TAE Files

Each character's anibnd file contains one or more TAE files which govern the specific events that occur during animations. A TAE file contains a list of animations, each of which contains a list of Time Action Events. These events have a type field which indicates the function to be performed at the specified time indices of the animation. Only some event types are fully understood, but they can be safely modified and rewritten without affecting the rest of the file. Some examples:

• i-frames
• parry windows
• applying a "SpEffect" (special temporary statuses such as ring effects, poisoning, buffs, AI triggers, etc)
• allowing animation cancelling
• forcing death
• creating "SFX" (particle effects)
• playing sound effects such as footsteps, sword swooshes, etc.
• doing an attack behavior (does damage to opponent, drains stamina from player, etc all in one event)
• doing a "bullet" (projectile) behavior (fires projectile, drains stamina from player, etc all in one event)
• doing a "common" behavior (like attack behaviors but for simpler things such as falling on someone's head causing stagger)
• creating motion blur on weapon swings
• setting the opacity of a character (used for getting summoned into other worlds, teleportation, etc)
• setting attack aim tracking speed of a character
• shaking the camera (e.g. Smough's footsteps)
• playing additional animation layers (e.g. all of Gwyn's animations have events to play his clothes-blowing-in-wind animation layer)
• many more that we haven't even figured out yet!

Tools

TAE-DX –– Editor for TAE files inside DS1/DSR anibnd packages.

MegaTAE –– Editor for TAE files inside DS3/Sekiro anibnd packages.