[WIPz] Oblivion Horses Overhaul

[ulrim]

Heloo!

I made a video of my progress...

Do you like horses? I do. A lot !

I have a demo for sharing but it has model meshes from the official plugin.

Would you like to get involved in the party?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssYckTseVNM

Now,...

Where are my cookies?

[DarkRider]

This looks really promising Ulrim, keep up the great work.

Cookies? Haven't uh...seen em.

[ulrim]

From the bethsoft thread:

Work done so far:

With the help of Psymon's suggestions, I have finally got travel options for horses working.

Each vanilla horse is supported by the default quest that has new travel flag variables. The control flags allow vanilla horses travelling to a marked location, home stables, nearest stables or stop travelling, when you command it or change mounts.

The configuration is done inside the game. I don't have external ini file configuration because each command is different for each horse found in the game. Support for other horses is still being developed, more on this below.

Each horse can have unique settings. You can command as many mounts as you want, since the horse references are stored for each horse. I may have to test this better though.

The set of horse commands bundled has been reworked. It features some of the ideas by kuertee already, for example, though the way I started coding it is different.

Downsides for this project is that AI has changed for every horse, meaning it is not compatible with other horse mods that change their behaviour too.

The work done so far allows the horses to be equipped with any kind of outfit, and is compatible with Maboroshi's Saddle bags out-of-the-box, at last.

Now that I've sorted my new Oblivion installation, I got the chance of checking out some other mods for horses. Kuertee's horse commands for instance. It would be nice to know if modders like kuertee would like to contribute too. I checked his ideas on horse speed and ownership but I won't be adding them myself.

About the support for other horses:

The initial idea was to provide better horse management. Since OBSE now provides function creation and encapsulation techniques, this should make it much easier to allow other modders to start adding their ideas.

I have spoken to Zira, asking if she wanted to participate in the project. I believe she didn't want to get involved because of the difficulty, though I had approval to use her work. I should point out that horse textures and meshes are not all this is about. It's about the way you can use the equipment and putting it into the game.

An example is Zira's Battle Shop Mod. You can buy the horses with the equipment. But you cannot use the equipment on other horse. Same thing that happened with the official DLChorsearmor plugin. And neither can use the shield or sword that are attached to the outfit - they're just for show. Not anymore! The methods I'm developing allow the horse to display each mesh according to the gear you want. You could attach the shield to the horse, much like Maboroshi allowed you to "attach" a saddlebag.

The idea is roughly the same as in the mod Shields on Back, except you have it equiped on the horse and it can be more than shields. Just like you could move the way the sword is positioned in Swords on back, it could be made an equip slot of sorts for the horse.

It is not spectacularly new idea, but it's fun and adds to game-play experience. With the examples given, modders that like modelling don't have to worry about scripting or dense thought behind the scenes. Just make the equipment so I can add support for it in game.

Work to be done:

Now that I have sorted out horse behaviour and added patches with help from suggestions, lets polish this.

The way it worked in the demo required the horses to use a cheating technique. I made them swap with clone vanilla horses with hard-coded meshes. One day I opened the CS and just started anew. Actually, it was more trouble than it was worth it, since the horse swapping made the horses head to the home stables every time they changed equipment. Now it works with any horse without cheap tricks involved. Thanks, again, to Psymon for testing this in the pre-release demonstration.

The support for horses has to be coded though, so it does not display certain oddities, such as mesh clipping or pink textures appearing.

I am making a record to track known horses from already available mods. For example, if you have Knights of the White Stallion, now you can add or remove equipment just like any other vanilla horse.

Things that are most important to catalogue are the location of the equipment meshes and horse manes, for now.

If anyone would like to help me assemble this list would speed up my development greatly. Thanks in advance.

Other than this, I have to improve the way horse selection works. Maybe add a spell to search for the horses around and let you choose which mount you want to command at a time. Another option is to set a key to get reference from crosshair and add a ini to fetch what key you want to set. Any advice is welcome.

Oh! And I found out how to package the meshes now, from my Ulrim's horses mod (doh!) so I can release!

P.S.: I made a video with the horse equipment. You can see why I want to track the available mane meshes, for example, so it avoids clipping with certain armours equipped.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssYckTseVNM

(Youtube sound audio-swap sucks. Here's a link to listen the music. And nevermind the silly pipe thing...)

The horse equipment bags are actual items that display as, well, bags. Meshes used for the bags were made by Quarn. Notice how they gain or loose weight and value as you take the equipment.

Modellers, show your mesh suggestions!

[Zerengil]

This could help implement pack-mules, to carry all your heavy stuff.

I don't know if there is a pack-mule mod out there, but this could implement it without too much problem. (I think)

[ulrim]

I'm working on AI for horses. Still have some issues matching a horse reference with an editor ID.

The idea is make a horse follow another horse right? It is easy to implement with an AI package and a marker.

Set the AI package to follow marker. Set a monitor quest script to move the marker to the target horse to be followed. Assign the AI package to the horse that carries stuff. The monitor could make the horse act like a container. Like, when it is activated, open a custom container to put your stuff, just like Maboroshi done with saddle bags.

Nice idea.

I should be getting some other workaround soon if I don't get any help with the scripting.

I've posted here on the study hall and also on bethsoft's cs forum section.

[Zerengil]

I know close to nothing about scripting (yet), but thats the general idea, also, if possible make it possible to buy different packmules with different capabilities of carrying stuff.

Sorry for just giving you more to do, but it would be awesome.

Edit: Are you making it so that the player can ride the horse, get off, do something with the horse, then fast travel without the horse following? as I find that pretty annoying.

Also, this got me really to my feet as I think horses were handled pretty simply in vanilla Oblivion.

Edited May 29, 2010 by Zerengil

[ulrim]

I could add a stay command, so horses stay at the current location when player fast travels.

I'm just waiting for the new OBSE 19 to come out...

EDIT.

Actually, I have this mod finished but I won't be releasing it.

Armor sounds are not updated on horses because I am waiting for the SetCreatureSoundBase function.

I have moved on to another project.

Not many people interested in *modding* horses (at least for horse armors, equipment slots and AI), so I may get back at requests or improvements after this is released.

Edited June 16, 2010 by ulrim