AndyDaMage

If you go back to when I first started the centuars then they were like that due to a lack of knowledge about the race system. http://tesalliance.org/forums/uploads/1253369854/gallery_108_44_216695.jpg But one of the biggest feedback topics i got was that they horse part was too small, so it ended up getting changed as soon as I knew it was possible to do so.

I thoguht I'd jump in with my two cents.....esspecially seeing I have had a long term in investment with this problem. I'll also just point out I didnt read all the posts here, so I may say things over that have already been said. :) The biggest problem with these is that the body mesh is in the clothing nif, rather then as it was in morrowind, seperated. Two and a half years back I looked for a solution to this, and I did find one, however OBSE was not a state where it was possible ot implement it yet. I did do some round about hacking on it though, and came up with these: http://tesalliance.org/forums/uploads/1258151528/gallery_108_44_16140.jpg http://tesalliance.org/forums/uploads/1258151528/gallery_108_44_90993.jpg http://tesalliance.org/forums/uploads/1258151528/gallery_108_44_89120.jpg At the point I had to run a pyffi script that gerenated the items for me outside of the game, however that is no longer the case. With NifSE now, I can remove the skin part of meshes on the fly with OBSE scripts now, meaning that you can essentially make a custom body mesh underneath, then replace the items that normally have the skin showing. This way on the item part of meshes will show up. Its not a foolproof system, I still have the problem that the cloned items arent recognised as the originals, and the custom body would have to fit inside the original body mesh, but it is a workable system. There were still a lot of bugs, suck as hand dont shows up when the custom is body is put in the tail slot etc....but I had 80% good work arounds for it. Hoever I have learnt more since i last worked on this. With a combanation of removing the skin, and changing the skeleton you could make it larger then normal. Its all fairly tricky, but very possible. Onto the next Issue, adjusting the Player skeleton for a custom race. Is this possible? sort of.... At the moment we have a single command called SetPlayerSkeletonPath. This OBSE command (and no you wont find it in the OBSE doc yet) will let you change the third person skeleton path for the player. It has some specific things when using it (must be done when in first person view etc) but it works great. Im still bugging scruggys to find a way to change the first person skeleton aswell, but for the moment you can only change the first person skeleton on the fly. For the Centaur Project I have an extra plugin that must be activated only when you play as a centaur. This plugin has one edit, it changes the gamesetting for the first person skeleton. At the moment this is the only way to change the first skeleton. The bonus about changing the path for the skeleton is that it also changes the path for the animations, so whatever animations you put with the skeleton are the ones that are found by the game. In the case of idle anims, these arent effected by the skeleton path change. Other stuff I have learnt: Never delete a bone from the skeleton, that jsut asking for weird issues. When I created my centaurs I still have all the original bones for the human legs in my new skeleton, i just put them un a dummy bone and gave it a scale of 0.0001. This mean that centaurs can still equip and use all items from the game even if they are boots and greaves, they simply do not appear to render on the centaur. This also lets the centaur where clothing such as robes, when it reached the waist it simply dissappears. In the long run I'll make alternate meshes for the centaurs so that armor/clothing shows up on the horse half (pic), but this works well as a backup as it doesnt restrict what the player can use. Hope what I wrote is relevent :)