I'm so sorry that mod was giving you so much trouble. Yes, by all means, go play the game. Sometimes just stepping away from a problem allows your subconscious to percolate on it and bubble a solution to the surface. I've been there, done that; I'm sure everyone else, yourself included, has experienced this before.

So as disappointed as I am, I'll keep an eye on this thread for the future.

Be careful, your next character might want a flyable, BYOAirship!!

Sorry, I don’t know of a horse-finder mod. I found a mod request for one, but no answers. I think I saw that the Gypsy Caravan mod drops a map marker when you set up camp? But no horse help that I remember in that mod. Of course if your horse died you would just need to be able to find the wagon when you came back with another one, and there are vanilla ways to determine if your horse is still alive. Would Fast Traveling to the wagon marker tell you if the horse was dead or had just run off?

Oh, I think there are follower mods that have a Where-Are-You quest for when the follower is doing their own thing. Alyssa might have one. Maybe it’s a spell or power, but if memory serves it puts a marker on the follower as if they are a quest object.

I think both Sofia and Inigo have convenient quest markers. If I recall they have a 'locator quest' - whenever you have that quest active, it puts a marker on the map of their location. Not sure how much help that is for finding a missing caravan horse though.

I'm trying out Jaxonz Map Markers. It's a mod where you can place a map marker on your horse, your follower, your pet, whatever. It's got a maximum number of such markers. Might be worth taking a look.

Yes, you have to have time to play, and sometimes taking a break from something can give you a fresher perspective when you return.

How odd that the Dragonkiller Cart was so heavily scripted and with duplicated codes - makes me wonder if whenever something didn't work they tried again and again till it did, but never removed the erroneous tries or something.

Maybe instead of deconstructing their scripts; try to start from scratch making your own that create the same result (or the one you are trying to achieve). I have been really lost in Papyrus, even with Atom to read them I can't figure out how to write them in Skyrim like I could in Oblivion.

Oblivion had a Mage's Tower that had a table that would jump if jostled/bumped - the "On Activate" was written right into the Nif itself; I saw it in Nifskope and tried to copy it onto a combat dummy to make it jump when struck with a weapon - but in Skyrim, and the Nifs are done differently in Skyrim.

So my mod came to a standstill while I tried to figure it out; then between that issue and the Navmesh I got burned out and shelved my mod. Urk. Now I'm just playing, lol.

I think I still have some work to do.

I guess that depends on whether you want the Argonian to drive the carriage or be hitched up to pull it.

Looks like he is getting the cart before the horse, (as the saying goes),

The picture of Jo'Bashi wasn't actually far from what was intended. If you push the Panic! button when you're on the cart, the horse is moved safely behind it, and the player in front to face the enemy. It's just that he was stuck in his driving pose, and still at that height. Now it's fixed, and he moves to a standing position.

The cart is buildable, drivable, you can store things in it, but I haven't got the sleep option working yet. According to the CK wiki, there's no known way to do that.

I still have to detect the completion of the wagon, and close off the Wronged Wright quest. I should add the canopy option, and put the bedroll in the back, before release, too. And there's a glitch where the horse starts off on its own when you get off the wagon. I think its AI is turned on too soon.

I made quite a few changes from the way things are done in Dragonkiller Cart. There's only the one menu, and the options depend on the current state. Initially you can only sleep in the cart (in theory) or store something in it. When you have a horse, and it's close enough, the "hitch" option is added. Hitching the horse removes the sleep option, and adds "get on", and "unhitch". You can still access the cargo when you're on the wagon, but you can't unhitch until you get off. You have the choice of "get off" which leaves the horse hitched, or "Panic!" which detaches both driver and horse, so you're ready to fight.

A decent amount of progress, and I should have something to try soon.

Sounds awesome, ghastley! I am in the midst of rebuilding my mod load order, so may be ready to start a Khajiit character and try out this mod! Keep us posted!

What a cool idea to protect the horse! I am guessing adding a sleeping mat that can be toggled on/disabled won't work?

If I'm not mistaken, there are mods with portable bedrolls, maybe the Player could have the bedroll in their inventory when needed; and store it in the wagon safekeeping when not in use?

I wonder if that is why that Dragonkiller Cart mod set up a tent/bedroll.

My intent was to have the player sleep on a bedroll in the back of the wagon. I may try just having the "sleep" button put the bedroll in place, and see if it can be activated there.

I started on the documentation, and took this screenshot of another minor problem. I don't think I can lower the player onto the seat, as the position is baked into the animation/pose.

BWAAHAA! She'll get splinters in a bad place if you don't give her a seat cushion! A cushion might be the answer for the space issue between her butt and the seat too.

Or maybe place a bedroll there, and have it one where you can either sit or lie down = sit animation cued in the middle of the bedroll; lie down animation cued at the head/pillow end of the mat?

I've been letting my latest Orc (the one in the hovering pose) drive the wagon around Skyrim, to try and get the niggling glitches out, and get a few screenshots for the mod documentation. So far, it seems that all the roads, and many of the larger trails, are passable, even the back route from Helgen down to Riverwood.

I need to start a new character to test the bedroll code I added, as it needs a save before the mod is loaded. It's a good thing there's god mode to get through the fetch quests, and COC to go to the bandit dens.

There's really only one situation that's still a problem. When the player gets off the wagon, and leaves the horse hitched, the cart will sometimes take off on its own, and drift slowly off towards the skies, leaving the horse behind. Turning the horse's AI on or off doesn't seem to affect it.

I'm starting to think I need a Power to settle the cart - i.e. restore it to a stable, usable, parked position - for the times when the player has lost control, either by glitch, or just bad driving. I need to figure out how that will work, but initial thoughts are to move the wagon to a fixed position relative to the player. So you'd move to a place where there's room for it, and cast. The horse moves to the wagon when you hitch, so it's implicitly also fixed by that mechanism, as long as it's close enough to hitch. In most cases you can just ride it back to the wagon. The wagon would return with brakes on, unhitched, of course.

I've also console-enabled the restored house for a photo-shoot, and I'll post pictures soon. I keep re-thinking how the quest for that will work. My initial thought was to check the map markers for all the stables where there are hire carriages, but the player can go to all those without the wagon. I need to make sure that at least one of those visits has the wagon present, before the drivers will know about it, and sponsor the rebuild. Probably the "wagon present" test will be part of the conditions for the Story Manager event that triggers it, and the kicker quest will then check the set of map markers.

Any thoughts on the "hired thugs" situation? Should that be a one-off that can happen anywhere, triggered by elapsed time after the house is rebuilt, or more like the bandits at the Hearthfires homes, where they're randomly waiting when you come home? Or something in between, with no fixed location, and random intervals?

Do you mean that little mountain path that winds past that tiny bandit ambush and down to that west gate in Riverwood? If so, I'm impressed! And excited!

As for the hired thugs situation, it depends on whether or not you want them to be highly motivated and stupid, in which case they would be completely random in time and location; i.e. they find the PC purely by luck; be lazy and stupid, in which case it would be a one-off case (then they give up). Or will they be smart and highly motivated? Then they would wait for the PC near the cities and settlements. Just out of sight of the guards. If smart and lazy (or he would say he's "energy-efficient"), he would wait by the house. In both of those cases they would be random in terms of timing, but not random in terms of location.

One of the most irritating things for me is coming home to one of my Hearthfire homes and finding damn bandits (or wolves, in the case of Lakeview) terrorizing my livestock and kids, and no steward in sight! Almost enough to motivate me to learn the ins and outs of the Skyrim CK so I can disable that damned spawn point!

I always love hired thugs, they really add fun to the game!

Not a lot of progress this weekend. I do have a wagon reset spell that the player can use when it's needed (such as overturning the wagon due to driving too fast). It's given to you when you complete building the wagon.

I created the Story Manager nodes and hooked up a kicker quest to start the house rebuild. That requires the the player to have visited all the stables - checking that the map markers show does that part - and the kicker quest checks that the player has the wagon with him when he arrives at one of the stables. If all conditions are met, then the building quest starts. That's empty right now, but will send a courier to say that the carriage drivers have rebuilt the house in the hope it will become a repair shop.

The workbench was in the demolished house, so it's inaccessible when the rebuilt one takes its place. That avoids the temptation to build more complete wagons, but the forge, smelter, tanning rack and grindstone are still out the back, for normal use. The interior has a work-table that's not a crafting station. I'll post screenshots of the rebuilt house as soon as I stop adding clutter.

The thing that's still eluding me is the bedroll in the back of the wagon. I tried moving one there from a holding cell, and found that you can't move furniture. So I tried creating one with PlaceAtMe, but that didn't work either. Since there are camping mods that spawn bedrolls, (including Dragonkiller Cart), I'll just have to poke around in those and extract the relevant parts. I may even have it working, but be suffering from save-bake. It's hard to tell if I went back far enough in the saves each time I re-tested.

I'll probably add quest markers to one of the quests for the wagon, and the player's horse. Keeping that quest active will let you select it when you need the directions.

You can overturn the wagon?? Cool! Does it do wheelies too?

Sounds like you're in the boring part of the mod process. Tweaking all the nuts and bolts to get the desired result. Laying the framework for the quest/story. Sounds like quite a bit of work.

Still, I'm looking forward to the finished product!

I’m in favor of the one-off Hired Thugs situation. It makes sense that they would track you down like a courier does instead of waiting around until you return to the workshop, plus it’s kind of fun to have the thugs stroll up in some random location. I think one time because the player will probably kill them, and even if the player gets away the organization in Cyrodiil would have paid the thugs to attack just once. (Lesson learned either way.)

I’m delighted that you’ve made a wagon reset spell. I’m sure there will be many unanticipated ways for players to overturn the wagon!

Is there an invisible bed marker you can use on a static bed-thing that you make for the wagon yourself? I’m sorry I don’t have any ideas for the bedroll part. I love the idea of having it inside the wagon, though, because the lone traveler would want to pack up in a hurry. Like car “camping” in an unofficial camping spot without a tent!

Your progress is exciting to watch, ghastley!

I somehow picture Maxical being seen in an overturned state in various locations throughout Skyrim from here on out,

You can also get killed if you're underneath when it does so.

The first attempts at the "recover wagon" spell had the wrong offset and the wagon landed on the player, fatally. It now lands a safe distance ahead.

There are two parts to the bedroll problem, neither yet solved. I want a bedroll to appear in the back of the wagon, and I want the player to be presented the sleep dialog. The bedroll can be a dummy, as the wagon is the activator for the sleeping. It just needs to be there when you wake up.

Major breakthroughs today!

I'd been having a problem with starting the quest that rebuilds the wainwright's house. The Story Manager log said that it passed on the event, but the kicker quest that checks all the conditions wasn't running. It had a debug.trace statement at the start, so I could confirm it got there.

Today I discovered that was the cause of the problem. Removing the trace attempt lets it work as intended!

So now Jo'Bashi has a workshop to go back to.

Exterior
Interior
Looking left
and right

The other big one was placing the bedroll in the back of the wagon. A bedroll can't be moved, so I ended up moving an X-Marker to the right place and creating a bedroll at the same location each time. The marker gets recycled in and out of a holding cell, but the bedroll is deleted when you hitch the horse.

Bedroll in place at last (and usable)!

I still have to add the canopy option, and create the hired thugs quest, but what's there is testable if anyone wants to try it.

One known gotcha: If you read the letter that rebuilds the house before you made all the crafting stations, you can't reach the workbench to do so. Make the smelter, grindstone and tanning rack before you read it!

Woo, got it! I have a Khajiit hanging around Whiterun ready and willing to play.

The house looks great (screenshot, I haven’t gotten there yet), and I love the sign! Yay for the bedroll in the wagon. I did not really get the problem until you explained that you’d solved it.

Thank you, ghastley! This is exciting!

One thing I noticed yesterday that probably belongs in the readme or wiki notes: if you reload a save with the player driving the wagon, the horse will walk away (or run away) having become untethered. I need to review the logic in the OnLoad process to see if I missed something.

Fast travel moves the player and horse only. The reset spell will fetch the wagon. However, if I'm in that kind of a hurry, I leave the wagon behind, anyway.

Otherwise, what's there appears to work, and what's not there isn't reminding you it's missing. You can't make the non-existant canopy yet, and the thugs aren't being threatened, except for the hint in the journal.

I use the Panic! button whenever I want to stop and exit, so it might get renamed.

Feedback on whether the house needs anything added would help. I'm conflicted about making it a viable "only fixed residence". The wagon-owner has no private alchemy, armorer or enchanting stations.

OK, great to know. Thank you, ghastley!

My Whiterun Khajiit had already made a bit of a mess in his game, so I started over. Mojo has found a ruined house with a great view and business potential. In the morning he’s off to the Wreck of the Winter War!

Biggest decision: which color horse to buy?

That’s a good question about the crafting stations in the house. I’ll think about it as I get to know Mojo. I’ve already realized that driving a wagon and collecting alchemy ingredients are not going to happen in the same trip.

I would definitely include an armorer workbench to round out the Smithing set, though. Enough critters will attack on the road and provide hides to haul back and use at the workshop to make a bit of crafting worthwhile. In looking at the pictures I liked that the house was very simple, but the tabletop alchemy and enchanting stations might still fit in.

I suppose that “Oh [censored]!” is not an appropriate substitute for “Panic!”

The carriage drivers all think that the Windhelm Horses are best in harness. Do they know something we don't?

The nearest stables sell the black ones, and Jo'Bashi is himself quite dark, so he currently has one of those.

But most of my characters bought a horse a soon as they could afford one, from the nearest stables, so I think I used them all at one time or other.

There's nothing outside on the front deck, so there's room to add things there.

I moved the spare wheels out to the front deck, and added a small table and chair out there, too.

The space against the back wall now has a table with the tabletop versions of the enchanter and alchemy stations, as they take up less space. The chest on the left is now under that table, so there's room for the character to use the labs.

While adding the Armorer Workbench at the back, I found a problem I hadn't noticed before. The rebuilt house has lost the chimney! The space where I had thought to put the workbench is where the chimney should have been, so it's going between the forge and the smelter (just enough space) and I'll try to add the missing chimney to a modified FarmHouse05 mesh.

Awesome, that big tundra sky begs for outdoor seating. Or perhaps that’s my Nord I hear planning to laze about on the front deck when he passes by the wainwright’s.

It’s good to have those stations available. I’m glad you found a spot for them.

No chimney, oops. Perhaps that's why there's so much fog inside some of Skyrim's buildings!

The chimney turned out to be trivial to fix, because the third variant of the mesh (another destroyed one with a bit of roof) had an almost intact chimney that I could copy across in NifSkope. So now the rebuild one is complete.

The crafting stations inside are looking good too. The table fits that space well,

Oh very nice. I imagine that the wainwright’s repaired place could become an informal rest stop for the caravans, much like the little country store/service stations that we have around here.

This morning Mojo informed me that Khajiit is no “test character” and that it was high time I gave a form to Shuvesse’s lonely face file, so now she’s waiting for him in Rorikstead. Evidently Khajiit has access to my hard drive. This one could be trouble.


Edit: misplaced modifier.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

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?