Talking and figuring out the act files is fine, just don't post nodes. From what I remember being told, the .cat files from act, are archives. Of all of the animations and whatnot for the fighting style. The stuff at the bottom are all paths, how they work I don't exactly know. ALL paths you need for an action node from a fighting style will be there in that fighting style file though. You just have to figure out what needs to load before you load another path. And what the name is at the end for the move to work.
Action nodes can do a lot of things, fighting moves, punches, animations, I think they can trigger other things, too. You can find example ones in scripts.img by searching for /global/ or any path you see in a .cat file, with a hex editor. That is really about all I know.
Also on checking of one, I did realize this
Strafe_Savage.act.Walk_Crazy.act.......
The end part loads how they walk and strafe from other files.
You are essentially correct.
The .cat files are in fact custom made archives that hold a master index file which is in plain text. Rise and I have figured out exactly how those archives are laid out and Rise even reconstructed one of them with the index file which the index file loads the seperate .bin animations.
The paths are very hard to figure out and while I cannot help anyone here figure this out due to the PSMM not being released just yet....I can however state that just trying to figure this out on your own will take a very long time since it has taken Rise, 1emon and myself the better part of a year on those alone to figure out and in all reality...Rise and 1emon have done all the work on the fighting styles where I just did basic preliminary work on them when we first started this massive mod.
The action nodes themselves are just what the name suggests. They are a node or core portion of code in the game that you can assign to a button to perform a listed action. Whether that be using a toilet...water fountain....doing the piss in pants animation like algie does or any of the overweight nerds do when threatened sufficiently, and so on down the list.
Everything needed to figure them out however IS in the .cat archives and here is how they work:
lets use the player.cat archive as a example here....
The player.cat controls every aspect of Jimmy aka the player and is considered a master action library. This file dynamically links to other .cat archives which in turn link to others in order to perform various things from basic running and strafe animations to fighting animations....handling objects to driving a vehicle. Everything is controlled by these.
I managed to code a partial extractor that does actually extract part of the .cat archives but it does not extract everything nor is what is extracted even usable as it is due to not having any way to build new .cat archives. I intend on finding a way to do this at some point but until I can come back to modding ...this will be on the back burner unless someone wants to take this up and give it a shot. I can easily give the full specs and post my notes about this if anyone is really serious enough to try taking on the task of coding a packer and unpacker for the .cat archives that fully works....since this will put the game to 98% moddable.
