Missing frames

After replacing Saga with a girl and confirming that hand.xa must be loaded correctly in order for Hitareas to be loaded, I went back to Esk to try to rename frames.

(Here are some other tests to verify hand.xa claim:
-removing keyframes down to 1. Still works. Remove last one, hitareas disappear
-removing track names completely. Hitareas diappear)

However, problems just keep coming up.

When you look at Esk's frame structure, there are a lot of frames. But if you try to map all of the frames that are used in a yuusha character to frames that seem to do the same in Esk, you'll find that it won't work out nicely.

Esk has a lot of frames that Yuusha characters don't have, but Yuusha characters also have a lot of frames that Esk doesn't have.

This causes a problem because we are required to have those exact frame names that the xa file uses...otherwise it will crash.

I am not sure how to deal with this, but I did find some clues after some testing:

1: It is ok to have extra frames. For example, I added a lot of random frames to Viara's structure and it loaded fine. So Esk having more frames than usual shouldn't be a problem. And yes, several modders have already been adding their own frames and bones to the characters successfully, so it's not an issue at all.

2: Dummy frames are ok. This is important, because this may be the solution to the "missing frames" problem.

Suppose we look at the index finger (hito). In Yuusha, this is how it looks:

a01_J_HitoL_01
--a01_J_HitoL_02
----a01_J_HitoL_03
------s01_J_HitoL_04 (this isn't required)

What about adding a dummy frame?

a01_J_HitoL_01
--dummy
----a01_J_HitoL_02
------a01_J_HitoL_03
--------s01_J_HitoL_04 (this isn't required)

This loaded fine. In fact, I didn't see much of a difference in functionality.
Now what about just adding dummy names with the same name?

dummy1
--dummy2
----dummy3

Then rename them to

a01_J_HitoL_01
--a01_J_HitoL_02
----a01_J_HitoL_03

That also works. You'll find that her wrist moves around a little too fast, but at least it works right? I'm guessing the problem here is that since I removed the frames, the bone weights were lost. But if we are just adding dummy frames to compensate for missing frames, it should not be an issue.

Hopefully with this, I can successfully import Esk. But it sounds like a lot of manual work.....