BackgroundWhat are Hit-boxes?Hit-boxes in M&B are little balloons around each bone of a moving character used by the game to understand if something hit that part of the body, and, by extension, that character. A character, independently by the way it looks, is hit just if the ballon is. The reason is that it is much easier to check the "ballon" for collision. It is similar to the Collision Objects (which are for static meshes, however, and can be any shape).
Another use of hitboxes is in ragdolling, to avoid that, say, an arm pass though the chest when the guy is dead and is falling like a huge bag of potatoes.
Hitboxes for human and horses in vanilla Warband, visualized with OpenBRF
Why you want to edit them? Simply put, if you make a new skeleton or customize an old one, you want to make a new hitbox for it, for a more realistic fighting experience in the game.
Hit-boxes in M&B / WBThe game keeps, for each different skeleton, a set of hit-boxes (with at most one hit-box per bone). Some bone, usually smaller ones like "hands", have none, at least in vanilla. Every hitbox is shaped as a "capsule", the geometric shape you get if you cut a sphere in half and cram a cylinder of the same radius in the middle.
Now the ugly catch: Hit-boxes for skeletons, unlike basically all other content of the game (e.g. meshes, animations, materials, collision objects...), are
not stored in any BRF file!
Instead, the game keeps them in a separate file, "skeleton_bodies.xml", which holds all hitboxes for all skeletons used in a module, plus a few other metadata also associated to skeleton (used for regdolling). That file is kept in "your_module/data" folder, but, if not there, the default copy is used in game "data" folder.
That's a bit of a problem for OpenBRF: hit-boxes are tightly linked to skeletons, they cannot even be visualized without one, and yet if they are edited the not the BRF file with the skeleton but this global .xml file has to be saved. That will cause some confusion, I'm sure. Important: the link between "hitboxes" (in the XML data) and skeletons (anywhere in BRF files) is by name: a hitbox will be associated with a skeleton with the same name.
How's to in OpenBRFVisualize hitboxesJust select the corresponding skeleton. You'll see, in the databox, a check-button called "has hit-boxes", in the "data" box, which tells you whether that skeleton has an associated set of hitboxes. If it does, you can visualize the set of hit-boxes by selecting the option inside the "view" box.
Hitboxes can be seen during animations just as well (to see how they behave during an animation). In all cases, they can be visualized together with a "skin" (the skin can be quickly toggled on/off with space: it helps to perceive how much the hitbox fits an actual character)
When you change the current module (and at start-up), OpenBRF scans the file "skeleton_bodies.xml" and remembers all the hitboxes found there: it will use them for skeletons with the same name. OpenBRF refreshes that file with F5 (with many other things).
Remember the association is done by name: for example, if you rename a skeleton, it can lose (or gain) a hitbox set.
Edit all hitboxes manuallyAnything you need to do with hitboxes of your mod, you can do it manually, by opening the file "skeleton_bodies.xml" in a text editor (copy the one from <game>/data folder into your <module>/data folder to start with). The file is a XML so it's should not be too difficult to figure out and edit.
To visualize that what you did made sense, you can keep OpenBRF open: just save the XML file and refresh OpenBRF with F5: the hitboxes will be updated.
This is the "slow but sure" way: you can add, delete, edit any hitbox assocaited to any skeleton. It is just not very intuitive to do. That's the emergency way to do anything (without OpenBRF).
WYSIWYG editing hit-boxes within OpenBRF- Select the skeleton with the same name as the hitbox.
- Click on any bone on the list.
- You can now use the controls to thicken, elongate, move, rotate the hitbox for that bone. You can also activate/deactivate that hitbox (not all bones have one). You can make the hitbox symmetric (e.g. you edit the left leg, and use that to update the right leg so to match). And so on: experiment with the controls, they should be easy to understand with very little tries.
- Hint: while you edit, it helps to turn the skin on and off (keyboard shortcut is space) to see that your hitbox is right.
Save a modified hit-boxNow the tricky part: when you edited a hitbox from OpenBRF, a "(**)" --
double * -- will appear in the OpenBRF windows title: this tells you that you have unsaved changes
in the skeleton metadata. It's of no use to just "save": that saves the BRF file with the skeleton and hitboxes are not kept there. Instead, you need the command, in "Module" menu, to "Save module Hit-Boxes for all skeletons".
Don't worry: you will be prompted that you must save your changes, and offered to do so, whenever you are about to lose them (e.g. you try to quit OpenBRF, or open another module, etc).
(hint: a quick way to discard your edits, if you need to do so, is to refresh the module with F5: that reloads the current "skeleton_bodies.xml")
Remeber you never save just a single hitbox: you save either all hit-boxes of a module or none.
Caveat: when OpenBRF saves the hitboxes, it saves a "skeleton_bodies.xml" which is looks very different from the one found in native (a backup is done). This is because XML files can assume many different form (indentation etc). In particular, OpenBRF unfortunately scrables the order of "attributes" inside nodes. The game does not care at all, and works correctly. But manual edit of that file get be more difficult, I'm afraid.
Add a hit-box set to a new skeletonWhen you create a new skeleton (e.g. copy, paste and rename an existing skeleton, or import it), it will have no associated hitbox. Unfortunately, you cannot just add hitboxes to its bones, one by one, because there is no way OpenBRF would no the rest of the metadata necessary to be saved together with the hitbox.
Instead, you have
to transfer an existing hitBox-set from another skeleton.
How to do that:
1) select origin (a skeleton with hitbox), [edit]->[copy hitbox]
2) select destination, [edit]->[paste hitbox].
The two skeletons must share the same number of bones.
More on copying and pasting hitboxesAfter you copied a hitbox (step 1 above), you can just paste it (ctrl+C) (instead of pasting an hitbox over the skeleton).
That creates a static collision object instead, made of capsules (plus "placeholders" for bones without hitboxes).
That "collision object" can in turn be copied and pasted "as a hitbox" over a skeleton (again, select it, [edit]=>[copy hitbox]).
Naturally, before you do that, you can also edit the "collision object" as normal, e.g. enlarge it, or manually edit its many numbers, or export it and reimport it, etc.
The two ways to transfer a hitbox from a skeleton to another are a bit different. If you go though the static collision, the position if space are fixed, indendent of the bone positions of the destination skeleton. There are cases when either of the two things is useful, so I kept both ways. Can you see why?
Minor: remove a hitbox from the moduleI.e. remove it from skeleton-bodies.xml
You can select the skeleton with the same name, right click, [Remove hitboxes]. Remember you are not actually doing anything to the skeleton. The association is done by name: if you remove the hitbox from a skeleton called "skel_giant", you are just deleting the hitbox called "skel_giant" (e.g. another "skel_giant" sitting in another unrelated BRF file will now be without hitbox).
When you save hitboxes, OpenBrf tells you all the ones he is going to save.
Small detail: if you want to remove one, but have no skeleton named that way, you can create a skeleton with that name just to delete it.
