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....

That sounds Awesome!

I need to check out the house ruin between the Western Watchtower and Fort Greymoor. That might be just right for this, if it has room for forge, logpile, and a carriage being built. I can flatten terrain a bit, remove rocks if needed, so it has promise.

Oh my gosh, that’s an excellent idea! Quests plus built it yourself is lots of fun, and a dead wainwright needs no voice acting. Brilliant idea to possibly give a purpose to that location.

Current thoughts (assuming site is suitable):

Player reads journal, fetches tools. This enables a carpenter workbench. He can now repair the forge, as step one to begin wagon-making. That should just be a disable broken / enable fixed swap. He needs to buy lumber as usual, and buy ingots or mine iron and smelt it. There are half a dozen iron veins near the site.

Wagon-making depends on my being able to break down the mesh into parts, but that was needed to animate it, so most is already done for me. I'm not sure if body is separate from frame, but wheels, front axle/tree are jointed. I can control build order, so wagon can be built on top of a trestle with wheels added last. When final wheel is made, trestle disabled again. Then canopy, and any other optional parts can be added ad hoc.

The game has a saw, a hammer as clutter items. Nails, locks, hinges and iron fittings are HF standard, made from iron ingots. Dawnguard has a drawknife, but making a spokeshave isn't hard. I want one specialized tool like that as justification for making carts at this location only. Giving the forge a unique keyword does the job, like the Skyforge, but it needs an in-game reason.

Does forge repair need materials? It can't use nails/fittings as it makes them, but could use lumber/stone. House building has an extra anvil for making nails/fittings/hinges/locks but I don't want that here.

Should a smelter be an option? Local ores, so some might want to do that, especially if they're RP'ing that a Khajiit isn't allowed into cities.

A smelter would be a good idea, and that made me realize that once the caravan is finished and on the road maybe the character could use the derelict house site for their future blacksmithing needs.

I’d say in a quest update or somewhere that you could salvage some of the old fittings and just need iron ingots, stone, and sawn logs to repair the forge. That way you don’t need a starter anvil and you don’t create a situation for Khajiit characters having to borrow Alvor’s forge in Riverwood.

Also the game has tongs, if you're looking for another tool to lose.

That site will work nicely.

I had to flatten a little, and remove grass (first attempt had grass growing in the lit forge!) but it looks great now.

Forge in derelict condition.

Forge rebuilt

Forge with Smelter

And as a bonus, I found there's a chest under the floorboards where I can add the journal!

Wow, it's looking good already!

Fantastic thoughts, all! I like the idea of using that old house by the Western Watchtower as the location - I remember when I first came across it, just having started playing the game on the laptop. Alise went in there out of curiosity - would we find a story? A quest? Something to occupy us? A mystery? We were so disappointed to find that there apparently was nothing there.

So your idea to use it as the location for building a wagon/cart is excellent! That was all that place needed - a mystery and a purpose!

Watching this space now!

I'm spending most of my modding time trying to slice up the wagon model so it can be constructed.

The wheels have to turn for the intro scene, so they are individual parts already. However, the majority of the body is divided up by texture material, rather than function. That means that all the nail heads are part of the chassis, together with various bits of leather that they found space for on the same texture map. The wooden parts are divided into lighter and darker, rather than functionally.

I'm not sure if I'll have the wagon built as a series of models that get disabled and the next stage enabled, or if I'll try to fade the pieces in as animation groups on a single model. I need to learn how to do that for the moving version, as I want a canopy and bed-platform that you can turn on and off.

It looks like I need to learn the havok tools even for things as simple as visible/invisible toggles on a nif.

The grass in Skyrim grows mainly on the plain? This is so exciting, I hope you don't get burned out on Hearthfire house building before finishing the Khajiit one (since I don't play an Orc or Argonian, I am waiting for this one with baited breath !!!).

I've started de-constructing the carriage, so that it can be built in stages. It occurs to me that a couple of them would be useful in the game as they are.

Original carriage - for carrying people.

Minus seats - suitable for merchants.

Minus sides - I could see this with a stack of straw bales going to the stables.

These look great, wow! I think they would be very useful for stables and merchants. I stuck a regular carriage outside my South Shore Trader loading dock because that’s all I had. Minus Seats looks particularly cool without that rolled-up rug hanging from the side. Yay!

Minus sides looks like an old-timey hearse, lol. Did you do this in Nifskope?

No, there are some things that can be done there, like taking the wheels off, but for the body of the carriage, it's divided into materials, instead of sectioned. So I had to load it into Blender. Then I found out that there were no planks under/behind the seats, so I had to copy some into the gaps.

I still have to make axles to leave behind when the wheels come off. The existing model just has a hole in the end of the bar, because they're not supposed to be removable, just rotatable.

The wagon also wants a canopy, and possibly a tail-gate, which I'll have to make from scratch.

I would so love to learn how to do something like that, your creative talent is amazing!

Ever since you've announced this latest project here, I've been keeping a weather eye out for the carts in Skyrim. As I use no mods that add carriages or carts, what I see are the vanilla assets. I see both the covered types that you've mentioned, and they're very similar to the old Conestoga wagons of US Pioneer Days, only on a much smaller scale. But it would be worth going to a nearby farm/pioneer museum to see these Prairie Schooners up close, as they could be worthy models for what you are going for. Scaled down to Skyrim size, of course.

The big Conestoga wagons were designed to be pulled by teams, rather than singles. I think the smallest team that could pull one of those things all day would be a pair - oxen, horses or mules. Mules were favored because they were "easy keepers" and could go all day on very little, could outrun most dangerous situations, and still be smart enough to avoid potholes, quicksand and rattlesnakes. Oxen are very hardy and strong, but they are very slow moving and can be difficult to maintain if they don't get time for cud-chewing (an essential part of bovine digestion). Horses are fast and strong, but can be quite stupid about getting into dangerous situations that mules would avoid, and require more feed than the other two.

I imagine that you are going for a smaller wagon that could be drawn by a single horse (getting two horses to move side by side in the CK can be an animation nightmare, I would imagine), so the pics you showed (more like the buckboard wagons used by many farmers in the US) would work just fine. If you are going to make one without sides (the flatbed), remember that those used for hauling straw often had poles stuck in the sides to keep the bales in place- these poles are removable to facilitate loading and unloading).

I continue to follow your progress with interest. While I have no modding experience when it comes to making new things in the CK, I think I understand your difficulties in making a wagon that would work with your concept. My hat's off to you in making such a detailed undertaking!

I have to be careful if I look to the Conestoga for inspiration, as those were surprisingly high-tech - with roller bearings in the axles, for example. And "prairie schooner" was more appropriate than you'd think. They were designed to float like a boat for river crossing, and had a curved floor to keep goods central. Most of the pictures found by googling show a team of six horses for a proper Conestoga!

The existing model is a bit of a problem as it appears to be unsprung, and has torsional stability issues. It's less of a problem as a complete model, but since I'm building it up gradually, the part-built stages have to look reasonable.

Yes, the Conestoga wagon was the height of freight wagon technology.

In the game, is the vanilla carriage body perhaps suspended from the frame by leather straps? I seem to recall something about old-fashioned carriages being built that way, obviously before someone figured out how to make springs. Hmmm . . .

No, if you look underneath the model, it's supported by pillars from the central "metal" spine to a parallel wooden one. There's probably room to introduce the usual three elliptical springs - the rear two longitudinal, the front one transverse - and remove the pillars. The rear axle is weird and looks like it's supposed to be a multi-link modern car one.

However, there won't be much left of the original by the time I've finished. I want the result to look like the existing carriages as much as possible, given there's currently only one design in the entire province!

In the Conestoga design, and several others of the period, the body sat in a pair of cradles that were sprung somehow from the chassis. So you could lift off the top and put it on another base (or go sailing). The cradles themselves may have incorporated transverse leaf springs, but they're hard to see in most pictures.

I was looking at these trying to imagine what you would come up with:




http://www.bruceongames.com/wp-content/upl...psy-caravan.jpg


(interior):



http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/pho...kberry-wood.jpg



Or this:


http://www.ranchwillowwagons.com/wagonphot...wagon-465cb.jpg



(interior):



http://awhimsicalbohemian.typepad.com/.a/6...c5093970b-800wi


(The interiors with the storage under the beds and storage under bench chairs; shelves with rails to hold items in, etc)


Here was another interior shot, but they didn't have a rail on the shelf:




http://www.huntstileorganicfarm.co.uk/wp-c...wb1-425x281.jpg




Will the interior have a bit of a TARDIS effect?

I'm intending a covered-wagon style cloth top with support bows, rather than a wooden box. It's more flexible in providing options for the player. (Think convertible versus sedan).

These are the sites I'm finding useful,

http://www.hansenwheel.com/

http://www.oxbowwagonsandcoaches.com/index.html

for the pictures of naked chassis, especially.

Oooh, naked chassis, huh?


Just kidding. Oh, okay! I had Carah's Caravan Redux in Oblivion, I guess that is what made me think of the gypsy caravan style player home on wheels; thought that is what you were planning on.

More naked pictures! This time in-game.

Here's the site when you start building the wagon. Just a pair of trestles to put it all on.

First you have to build the chassis. Note the springs the original didn't have.

Now you can add a wheel.

And another - as you complete a pair, the trestle is removed.

Third wheel and fourth. Now the wagon needs no support.

Spine and cross-piece to start the superstructure.

Then you can add the driver's seat

And then the bed

At this point it can be loaded and driven, so add the trees

And finally some sides.

This is the basic configuration for the merchant wagon. I'll make the canopy part of the final wagon that you can put up or take down in use. Without seats, there's room for a bedroll in the back, though using it there may mean unloading the wagon.

Holy Cow, this is Awesome!!! And exciting how far you've gotten on it in such a short time! (of course, naked chassis is always exciting! )

Fantastic work! I really like the addition of the springs in the construction phase. I agree with mALX, you've made tremendous progress in such a short time.

I'm looking forward to springing a Khajiit character when this mod is finished!

ghastley, this looks fantastic. I love the structural details that you added. It makes me want to put a partially-built wagon somewhere to show off your work!

A little more progress. I spent nearly a whole day trying to make the collision mesh for the cart spring. It has to have one, as it's a "material" like the iron fittings and hinges, so you can drop it from your inventory or store it in a chest. I ended up pasting the mesh into a helmet's nif.

But there's other stuff going on, too.

I have a book for the player to find.

And read, for more background.

And then the quest starts - as groan-worthy a title as anything of Bethesda's!

I love the groan-worthy puns, and yours is right up there!

I'm getting excited about this mod! It looks like it is really coming together!

OH! I LOVE this little background story revealed in the journal, and the quest (and the quest name too, lol!) This is Awesome Ghastley !!!

More little steps forward.

The game doesn't have one of these -

So I had to make one.

Yippee!

Umm, maybe I'm getting a little too excited?

You are amazing! How do you make something that doesn't exist in the game, and make it look just like the real life item? I am in awe of how you do that!

Wow, that spokeshave looks beautiful! You made a tool that will look good in a display!!

Love the journal, and The Wronged Wright is a title that won’t be forgotten. Yay!

I spent most of yesterday on the tedious parts. Filling in lists of references in the quest properties, setting aliases, objectives. The worst part was the endless conditions to make sure the four tools can be found in any order, and don't get assigned to the same dungeon. I expect that I'll find that quest can't be started because all those conditions can't be met.

Reading the book starts the quest, which makes the game select four bandit hideouts with boss chests to put the tools in. They have to be selected all at one time to avoid using the same location twice. The player is initially given the objective to find the saw, but could visit one of the other dungeons and find the hammer, tongs or spokeshave first. So when he finds the saw, the next objective has to be for a tool he hasn't found yet. Getting that logic straight is twisting my brain.

Fortunately, the game already provides a way to use a regular item and label it as "Wilf's item" when it's used as an alias, so I don't have to duplicate all the pieces just to make quest items.

I haven't started on the process of driving the wagon, but there are enough other mods that do it, so I can look at those and pick the best method.

I'm also looking at re-building the house as an add-on quest, and making it a wainwright's workshop. There's a corresponding complete house for each of the destroyed ones in the game, so replacing the structure is easy. Furniture is a known process too. The only question is when would be an appropriate point to do that? When player has a spouse to stay there and be shop-keeper? Since the whole idea is that the Khajiit is nomadic, does he want a static home?

I think the add-on quest to restore the ruined house is a great idea. I have a Redguard and an Argonian in mind to use your Khajiiti caravan, and I suspect that there will be others who will want to build it not just for Khajiit. Both of mine (Alesan and Dar-Ma) have other housing, but both would build it for someone else to live in. I use My Home Is Your Home to park NPCs all over the place, so it would be easy to move one or a few in as the new wainwright and give them schedules working outdoors. Even with a purely nomadic Khajiit character I would do the quest to restore the workshop so that my nomad would have a place to swing by and do the maintenance on his wagon, or so we would pretend.

So I guess I wouldn’t wait for the player to marry, since the restored home and workshop would be useful in all kinds of situations. Even if the nomadic player wanted to adopt kids without a spouse, your wainwright workshop would give them a way to do it if you included the children’s stuff.

Maybe the add-on quest could start after completing the wagon? How were you thinking of doing it? If there was a way that would not put an unfinished quest in the journals of the true nomads who would not build a house, I think that would be best.

Wow, a functional house there would be the icing on the cake!

One idea I'd had was that the quest to restore the house would start after the player visits each of the walled cities and talks to the carriage drivers. They'd convince him of the need for a repair shop, and central is good. However, I can't think of a way to do so without dialogue, which needs voice acting, unless it's a lot of couriers with letters!

One of the motives was to provide a need for the partial wagons after the build part is done. A workshop might have several part-built wagons in progress of "repair". There's a fair amount of open space at the site for that.

But it won't happen unless I get the first part finished. There's still a few bits to link up before Jo'bashi goes testing.

Gaaah, that must be why quests didn't work if you found the item before getting the quest when Skyrim first came out; is that still an issue?


Holy Cow, I didn't know it could do that! I made duplicates of a bunch of stuff, thought we had to like in Oblivion! That is Awesome, I wonder how it works?



I haven't started on the process of driving the wagon, but there are enough other mods that do it, so I can look at those and pick the best method.



I wondered if that house next to the cart in the beginning could be fixed into a cozy little shack! Yeah, spouses and children couldn't all squeeze onto the back of that wagon, there would be cats hanging off the springs!

I can test if the player has found all the stables where the carriage drivers hang out by testing the visibility state of the map markers. So I don't need dialogue with the drivers to build the list. Any appropriate event such as ChangeLocation can trigger a test on the complete set, and send a single courier.

The drivers have all seen the non-uniform wagon, and wonder where it was made. If there's another workshop somewhere, especially if it sells spares, and does repairs, they'd all like to know. The inflated prices for the Cyrodiil monopoly are severely cutting into their profits from the carriage trade.

Once shop is open, I suspect I can use the "hired thugs" quest in the same way that thefts trigger it, with a custom contract in place of the regular one. The Cyrodiil Wainwrights' Guild has sent them, so I may even clone it to use Imperials as hirelings. The player already gets DB assassins, or I'd be using those, too.

There is a nice generic "We're here to teach you a lesson" topic that suits any hireling situation, so I don't even need voice acting for them.

This is some very interesting info on how these things can be worked out, I really appreciate you sharing this, it may help me one day in my own mod-making (if I ever get back to it, lol).

Jo'Bashi has been busy clearing bandit dungeons around most of Skyrim. Every time I find a problem with the quest, he has to start again, as most things I need to change are baked into the save game. So he's cleared Faldar's Tooth twice, Orotheim twice, White River Watch once, Stoney Creek Cave once, Robbers' Gorge, Uttering Hills, Bilegulch Mine, and probably more that we've forgotten.

He's built at least four wagons, and mined a lot of ores, too.

He still has a couple of dots to connect...

Aw, his harness is missing, but what a nice looking horse!

All he has to do is tell Dot to baaaack up, eaaaasy . . .!

Love hearing about the progress you're making!

Very exciting to hear the progress and see the wagon with horse almost in the right place! I love the horse's look. That’s a lot of bandit camps, wow. Jo’Bashi is a good sport.

The hired thugs from the Cyrodiil Wainwrights Guild is a great touch. I missed that before. And it will be neat to have some partially built wagons around once the player is on the road. Your wagons look cool with their underparts showing.

I downloaded Dragonkiller Cart to check out, as it appeared to contain all the pieces I needed. Of course, it has way too many features, so now I need to figure out what's essential. Most of the extra stuff is related to camping equipment (taken to extremes, as you can create a smithy or alchemy lab on the road). I won't be doing that, as the Wainwright's house can provide the base station needs.

Activating the wagon should let you get on or off the driver's seat, harness or release the horse, and open the wagon as a container (cargo), but what else?

Dragonkiller Cart has a "Battle" option as well, which appears to be a combo of get off and release the horse as one fast choice. It also has multiple containers, partly because some of them relate to the extra features (tent and other equipment, especially). I'm not sure I need more than one.

If the player sleeps in the wagon, then I need a sleep option. Get off option should work whether the player is in the back, or on the driver's seat, so that only adds one. I'd like it all to fit on one menu, if possible. Showing only available options will keep it simple. I.e. harness / release won't both be there, and get on + sleep will swap with get off + combat.

Sleeping on the wagon avoids the need for a tent, with its attendant problems of finding level ground, enough space, orientation etc.

Since the player can separate from horse and wagon, and the horse can die leaving the wagon stranded, I need a method to locate each of them. Does anyone know a mod that does that for horses?

I remember seeing this mod before, and liking the idea, though I found the camping equipment a bit of overkill. It's good for an all around character that levels up all skills, but for RP purposes it's a bit awkward. For example, both of my Skyrim toons are not interested in enchanting - so there is no need for the enchanting table. Alise has some Alchemy skills, but she is more interested in making potions for sale than she is in using them herself. Alise is a skilled smith who is happy at the anvil creating new items, but Halle is not at all interested in that. Halle's idea of cooking is charring whatever raw meat she has in her pack for dinner, Alise enjoys making all the recipes, especially the stews. Halle is closer to a hunter archetype, in that she likes to walk all over Skyrim and explore the back country. In fact, I found quite a few new places with her that Alise never discovered.

The reason I never downloaded Dragonkiller Cart is because it was just too much. I am much more interested in a simpler mod that lets me use other simple mods with it. Currently I'm using Camping Kit of the Northern Ranger with Hunterborn, and that pretty much covers all my camping needs. Northern Ranger isn't quite as immersive as Camping or Frostfall, but I really like the dark fire option, as well as the fact that the kits pretty much contain everything you need to set up camp. The one kit even contains a barrel that can hold extra items without adding to the player's encumbrance. I like to RP that this is like Oblivion's Bag of Holding. Hunterborn is giving me new ideas for RP, and I think it would work quite well with your Khajiit cart mod if you keep it simple enough. Hunterborn lets my PC live off the land, literally.

I rather like the idea of sleeping in the wagon being included with your mod, as it allows my character to decide between that or pitching camp if she has one of the camping mods included.

Since I am off from work today, I will take some time and search the Nexus for a Skyrim version of "Dude, where's my Horse?" from Oblivion. I'll be back if I find anything!

*EDIT* Silly me, I forgot that Convenient Horses and Convenient Horse Herding are part of my default loadout. CH uses the Horse Call feature, which gives the PC a horn that can pretty much summon the mount from anywhere. It's useful if you end up miles away from where you left your horse and don't feel like footslogging all the way back (Bleak Falls Barrow, anyone?). A similar feature might be useful for your mod - have a flute be found beneath the floorboards of the ruined house - will it call a horse you buy or a horse owned by the previous owner?

CHH on the other hand has a feature where you can set up a horse camp anywhere. It uses a banner to create a "home" marker for the horses to return to. You can use a similar script for the cart so the horse always comes back after a dragon attack.

I'll keep looking for other candidates.

*EDIT 2* This looks interesting - I've never used it, but it looks to be just commands for the horses - kuertee's Horse Commands.

Those horse-calling features are rather the opposite of what I'm looking for. The Dragonkiller Cart mod gives you a power to summon your cart from wherever you left it, but I'd rather leave a marker on the map and make the player go fetch it. Ditto for the horse, so I'd use two different icons, or arrow colours. If your horse dies, the wagon marker should drop automatically, so you can come back with another.

Being compatible with camping mods will be a plus, so I don't want to duplicate their features. It's enough to allow the kit to be carried on the cart, so the cargo container should suffice.

Then take a look at the Convenient Horse Herding mod - it adds a marker to the horse camp that allows all horses to return to it.

If you just want to know where the horse and the cart are (assuming they've separated, such as after combat), then maybe there is something in the depths of the CHH mod that you can use?

I have had the Dragonkiller Cart since last year, LOVE it! It has a lot of items I've used in my own personal game mods too, really great mod!

The problem I've had with Dragonkiller Cart is that there's too much stuff to strip away before I can understand how the wagon part works. I spent a lot of the weekend asking myself "why did they do it this way?" and not getting any answers. There's a lot of code duplicated in multiple scripts, and global variables that look like they should been properties instead. Not to mention a few cases of "do something, then disable and re-enable the target and do it again" that look like empirical coding - i.e. they don't why it worked that way, but it did.

So I had to put down the mod and do something else for a while. Like actually play the game.