Khajiit Hearthfire, Possible mod Options

[ghastley]

Yes, it's probably a good idea to have a separate thread.

The idea is for a Khajiit merchant to be able to get a mobile home, i.e. a horse-drawn carriage/cart that will carry his wares, and be suitable for sleeping in, with a bit of re-configuration in-game.

It would add a canopy (Conestoga-like) and a removable board to fill the gap between the seats/containers when used for sleeping. The seats would theoretically hinge up for storage, but could be activated as containers without the need to add that animation, if it proves too difficult.

The game has animations for driver and passenger to enter/exit/use the carriage, so as long as it's the base model, they should work.

Unknowns: Can I add sleeping furniture to the cart? Will animations to show/hide elements in the nif be playable by script, so the re-configuration works?

I'm also considering having the player do some of the building work. Make pieces from iron ingots and lumber, at wainwright's forge only.

Player can already buy a horse, no need to add that. Lumber purchase at mills only starts with Hearthfires quests, but this will be one. The log pile will be at the wainwright's home, in this case.

OOOHHH!! Sudden idea. Wainwright is dead, house derelict. Journal contains plans for wagon-making, notes about loss of tools. Player tracks down tools, and makes own wagon. This avoids the need for dialog and minor town site. There are a couple of derelict houses near the roads that could be converted by adding a forge. Might need a derelict forge that can be repaired as step one. Hmmm....

[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