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.

[Olav]

That sounds very clever, Rob, although probably a bit too complicated for me...

Anyway I hope someone will make a mod that works with the type of keyboard I have. It's getting quite popular, and several other game developers have even written scripts for it.

They keys function so that you can assign lots of keystrokes to each key (macro), so that hitting that one key substitues several key presses in games etc. Sounds about like the way your mod works, if I understood it somewhat correctly.

Anyway great keyboard. Besides those keys it has an LCD display, also programmable. At default it displays RAM/CPU usage. Playing Civilization IV it displays the last 4 messages you've received, for example. It also has media controller keys and manual volume knob, which I find handy, as well as two USB ports for mouse, joystick etc...

Best thing about it though, and the reason I got it, is that the keys are lit up with a cool blue colour, so that you can play in total darkness and still see the keys clearly. It wasn't expensive either. More info here (I'm not working for Logitech ).

Anyway, I'm drifting off-topic (again) from my own thread, but being able to program more keys to avoid the rather unfriendly user interface in Oblivion would be great.

[RobRendell]

They keys function so that you can assign lots of keystrokes to each key (macro), so that hitting that one key substitues several key presses in games etc.

Well, you could program each key to do something like the following:

~player.equip 00035E6E^M~

which would open the console and equip an ebony longsword (and then close the console). Likewise, you could use

~selectplayerspell 00000136^M~

to set the current spell to "Heal Minor Wounds"

(^M = control-M, a carriage return)

You could even have a single key equip a bunch of items.

The problem is finding those FormID numbers to put in your commands. For items and spells in the official game, you can look them up in the Construction Set. For items from mods, though, the first two digits change depending on what order the mods load in, and for self-created items an spells, you don't really have way to get the FormIDs other than the route I took (pull them out of the save file).

There would also be a problem with you seeing the console text pop up briefly. You'd also want to avoid pressing any other keys while the macro was running, because you might inadvertently send extra keystrokes to the console mid-command.

Anyway, it's a thought.