Dragon Fang activates at 2-range while they're a Nohr Prince, Corrin actually
starts spitting fireballs from his hand (crit or not) and frankly it looks fantastic.
But this was brute forced, and it was painful. Also, warning here, that if you want to try doing this with any other sword model in Fates, you'll need to make 37 extra ROM4 assets to account for all the possible animations. Axes and Lances I haven't tried this with (Yato's a sword, and that's all I cared about honestly), but for them it's likely a similar number of assets.
It was absolutely ridiculous; there's got to be a more efficient way of doing this. Please, if anyone knows where the pointer information is for directly linking spells/attack animations/etc. to weapon models, and if there's a way for Paragon to manipulate that, I would love to have that information.
I do not think proprietary tools or direct graphical hacking is necessary; I say this because I was able to get weapon models that normally have pre-defined parameters to behave differently through the ROM4 method (I had Siegfried casting Fimbulvetr, I had Ryoma throwing the Raijinto instead of casting Thunder from it, etc.). Pretty sure this is just well-hidden pointer shenanigans?
