Joint Project 1: Baddies - trouble with Attr's

[Tyhm]

I'm trying to assemble a really basic Baddy script over on the Playerworld Main board so everyone will have access to the same sorts of tools we all had back when the world was clientside (but with the added advantage that this time, we can script the baddies to shoot fireballs out of their ears or whatever else we want to modify them to do)-
Point is, I've made a bunch of baddy ganis, but I keep running into a handfull of problems.
1) Back in 2003 when I first made these, I used Attr5 (horse) to store the baddy's "skin" image (ie, baddygray.png). Nowadays when I use Attr5, it overrides the gani and puts the showcharacter on a messed up horse...so I'm switching to using #3/head, which isn't perfect as I'd like the same ganis to be usable if someone ever made a player-race-baddy. If I move it to Attr8/Body, will that give me yet more problems?
2) The original Swampsoldier used putleaps0,x,y in its "script" - which is now a clientside-only command, I guess...anyway, I put a ganiscript in to emulate that and it never does anything. Not sure why. Anyone else run into this?
3) Is there a simple way of making a gani flicker (ie, when hurt) short of changing ganis to a flickering version? Contrariwise, is there a way to jump from frame 5 of one gani to frame 5 of an alternate gani?

I'm way outta my depth here, so I'd appreciate any help I can get. Everyone's free to do what they like with the finished product, I'd just prefer if all the intermediate work on it was public domain so we don't have a different Basic Baddy Gani for every server, etc.

[ryu_no_bishie]

im just an animator, i have no idea how ganis actualy work but you could take appart someone elses gani and edit it so it does this thing you seem to want it to do. then just animate it.

[Chompy]

For adding attr's I would just make a gani with images (don't edit anything),
then save the file (remember .gani at end), close graal shop, go to gani folder,
look for the gani you saved.

When you've found it, copy it too desktop (not necessary),
open it with notepad, find the lines with like SPRITE ## and look for the
image file you used, replace them with ATTR#, f.ex. ATTR4.

When you've done that, go further down, where you see something like,
DEFAULTPARAM1 hat0.png or something, write in

DEFAULTATTR# the image file you used.
for example: DEFAULTATTR4 hat0.png

Now you can use the gani online, but has no image..
That you can fix with a simple script, for example

PHP Code:

//#CLIENTSIDE
function onCreated() {
  player.attr[4] = "hat43.png";
  setani("gani name here", NULL);
}
// example 


I thought it was something like this you wanted to do?

[Tyhm]

Nah, I got heads = HEAD and whatnot working just fine, I'm just wondering which attributes work best for "You can tell it's a baddy because it's head is baddyoctopus.png" without "And it shows up all weird in ___". I used the old horse attribute and it glitched out, so.

Current problem: Projectile Ganis. If I could take the arrow gani, replace the shadow with a shrubbery, then replace the arrow with the frog, I could make a fairly convincing projectile-frog...but every time I try, the shrubbery winds up moving. I even named the shrubbery "shadow" and set it to index 0 - how does the system decide which elements are "Shadow - don't adjust for Z" and which elements are "Arrow - do adjust for Z"?

I suppose I COULD just revise the script to switch to a static "Standing Still" shrubbery while it's firing the frog, but it seems wasteful.