Jetpack mod authors response:
"[…] You can make a mod that has Jetpack as a dependency, and your mod would just overwrite data.raw["jetpack-animation"] with whatever graphics file you have in your mod. There are 3 layers: "jetpack-animation", "jetpack-animation-mask", and "jetpack-animation-flame". This will need to be done in the data-final-fixes phase or it won't have any effect."
As author of miniMAXIme, I believe that the suggested approach is impractical. It would work if "I, Robot" was the only character mod used in the game. But as soon as there are more characters to choose from in the game, all flying characters would be changed to look like compilatron. It would solve the issue for "I, Robot" only, not for the other character mods.
Basically, the main problem is that Jetpack follows the assumption of vanilla Factorio that all players will use data.raw.character["character"] and it is therefore sufficient to use data.raw.character["character-jetpack"] with data.raw.animation["jetpack-animation"] for the flying version. What should happen instead is that characters can provide their own animation and whenever they switch to another character, the jetpack animation is switched as well.
What we really need is a way to tell Jetpack "If the player is using the default character, use the default animation; if the player is using IRobot_character_skin, use jetpack-animation-IRobot_character_skin; if the player is using Shrek-skin, use jetpack-animation-Shrek-skin, and if the player is using a custom character without custom animation, fall back to jetpack-animation!".
idk hit me up on discord and we can colab on this if you want.
I'm neither on Discord nor any other "social" media except for the Factorio forums and mod portal. Why? I don't like to register at places that already belong to (or coud be bought up in the future) by Big Money (TM) -- and I'm afraid of getting sucked in and wasting precious time that I could use better for modding. If you're on the forums, you could contact me per PM …
