Golfer Utility Questions

Discuss Golfer Animations, Clothing, Clubs, MOP's, Soundscripts, Seasons, Rosters and all Career Mode related plus any External Programs here.
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Big Sexy JC
Posts: 218
Joined: November 15th, 2022, 8:10 am
Location: Indiana

Golfer Utility Questions

Post by Big Sexy JC »

Gents,

I've seen two posts with a combined 270 views willing to pay someone to create player animations without a single response so I started to assume there was more to creating those than I realized. So, over the holidays I've had some time off and really started digging into the golfer utility. I'm not sure who made that, but it's a great little utility with a very simple interface that is super easy to learn and use so a big thanks to the designer.

Anyway, I've figured out how to switch faces, shirts, etc. and learned which animations are compatible with each other and which ones aren't. I wouldn't call myself an expert, but I think I understand how to use the utility as well as I need to know. The exception would be faces. I feel like that's the little secret that is hard to get info on. I can't find a tutorial on how to create faces or how others created them. I'm not sure why so many of the animations have the faces locked so that you can't switch them around to other animations? Is that because that's where all the work and expertise is at and nobody wants to make those accessible?

Here is what I'm wanting to do:

I want to take the anipro1 animation (for example) and be able to swap different faces into that animation. I would also like to use the faces from the anipro1 animation with other animations.

I want to be able to use the faces from the non-hat wearing animations with the hat/visor wearing animations. I've tested this, but they don't look right. Is this possible? If so, is there a tutorial somewhere?

Or, I want to be able to add hats to the non-hat wearing animations. Can you just add hats onto an animation that doesn't have hats? I'm assuming the answer is no.

Is there a compatibility chart anywhere that has which player animations have which naming convention (for example, all of M01 files are Matt and M03 files are Eric) and which animations files are compatible with other animation files? I've done some of this testing on my own, but certainly haven't done enough testing to have all those answers yet. I was hoping someone had done it and documented it that was willing to share it.

As you can kind of gather, I don't want any golfers without hats and all the faces that are accessible are of golfers that don't have hats. I need to know if there is a way to get around this?
gator
Posts: 178
Joined: August 26th, 2019, 9:30 pm

Re: Golfer Utility Questions

Post by gator »

Back in Links heyday, if you will, there were a select few individuals who were privy to and knew how to edit and create new anis. You can see some of those designers names/screen names by checking out the ani download page on this forum (viewtopic.php?f=18&t=97). This was a VERY closely held secret. Their website still exists to this day (http://www.linksanimasters.com/) although there hasn't been a post on their forum regarding any new anis since 8/2014. I just grabbed a screenshot from the forum that pretty much says it all:

Ani Masters.jpg
Ani Masters.jpg (176.48 KiB) Viewed 1536 times

What they did give us (in addition to a LOT of wonderful anis) was the Golfer Utility Program and a couple of tutorials which allow us to swap out faces, shirts, pants, shoes, hats on those anis that the designers would allow us to do so. As you have figured out, some items won't work with some anis as their wire frames are not all the same. I hate to be so negative as I too wish they would have shared their "secrets" so that we could continue to create new anis.
Big Sexy JC
Posts: 218
Joined: November 15th, 2022, 8:10 am
Location: Indiana

Re: Golfer Utility Questions

Post by Big Sexy JC »

Thanks gator. That explains a lot. I am familiar with the animasters website, but was never on the forum so that's the first time I've seen that post. Are any of those designers still reachable or on this site? I mean we are talking about a game made in the last century, and to your point, nothing on the front of new anis in over 8 years. I think those of us still playing this game are just trying to get as much out of it as we can, while we can.

I'm willing to pay for some help or for someone to create new anis, but I'm also willing to make them myself if I had a tutorial on how to do it. I'm a little surprised that nobody has dug into cracking those L3 animation files open to see how they are created. Heck, at this point, new anis would be icing on the cake. I'd just love to have the existing ones unlocked so we could access the face files and use them as needed in the utility.

I have dug into them enough to see why the ones without hats don't work with the ones with hats and vice versa, but it seems like it would be fairly easy to fix. I mean one is centered and one is offset to the left so while you can swap the face files around, they just don't show up correctly if put on the "wrong" ani file.

Heck, I even tried to add pants to the shorts anis and i'm completely dumbfounded how that didn't work. I removed the skin TGAs from the short anis and replaced them with skin files that didn't have legs and switched out the shorts with pants. Everything worked perfectly and the modified animations show up in the game with the new shorts, but remarkably the legs are still there without pants. I have no idea where the game is pulling the leg skins from when I removed them. It blew my mind. I mean come on Matt, it's OK to play golf with pants on dude.

I guess here is my official call out to the animation masterminds. The game is old and past it's prime. Just throw us a bone.
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