Anvildude

I was thinking that setting the Staff up as a 'gauntlet' would allow for cast-and-equip to work. The thing is, this, along with so many other mod ideas, is going to dive you down a rabbit hole of changes. For example, changing spells to fire out through the staff tip: Assuming you manage to create the animations for the staff-based castings, you could very well also change the position that the spell 'model' comes from- they're all based on the zero-point of the character model, or the wrist or hand joint of the skeleton, and offsetting the animation and particle meshes should allow you to stick them wherever you want in relation to the hands of the caster... However, this means you'd have to create separate magic effects and spells for every single possible spell to cast through a staff, and set up either a script or other interrupt to 'hot swap' the chosen spell for the staff version- which would also require you to make each spellbook teach both versions, hide the staff version, etc. etc. I'd actually suggest, instead, tweaking the Fluff of the system. Say that casting through a Staff requires a slightly different spell than casting through your hands, and have either new spell tomes for staff-specific spells (which would be suitably offset, and have a much easier "is Staff_x equipped" conditional) or have the original spell tomes teach both versions- and then the Player would be responsible for having both the correct staff and correct spell equipped if they wanted to take advantage of it. But yeah. Sounds cool, but a little difficult. May I recommend, as well, utilizing the Atronach Forge for the crafting/enchanting aspect of these staves? It seems to me to be a critically under-utilized vanilla mechanic in all these magic mods.

I was actually running into this exact issue. I wish I'd seen this thread before tearing my hair out about it. Finally found the thing by accident. Quick question to you all, though (and maybe warning, too)- Have any of you had issues with the perks not staying where you put them? I've tried to arrange my new smithing perks all nicely, but every time I load up the game, the constellation is all... squirreled up. Everything's there, and it works, but it's all out of position, making it look terrible.

Don't know if you're still looking at this. I'm currently working through some skill modding myself, and I think I could help you out with the creation of the skill tree and perks- but I'm having trouble figuring out how to get a custom Skill to level up based on the correct actions. Let me know if you still want any advice I can give.

I'm running into this as well. It does sound like it's the animations, more than the behaviours- as far as I can see, the behaviours can be set up identically to player actors (like assassins, who definitely can dual wield)- they even have a .75 default chance to use a dual attack ( if I'm reading their behaiour graphs right). So if they're missing the dual-attack animations, seems to me like the engine will just hard-block the execution of that attack. In a way, the fact that they won't even go with unarmed attacks when 'wielding' their weapons supports this- if it were simply a behaviour issue, you'd expect them to still attack, just with a different weapon set that they preferred more. Granted, I only noticed this with a Draugr that had a shield as well as his dual daggers, and so that probably messed things up as well- all the pure dual-wielders I've encountered I managed to sneak attack before they drew their weapons.

This is YEARS late, but I'd suggest looking at the Actor stuff, rather than the Item stuff. The AI and Actor Behaviours and the like- For instance, the Draugr have a "Left hand only" thing going with their spells- but the basis of that is in the Draugr AI package, rather than in just the spells.

Just to expand: I think I might know what's going on, but I'd like to double-check. So, the game apparently just, dynamically figures out what material keywords you want the Perk to affect via the description? Because I can't find any other way that the Perk knows what keyword to bind to.

Journeyman, would you be willing to describe what you found? I'm having the same issue right now.