[WIP] Immersive Horses

[gezegond]

Hi. I was really surprised to see this as I was thinking of making an "Immersive Horses" mod of my own. These are some ideas I had in mind:

 

1-To be able to assign any horse to any of your followers. (Convenient Horses makes followers summon invincible horses, which makes it really immersion braking since the player has to buy and take care of their horse)

2-Being able to "own" the horses you see in the wild (This one you already seem to have)

3-Being able to buy and craft different horse armors, each protecting the horse in different amounts

4-Being able to buy and craft different horse saddles, each granting a different carry weight.

5-Being able to buy several horses at stables instead of just one (this is needed since now you would have to buy horses for your followers and not just for yourself)

6-Assigning a horse for carrying supplies. This horse would not be ride-able, but would have a big carry weight.

7-Having necessary horse functions present in convenient horses, such as horse whistle, horse summon, and horse aggressiveness.

8-Horse aggressiveness could be set for each horse separately.

 

What do you think about these ideas? I was thinking maybe we could work together but right now I'm working on another mod...

[sevencardz]

@gezegond

#1 Assign horse to followers - Yep, this is something I want to add. When I first looked into it, the problem I ran into was that a follower needs to have a particular A.I. package which allows that follower to ride a horse, so I think the way to do it is to make a quest for the followers to ride horses. To keep it as simple as possible, I'd like to have the mod simply figure out which horses aren't being used by the player with Game.GetPlayersLastRiddenHorse() and then followers will simply mount any available horses that are following you. Keeping track of who owns which horse might get cumbersome.

#2 Claim wild horses - Yep, not only will you have the ability to permanently own any wild horse you find, you also have the ability to give yourself ownership of horses you steal, which also gives you a hefty bounty if you're caught. Currently, I have the bounty for stealing a horse at 3000 gold and the purchase price at 2500 gold. I never understood how the bounty for stealing a horse would be less than buying the horse outright. If I'm the Jarl and you steal a horse in my hold, you're going to pay for the horse, and then you're going to pay fees on top of that and you're probably going to get assaulted by my guards for the trouble. :)

#3 + 4 - Craftable saddles/armors - I'd like to do something like this, but the issue is finding texture resources as I have no talent or ambition to create these myself. I just added a feature that lets you change your horse's armor or saddle, but for proper crafting and immersion I would also need textures/meshes for the items to display in your inventory and in the worldspace, and I haven't been able to find any. I'm hoping nivea's tack overhaul can fill in some of these gaps.

#5 - Buying more horses - I actually just did this last night. :D After an hour or two of learning how quests work... I managed to get it done rather easily with some edits to the 'stables' quest:

1. add a reference alias to the second horse for each stable
2. duplicate the existing dialog topic for the buyable horse and switch the aliases to the one you just made
3. edit the dialog topic for purchasing the horse to choose either the first or second horse, depending on which one is available/alive

I'm also going to add another horse to the Whiterun stables so you'll be able to purchase all 10 horses.

#6 - I like it, but I would want some sort of obvious visual representation that it's a packhorse. Similar to the Mule mod on the nexus.

#7 - Currently, I've integrated with the Whistle mod to achieve this. You can select any horse from a menu to Whistle for individuals, or you can Whistle for all of them at once.

#8 - Personally, I don't think horses should ever be fighting with you in any situation, unless you're mounted on one. That said, it's not hard to add in options to change temperment with my current system so meh, I'll throw that in.

Most of the core functionality is done at this point. Here's what I have left on my list that I'm not exactly sure how to achieve:

Add a second horse to the Whiterun stables.
Add the ability for followers to ride horses that are currently following you.
Add the ability to board your horses at each stable for a fee.

[gezegond]

Keeping track of who owns which horse might get cumbersome.

 

How about an actor array for horses? You can use a spell (or shout) to add a new horse to the array. Then make a corresponding int array, which holds the value for the horse's riding state. So for instance, 0 for player horse, -1 for cargo horse, and 1-100 for each follower.

 

The only problem is you need to sync your follower list with the list of whatever follower overhaul mod that is being used. afaik that's how convenient horses does it.

 

EDIT: a better idea, have a third array, and actor array that corresponds with horses, but holds the references to the followers. That way I think we can dodge having to keep syncing a follower list.

 

#3 + 4 - Craftable saddles/armors - I'd like to do something like this, but the issue is finding texture resources as I have no talent or ambition to create these myself. I just added a feature that lets you change your horse's armor or saddle, but for proper crafting and immersion I would also need textures/meshes for the items to display in your inventory and in the worldspace, and I haven't been able to find any. I'm hoping nivea's tack overhaul can fill in some of these gaps.

 

I personally was thinking of incorporating Horse Armors for Skyrim and More Saddles into my mod. I asked permission for more saddles but haven't gotten any replies yet. Anyhow, perhaps I could try opening the saddle meshes in nifskope and editing them to be suitable for worldspace. I've never used nifskope before though, so don't expect anything anytime soon, specially since Im working on another mod right now. It shouldn't be a big deal though, as far as I can see from the images on more saddles, one just needs to open the saddle and remove some unnecessary parts and it would be suitable for worldspace. I should be able to do it easily unless it would decide to force me to texture map all over again. (which it shouldn't, but im not sure how UV mapping works in skyrim)

 

#5 - Buying more horses - I actually just did this last night. :D After an hour or two of learning how quests work... I managed to get it done rather easily with some edits to the 'stables' quest:

 

1. add a reference alias to the second horse for each stable

2. duplicate the existing dialog topic for the buyable horse and switch the aliases to the one you just made

3. edit the dialog topic for purchasing the horse to choose either the first or second horse, depending on which one is available/alive

 

I'm also going to add another horse to the Whiterun stables so you'll be able to purchase all 10 horses.

 

What I had in mind was similar to horse herding (I think), so each time you bought a horse from the dialog, a new horse would be placeatme'd to you. You could buy infinite horses, but it looked a bit weird. If you don't want to go for that because it looks weird, I think it would be a good idea to add more horses to the wilds, since players can have up to 100 followers with follower mods, they should also be able to somehow acquire more than 100 horses (accounting for dead horses, infinite horses lol)

Edited December 31, 2014 by gezegond

[macrads]

Hey.

Just remembered about one issue that has always bothered me.

You can't SELL horses!!!! :confused: :confused:

If you are implementing ownership of stolen horses to player, there must be a way to do the opposite. Steal horses a then sell them, that would be cool feature I think.

[sevencardz]

@gezegond

Right, I'm using an actor array to keep track of the horses now, but I always aim to keep things as simple as possible. I'm hoping I can get away with keeping just the current horse array and coding the rest around CurrentFollowerFaction, but if not, the more complex way is still an option. My fear is ending up with huge inefficient scripts that start to lag from doing so much array traversal and other upkeep processing.

Currently I have these armors incorporated and accessible via an options menu for the horse:

Gabriel Gullbergh horse armors: Horse Armors for Skyrim
Christian Paskota horse armors: Sethai and Elthrai Horse Armors
Sader horse armors: Divine Aegis Paladin Style Ebony Armor

I PMed Sader just to clarify permission to reuse his armors. They're based on MysticHybrid's meshes and the rest of both author's stuff is free for reuse, so I would imagine so. I'd be interested to use More Saddles too, so let me know if you get permission for that.

Yep, I want to avoid any and all situations where horses just 'appear' out of nowhere, lol. The exception being summonable horses, of course. I like the idea of adding wild horses, if they're placed immersively (lol). There's also NPCs Riding Horses.

@macrads

Check out Horse Stabling. I'm considering incorporating some of those features as well. However, it would be nice to have proper voice acted dialog rather than just silent menu selection when selling a horse.

[gezegond]

My fear is ending up with huge inefficient scripts that start to lag from doing so much array traversal and other upkeep processing.

 

I doubt it would lag just from 3 simple arrays (all of which are essnetially integer arrays) Convenient horses has A LOT more scripting and it still doesn't lag much. Also afaik the lagging only happens if you have onupdate calls. As long as you avoid those and run your scripts smartly, it won't lag the game much.

 

Yep, I want to avoid any and all situations where horses just 'appear' out of nowhere, lol. The exception being summonable horses, of course. I like the idea of adding wild horses, if they're placed immersively (lol). There's also NPCs Riding Horses.

 

My current solution to this "problem" is simple. Fade the screen to black, place the object at player, forward 2 or more hours game time, then fade back in. BAM, Instant immersion! :D

 

You could have a dialog that says, wait here, ill go get your horse, then the screen goes black and so on...

 

Happy new year btw lol

Edited December 31, 2014 by gezegond

[nivea]

 

@macrads - I just remembered that nivea's working on a horse tack overhaul and she says it will incorporate shoes:

 

Shoes: 1 (Just iron so far, will add more types. They work as in add a speed bonus to the horse you put them on.)

Compatibility/integration with that mod is on my list. :smile:

 

 

Yup horseshoes are all done except adding more metal types, currently on break seeing as its been holidays in USA and that means busy time doing other stuff. I might wait on this mods release since its adding alot to the game and then build my mod around it, or at least get a good idea how to make them work 100% together.

 

Working shoes:

https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8624/15228051943_da17b3e22d_o.jpg

[Boombro]

This seems like it coming along very nicely!

 

For the armors, maybe you can buy them from the stable master? Seems less of a trouble for player and you, since there is no need to craft or making a world model. Maybe also some kind of secret npc for armors with high states that fits end game?

[immortalfrieza]

#3 + 4 - Craftable saddles/armors - I'd like to do something like this, but the issue is finding texture resources as I have no talent or ambition to create these myself. I just added a feature that lets you change your horse's armor or saddle, but for proper crafting and immersion I would also need textures/meshes for the items to display in your inventory and in the worldspace, and I haven't been able to find any. I'm hoping nivea's tack overhaul can fill in some of these gaps.

 

 

Maybe instead of creating the texture models of the armor for the menu and craft menu, you could use a model of a horse wearing the armor as the menu model. As for when it's dropped on the ground, maybe a bag or box or some other small generic storage container could be used to represent that. I don't know if either of those are possible but if they are it would simplify things.

Edited January 1, 2015 by immortalfrieza

[nivea]

 

#3 + 4 - Craftable saddles/armors - I'd like to do something like this, but the issue is finding texture resources as I have no talent or ambition to create these myself. I just added a feature that lets you change your horse's armor or saddle, but for proper crafting and immersion I would also need textures/meshes for the items to display in your inventory and in the worldspace, and I haven't been able to find any. I'm hoping nivea's tack overhaul can fill in some of these gaps.

 

 

Maybe instead of creating the texture models of the armor for the menu and craft menu, you could use a model of a horse wearing the armor as the menu model. As for when it's dropped on the ground, maybe a bag or box or some other small generic storage container could be used to represent that. I don't know if either of those are possible but if they are it would simplify things.

 

 

Ground mesh is used in both inventory screen and when you drop it, also no you can not really use a rigged model of the horse as the ground mesh without some real issues anytime anyone drops it.

 

I would suggest just using a bag or horse skin (do not remember the name of the horse skin item lol) if you can not make your own versions.