The number of frames can be reduced for all animations,
although i would not recommend to cut any down to 1 frame.
For the keywords Spell, Special and Attack_Special,
the value for Spellstart must be adjusted so that it is within the frame range of all the related anims that are assigned in the mls script.
Similar for Missilestart regarding keywords Attack_Ranged/Shoot/Throw.

While i understand the desire to speed things up, have increased fps rates of many vanilla monsters,
As someone who imported ~1k anim sequences for dozens of new Wiz8 monsters, and tuned the vast majority of them to look smoother,
the reduction of combat anims to literally nothing appears paradox, after all this is a fp 3D video game,
it can be done in less than 4h without using any glitches, speedmods or even wiz8fast.exe.

Thanks, that was very insightful information. I didn't know that the start of missiles and spells need a specific framerange or a specific frame where the start is assigned to.

Now that you mention that, this also explains why there was no smooth transition from the 1-frame-idle-animation to the spice-animation anymore: I probably removed the specific idle-frame where the start of the spice-animation was assigned to.

In a monsters anim set, all other animations start and end frames fit to at least the start and end frame of the idle animation,
usually Idle has so little variations that all of its frames would fit,
With the exception of most walk anims, they require the Transition anim,
which is played backwards when the monsters stop moving and fall into idle.

btw the Walk anim is tied to the value for Movementrate,
iirc it is required to adjust the movementrate at the same ration at which you increased/reduced the number of frames in the related Walk anim,
else the monsters feet will either shift on the ground or, drastically spoken, walk on the spot.

If not yet done you may also want to outcomment all sound effects in the .mls scripts
with a [#] at the beginning of each line that contains the term "Sound" in the keyword.
Then there are still the sound effects of armorMaterial_hit_by_weaponMaterial
and the character battlesounds to shorten

Ah true. I checked it again, and it looks like the first frame of all animations builds on top of the last frame of the idle-animation.


I made now cleaner tests (3 combat rounds against a party of 3 slimes and 9 rats). All tests used Wiz8Fast with 25x movement speed. Aside from that only character animations were changed.

Combat duration with default animations was 56 seconds.

Combat duration with faster attack-, dodge-, gethit-animations (Kaucukovnik) was 47 seconds.
These animations were also used in all subsequent tests, but with additional changes to idle- and spice-animations:

a) Changing the idle- and spice-animations to 3x its original speed.
Combat duration 30 seconds. Idle- and spice-animations are stressful to look at. Similar with 2x speed.

b) Replacing the idle-animation with 1-frame-duplicates at 3x speed, and removing the spice-animations.
Combat duration 30 seconds. Characters are completely motionless.

c) Replacing the idle-animation with 1-frame-duplicates at 10x speed, and removing the spice-animations.
Combat duration 24 seconds. Characters are completely motionless.

d) Replacing the idle-animation with 1-frame-duplicates at 3x speed, and preserving the spice-animations.
Combat duration 33 seconds. Characters are motionless, but have occasional spice-animations.

e) Replacing the idle-animation with 1-frame-duplicates at 10x speed, and preserving the spice-animations.
Combat duration 28 seconds. Characters are motionless, but have occasional spice-animations.

f) Preserving the idle-animation, and removing the spice-animations.
Combat duration 40 seconds. Characters have their idle-animation, but no spice-animations.


Out of these options (e) seems to be the best compromise. And the speed difference (from 47 to 28 seconds) is still huge.

After some further testing I have to admit the idle-mod looked quite bad on some monsters. For example, flying insects and plants looked like they were paralyzed during idle. The occasional spice-animation made it even worse, because it looked like a glitch.

But that wasn't the only problem. Some monster have a longer idle-animation (like slimes), and some a shorter one (like rats). Depending on that the improvement was either noticeable or neglectable. And when they were neglectable, it felt like the idle-mod wasn't worth its compromises.

Another problem was, that in my previous tests Wiz8Fast was set too slow (25x). When set to 125x a significant improvement to the combat speed happened. This actually made the slow (default) idle-animations bearable.

These things eventually convinced me, that the idle-mod isn't worth its compromises. In fact I don't think any option in my previous post is anymore. I think the infamous pause has to stay.

The ideal solution would be to have idle- and spice-animations, only shorter in duration, but not faster in pacing (fps). But that isn't really possible. Though it would be possible to create a shorter animation out of the existing frames. But that is very tricky. You have to remove frames to make it shorter, and that automatically makes it either faster or slower and robotic.

Aside from that I also noticed how hit-sounds produced a noticeable pause, e.g. when getting shot by umpanis, trangs or fire ants. The idle-mod didn't help here. As suggested by @townltu, shortening the sound files would be an option. I tested this (by extracting the sounds and making it faster in a third party program), and the result was pretty good. This definitely improves ranged combat.

I think I found the root cause of why the "Pause" becomes so annoying:

Whenever an enemy has to move somewhere and this enemy is just playing a spice-animation, it will first complete the spice-animation, then it will play a full idle-animation (!), and only then he will actually move.

So the game plays 2 animations in a row before actually moving. This causes the pause being longer than expected (up to twice as long, which can be 4 seconds on some enemies). I don't know why they made it like that, because it doesn't happen in any other case. Probably a bug.

This animation chain can happen whenever an enemy wants to move, which is quite often. It's also something that can't really be fixed. For example, it doesn't get better if you shorten the idle- or spice-animations only a little bit. Shorter animations can actually cause more spice-animations (and therefore more chains) being played in the same timeframe. For a significant improvement you would have to shorten the animations so much, that the compromises would probably be also too much (either nonexisting animations or too fast ones). What a shame. If there's one thing that should be fixed after all these years, it's this.

Try it, in fan patch 1.28 there is a new option "Monster animation speed" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_lT-rhBcZA