Your hotkeys, please Options

[Olav]

Ok some will probably find this a silly question, but please bear with me. I'm simply curious about these things, and perhaps I can pick up a tip or 3...

I'm simply wondering what you have programmed your 1-8 keys to do.

Mine are:

1-3: Shock, fire and frost damage, or some other variations of good destruction spells.
4: Invisibility (or heal others if I have companions)
5: Detect life
6: Restore health
7: Light / night-eye
8: Various depending on situation (open lock, soultrap, summon creatures, charm, silence etc.)

So I'm using all the keys for spells, but I've been thinking of assigning maybe 1 and 2 to blade and bow as I miss that sometimes.

[RobRendell]

Does it count when I've written myself a mod to give myself 56 hotkeys? 8 banks of 7 keys.

My first bank of hotkeys are offensive spells (ranged fire, frost, lightning, area fire and frost, touch fire and frost)

2nd bank is equipment: 4 different weapons, repair hammer and my CE detect life gauntlets (one slot unassigned)

3rd bank is "exploring" spells: 3 different feather spells, invisibility, soultrap, call steed and summon steed (latter two are from a mod).

4th bank is amulets and rings (can't remember exactly what... water walking amulet and water breathing ring are in there, plus some others)

5th bank is healing spells: three levels of heal self, then greater convalecense. Rest of the bank is unassigned

6th bank is looting: 5 different levels of unlock spell and telekinesis.

7th and 8th banks are unassigned.

And before you ask... the hotkey expander mod I've written is really not very friendly. It works by you assigning the 8 hotkeys to 8 custom items I created. If you trigger any of seven of the 8 items, it just equips/unequips/sets the appropriate item or spell depending on your current bank, but if you hit the key you've mapped to the "Hotkey Diamond" (1, in my case), you go into "bank switch mode", and the next number from 1 to 8 you choose determines what your new bank is.

However, as I said, it's not very friendly or polished. Since you've mapped your hotkeys to "Hotkey Diamond", "Hotkey Emerald", "Hotkey Gold", "Hotkey Pearl" etc, you can't see what each key will actually do by viewing the hotkey display. The game says "You can't equip that item" whenever you hit a hotkey for an annoying number of seconds before you get to see what you've just equipped/unequipped. You can't mix spells and items in the same bank (and need to set each bank to one type or the other... if you get it wrong, that hotkey item's script throws an error which makes the game decide to disable the item until you quit out to the front menu and reload).

The way you assign a bank is really inconvenient, too: assign hotkeys 2 through 8 to what you want, save the game, switch out of Oblivion and run a .exe file that massages your saved game to copy the hotkeys into the script data for the current bank, switch back to Oblivion and re-load your game. Unfortunately, I don't seem to be able to get the C code to work in reverse, copying the current bank into the hotkeys... it works for spells, but items get assigned but then vanish sequentially around the display over the space of about a second when you first access the hotkey display after reloading.

So, all in all probably not really in a fit state to be put up for general download.