Note that adding the Armorer Workbench meant updating the properties of the Wagon Building quest. When I upload the next version, Mojo won't be able to build it without restarting from before the journal was read. In Jo'Bashi's game I enabled it via console.

At least it wasn't a change to the wagon (as the canopy will be) because that's present but disabled as soon as the mod is added. The canopy will need a property variable to track whether it's visible. I will be adding it to the mesh with an "animation" to make it show/hide, assuming I can work out the logic of "making" it at the workbench. It will be an exception, in the sense that there's no item in the world to enable when you make it.

A thought: when the house is rebuilt, you lose access to the workbench and can't add the crafting stations outside. Should the missing ones come with the house? If that's a known effect, some players will just take the easy way out and get the free ones.

Edit: I didn't know the Wreck of the Winter War was a candidate site for the quest. I cloned the conditions from Karjho's Amulet quest, so I could steal the table for it, and UESP doesn't list that one.

This post has been edited by ghastley: Oct 20 2015, 03:26 PM

Thanks for letting me know. I figure I’ll restart as many times as it takes. I think I’ll know what you’re talking about with the house a little better once I go all the way through what’s already done. I have a save from right before the journal reading, but please remind me to start brand new when there’s a change that needs a save from before the mod is installed. Otherwise I will not think of that and end up harassing you with non-problems that would work perfectly if only I did it right.

Mojo and Shuvesse have retrieved Wilf’s Saw and are headed next to Robber’s Gorge. I love a treasure hunt!

One unforeseen benefit of the "treasure hunt" phase, is that you are likely to use the carriages to get closer, or at least pass the stables on the way. Then the rebuild part is already partly done.

I've had one run that used Orotheim, Rift Watchtower, Broken Oar Grotto, and Knifepoint Ridge. Saw a lot of the map going to all those, as none of them are near the stables.

I don't have Dragonborn active when I'm testing this, so I haven't been sent to Solstheim, but I believe it would be possible.

This post has been edited by ghastley: Oct 20 2015, 09:22 PM

Find the tongs in Treva’s Watch. Holy smoke!! Mojo is level 4 now, he’ll probably be level 20 when he gets out the other side of that place! This is a lot of fun. You’re right, he’ll have visited a bunch of stables already when that time comes. Plus this way he can make an informed choice about his horse. So far he's been a short stroll from a stable each time, unlike your Orotheim shoe leather run.

I have Dragonborn active, so there may be a boat trip in Mojo's future.

Mojo is now a proud unlicensed driver! Wilf’s Spokeshave was in Redoran’s Retreat, very handy. He used the clay pit and quarry up by the Honningbrew Meadery. All of the build steps looked great. The in-progress wagon floated a tiny bit in his game, but it dropped into place once it was complete. The first driving lesson went well, as did the second nap.

My first boneheaded move: Mojo was so delighted with his new wagon that he decided to take a nap in it before he walked back to Whiterun to buy a horse. That was nap number one. While I was pondering how to put the bedroll away afterward (I thought that Activate Wagon -> Sleep might turn into Activate Wagon -> Pack Up once the bedroll was out), Mojo’s follower knocked the wagon sideways leaving the bedroll in the air. I probably should not have let him take a nap before getting the horse-hitching figured out. That was a reload in case I had really broken something.

I love the quick access to cargo space. Mojo had quite a bit of junk to load into his wagon. I imagine that the tools will not be quest objects after the house rebuild, and Mojo is pretty thrilled with having the only spokeshave in Skyrim!

Tales of the first roadtrip coming soon. He has not been anywhere near Markarth, which is the last stable to visit. I expect he will make frequent use of his Panic! Button due to wildlife. I do not have Convenient Horses active in his game, so post-skirmish horse wrangling will surely be a big part of the learning process!

Thank you for this, ghastley! Driving the wagon is even more fun than I thought it would be.

The bedroll is removed when you hitch the horse, as the "brakes" should be on until that happens. I'm surprised that the wagon moved before you did so, but since it's still a havoked item, it's possible. I'm trying to minimize the number of actions in the menu, as I still have to fit in the ones for the canopy.

The tools remain quest items because you don't want them being stolen again, so I decided they'd stay (weightless) in inventory. That also avoids any embarrassment when the spokeshave's collision mesh doesn't fit the item too well. The excuse is that it makes the thugs come after the player, not just raid his home. I may make the other tools lose that status at the end of the quest, as they're not as special as the spokeshave.

In other news: Jo'Bashi has just had his first wave of hired thugs! Fortunately he was passing the Western Watchtower at the time, and got a lot of assistance from the guards.

Edit: I decided to package it up as 0.2 and not wait for the canopy, which may take some time. If you replace it in Mojo's game, he won't be able to make the Armorer Workbench, but it will appear as part of the house rebuild. All the other changes should just happen, such as the chimney and the inside crafting stations.

Since the thugs are random (1/3 chance when you level up after the rebuild) you can save before accepting a new level and check the state of BYOWKill afterward. If the thugs aren't on the way, re-load and re-level.

Download here

This post has been edited by ghastley: Oct 21 2015, 09:08 PM

As soon as Mojo’s follower (Shuvesse in her new NPC life) kicked the wagon I realized that there must be something about the horse and brakes and the bedroll that I had screwed up. I’m guessing that’s the only time that the wagon will be unhitched with the brakes off simply because it hasn’t ever been hitched up yet? I hope my driving record improves once on the road!

I got 0.2 installed and Mojo has his first travel day behind him. He clipped a farmer and only ran over one fox, and he didn’t overturn the wagon at all. He had a little trouble getting up one steep hill (I took a screenshot of where), but on the way back down after realizing that he went the wrong way it was super smooth in that spot. He was able to ride through the whole trouble spot without dismounting or resetting. It just stretched and bounced the wagon and then recovered.

Lots of fun. It has been raining since about two minutes after Mojo hitched up, so now Jo’Bashi has another wet cat with whom to commiserate as long as they have their tops down.

I'll be working on the canopy this weekend. One thing that was holding it up was that it needs to be made at the workbench, but isn't a world item that can be enabled, just a part of the wagon itself, and I couldn't figure out how to use the same script. But then I realised that I can use an X-marker as a proxy. That's invisible even when it's enabled, and I can test its enable state to determine of the wagon has a canopy or not.

This change adds properties to the wagon and the building quest, so you'll need a save from before the mod was added, not just before reading the book.

Has Mojo done the circuit and started a courier yet? I've tested building the wagon and doing the rounds in both orders, as well as building the wagon before and after buying a horse. And of course Jo'Bashi's replacement horse tested that scenario.

Fenomena de Fault, the brazen Breton with the bare boobie, has had a couple of thug encounters, so that part seems to be working as intended in her game, too. For someone who was created just to check out an outfit, she's persisted to level 26!

One additional change I'll be making is to restrict using the Reset Wagon power, so you can't park indoors, or inside walled cities. I think that will all be covered by "in Tamriel worldspace" as that excludes interiors, cities, and places like Sovnguard, Fort Dawnguard, and the Vale. You'll still be able to drop it in many unsuitable locations, but this should cut down the opportunity a bit.

OK, great! Once Mojo gets thugged I’ll start him all the way over and this time make a save in Whiterun before installing the mod. I was wondering if there was a way to get the wagon to Solstheim, which would be a really bad idea. It sounds like the worldspace check will also prevent Solstheim mishaps and the resulting headaches.

Mojo has reached Markarth and now has five stable markers on his map, though he visited only Markarth in the wagon. He should level up quickly with all of the shenanigans available locally. Then I’ll check his thug status and proceed accordingly.

Funny thing. He parked rather carelessly in the middle of the road to sleep for the night, and when he woke up he was surrounded by a Khajiit caravan! So he travelled with them briefly but passed as soon as he found a wide spot in the road. The horse walks faster than the cats.

He flipped the wagon once and was able to get going again by getting off and unhitching then re-hitching. Then he was facing the wrong way so we learned that the wagon can easily ford the river right by the bridge at Left Hand Mine. Still hasn’t needed the Reset button.

He’s also tried dismounting normally to fight a wolf, and while he was getting off the wagon his horse killed the wolf while still hitched to the wagon. The Panic! function has worked well so far to keep the horse out of the fight. Later he tried to run over a roadside thief, but didn’t quite kill him. Good fun!

Also we learned that he can ride the horse and pull the wagon instead of driving the wagon. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing to do, but it made jumping off and on to fight wolves through a densely populated road section much easier.

Once when he dismounted the wagon normally (not panic) he wound up inside it, but getting back on and off solved it. Also he lost Shuvesse for a time and I thought he’d silently killed her, but she turned up again. Whew!

Yay for the bare-boobed brazen Breton! Sounds like she has taken charge. That’s awesome!

This post has been edited by Grits: Oct 23 2015, 10:40 PM

Just a quick teaser image in case things start going backwards. The model was the hard part, so it should get done soon.

This has a temporary texture with no normal map, but it shows the basic shape and lets me check a few things in-game, like whether I can still activate the bedroll when it's there. It looks like you'd want it off to drive, as it blocks the third-person view you're forced to use, so I'll keep the option active at all times.

Still in progress: node fading animation and hook-up to wagon menu, improved texture with normal map.

Edit: So when I added the controller nodes for the hide/reveal of the canopy, the CK crashes when the mesh is loaded. It may take a little longer than I'd hoped.

This post has been edited by ghastley: Oct 25 2015, 04:35 AM

Quick question. Mojo has Repair the Forge in his quest log with the marker pointing to the wainwright’s bench, and on the bench the Armorer’s Bench option has appeared (since I updated to 0.2) Is there any chance this would interfere with the thug quest?

Sorry to hear about the CK crashes. I hope the canopy cooperates. I love the look of it.

I think 0.2 was missing conditions in the recipe for the Armorer bench, so it appeared too soon. I just had the same issue with the canopy and fixed both for the next one.

It didn't affect the thugs for Ma'Lishus (Jo'Bashi's sister). She got lucky, and had a number of local quests for the tools - White River Watch, Valtheim, and Halted Stream, and KnifePoint Ridge was the farthest she had to go. She took a carriage to Solitude to buy a horse, and did the tour on that, including recruiting Kharjo on the way. The thugs arrived in the middle of another battle somewhere, and she didn't have to deal with them herself, just collect their coin.

The scripts are all in place, just waiting for a mesh that does what they ask. I've been told it's possible, but I can't see what I got wrong.

This post has been edited by ghastley: Oct 26 2015, 03:47 PM

Ma'Lishus! Awesome.

Mojo is on the road to Solitude with Shuvesse, Vigilance, and The Horse With No Name. He's going to do a grand tour until the thugs find him.

I'm beginning to think that the problem with the canopy is combining Havok and Gamebryo animation in one mesh. The wagon already has the swivel for the front axle and horse linkage done with Havok, so maybe I can't use a Gamebryo visibility mechanism at all.

The Havok tools documentation doesn't seem to mention alpha or visibility, so I don't know if that can be incorporated into anything but a static.

I don't see a way to make the canopy a separate mesh that can be enabled and disabled, as then I can't fix it to the wagon. Edit: Or maybe I do. If the canopy were an Actor, I could use SetVehicle to fix it in place, like a passenger. I'll see if I can turn everything silly off, e.g. letting you talk to it. and give it a go this weekend.

Meanwhile, found a small silly error and corrected it. If you reset the wagon while the bedroll is in it, the bedroll stays floating where the wagon used to be.

This post has been edited by ghastley: Oct 29 2015, 03:14 AM

I hope this weekend is a big success!

Mojo has leveled up again and is checking for thugs. I’m using getstage BYOWKill and getting 0.00 back. What am I looking for? Anything but 0.00?

Mojo parked the wagon and rode the carriages to the five stables after leveling up to 7 just to be sure he did that part right.

It's more the Started vs Stopped indication. It only changes from 0 to 200 when you kill them all.

I found that the IncreaseLevel event is triggered by accepting the level, rather than getting the notification that you can. So when you get told you can level up, you can save, take the level and check, and if it didn't start the quest, re-load and repeat. Or wait for the next level. Jo'Bashi checked, as he was responsible for the debugging process. Ma'Lishus didn't, and got thugs the first time!

The first time I tried it, I discovered that although BYOWKill was triggered, it left the thugs disabled at their spawn point. There's another WEBYOWKill quest that fires off the World Encounters script event that enables them, and sets their AI to hunt the player down. I set it up this way to match the Theft/Revenge thugs, so I could re-use the actors, with their AI packages etc. The WE event essentially is "player entered WE zone", via a whole chain of other scripts, but the script event it creates is pretty indiscriminate, and shared by a lot of things already. Bottom line is that the enabling is going to happen, but the spawning is subject to the 1 in 3 chance.

I think the whole WE thing is there to make sure it happens in sensible locations, i.e. exterior locations, not too near cities, etc. I opted to spawn the thugs at the Pale Pass entrance, but they may "fast travel" from there.

Edit: In other news, I've done a bit of NifSkope work and produced meshes for wagon and carriage with one wheel removed for repair, and a trestle supporting the body. Together with the wheel mesh, I can put a "work in progress" near the house later. I may also make a part-built wheel, with a hub and all the spokes, but no tire, and an incomplete ring of fellies, just as clutter.

This post has been edited by ghastley: Oct 30 2015, 09:26 PM

OK, thanks, I’ll just let Mojo wander and see what happens.

Excellent news on the unfinished wagon clutter. During the building process I kept going outside to stare at the wagon between each step. It looks really neat and hits that mod sweet spot where it fits perfectly into the world but is something fresh and new to look at. I especially loved seeing the springs go on. That made me think about what it would feel like to actually drive the wagon.

I recently noticed the game’s loading screen that talks about horses and carriages being common methods of transportation in Skyrim, even though you only see abandoned wagons and rarely see another horse along the road. The restored wainwright’s workshop will breathe life into that mostly imagined aspect of Skyrim. I’m just delighted by this project, ghastley!

Well, be patient, because plan B was a bust.

To make the canopy an actor, it needs a skeleton, and a behavior graph. And the latter needs Havok tools, which require 3DS MAX, or Maya. I use Blender.

So it was back to plan A, which started to look a lot better when I went to Nightcaller Temple and noticed that the Vermina Statue door uses controlled transparency. There's already an animation behavior set up for that, so it's just a matter of getting the controllers defined properly for the mesh.

Of course the controller/interpolater/manager linkage in nif's is not exactly simple, and it's still crashing the CK when it gets loaded. But at least I have a working example that does what I'm trying to do.

I took a break in the middle of it all to make this. It was a bit tedious adding the wood back where I ripped the iron tire off, but at least I knew it would work. Next time I get stuck, I'll make a spider - i.e. just the hub and spokes.

Edit: Found it!! I had a bad NiBlendFloatInterpolater with everything zeroed out. That's not to say it's working exactly the way I wanted yet, but it's a lot closer. I still have to adjust the fade timings, but the canopy does now appear and disappear on demand. The texture needs work, and the mesh needs a few vertices moved, and seams creased, and a few strings added, and ...

This post has been edited by ghastley: Nov 1 2015, 03:56 PM

Mojo just got his letter from the grateful carriage drivers of Skyrim. He can’t wait to go check out the restored workshop. Great foreshadowing of the future thug encounter in the letter!

He’ll have to finish some urgent business first. Though he is very close to the workshop, the courier caught him at kind of an awkward moment.

Great news about the return of Plan A! Your break produced an awesome looking wheel-in-progress. I love the detail at the end of the spokes. Also, new vocab word: Felly.

I believe I have a functionally complete version now.

Download here Version 0.3

The texture for the canopy is in need of replacement, but that can be done without restarting a game, so this one should be the last that needs that. Unless it's broken somewhere I haven't noticed. You should be able to make a canopy, and it should toggle on and off via the menu. You can do that at any time, even when you're driving, as you may need the extra visibility.

There's a spider in the house, too!

Things to think about:
Currently, the wagon is considered complete when you've added the sides - I'd originally considered letting you drive it without them, so they were added last. Now the canopy is last, and that's optional. However, if you don't make it before the house is rebuilt, you never can. Should the harness trees be the last part, as they're required to hitch the horse?

Should the thugs be on a tapering schedule, where they get less likely over time? The current setting is a fixed 1/3 chance each level-up. That could be a more complex calculation based on level, so it would be 1/3 at level 10 or below, and decrease above that until they stop at some point.

The wagon is always empty, to make room for the bedroll when needed. It might be possible to have "general goods" in there when the bedroll isn't. Not having seats avoids any scripting for the follower to ride, so that stays the way it is. Do you prefer the wagon empty, or does it need something in it?


This post has been edited by ghastley: Nov 1 2015, 08:52 PM