ESO Mod:ANFT File Format

The ANFT (ANimation File Table) file (or files) are found within the .DAT files which are linked to the various animation files.

Overall Format

The overall ANFT file is composed of a short fixed size header, multiple 16-byte entries for each animation file, and a fixed size footer:

   [ Header (0x9 bytes) ]
   [ Entry (0x10 bytes) ]
   [ ...                ]
   [ Footer (0x4 bytes) ]

The header and footer are little endian, and the entries likely are as well.

Header

The header has the following structure:

  byte FileID[4] = "ANFT"
  byte  Unknown1 = 0x01
  dword RecordCount

Entry

The 16-byte entries have yet to be deciphered. As decompression and naming are handled by the MNF and ZOSFT files respectively, this data likely serves another purpose. The last five bytes of each entry are 0x00.

Footer

The footer is at the end of the last entry and is simply:

   byte FileID[4] = "ANFT"

Notes

One of these files has been found in eso0002.dat, and it contains 7,612 entries, which exactly corresponds to the 7,612 .GR2 animation files within eso0001.dat. However, there are additional .GR2 files in eso0008.dat through eso0014.dat, and it is unknown whether these files have ANFT files of their own.