How do I edit ATC files?

[littlewhitebutterfly]

In short, I'd like to modify or delete a pedestrian. I located the related ATC files on the simcity_1.dat, but don't know how to edit the GIFs that compose the animation. I tried to delete the files altogether, but the game, as expected, crushes. Could you please help? Thank you!

[geoffhaw]

Oh Boy!  This is a huge area to play about with.

First of all, by GIFs, I assume you mean the FSH files? 

Basically the ATC file controls an animation in the game.  For each ATC file there will usually be 5 AVP files, one for each zoom level in the game.  (The two closest zooms in the game use the same AVP file.)  Finally, there will be at least 1 FSH file where the 'frames' of the animation are held.  All of these files are referenced together by various IIDs held in the files. 

To change an animation (like I have done in my animated flags) you have to extract all of the FSH files for all of the zooms, change the pictures, and resave your amended FSH files with new dat filenames.  This is a very long process. 

Somewhere, there is a tutorial on how to do this (for flags, but the process is the same), but I can't find it at the moment.  I'll try to find the tutorial and post the link.

[RippleJet]

If you only want to disable certain pedestrians, you don't need to tweak the ATC files at all.
Just locate and extract the pedestrian exemplars from SimCity_1.dat.
Then change the Model Resource Key to 0x0, 0x0, 0x0 in that extracted dat file.

That's the property that's currently pointing to the ATC file.
Zeroing its address out, it will disappear from your game.

Place that dat file in your plugins folder,
and it will override the pedestrian exemplar included in SimCity_1.dat

[littlewhitebutterfly]

Great, for the moment then I'll just disable that pedestrian; it would be interesting though also to read the tutorial on how to edit animations, so I'll be looking forward to it. Many many thanks, fantastic help!