Animating the bards of Cutthroat's mod

[ViolentRiC]

http://mw.modhistory.com/download-53-7035

(adds bard NPCs who will play music upon request)

 

So I added this mod from the above site and I'm torn on whether I want to keep it because it looks great once you pay them to play but until you do, they just stand there 100% frozen (body and face) and not only do they look jarring to the point of immersion breaking, they're actually kind of morbid!

 

I've never modded but I do have some mod editing tools (for fixing problems like a bad dialogue entry) and I'm wondering how difficult it would be to ammend it so that they do their 'performing' animation constantly. The performing animation is really nice, they sway slightly while playing the lute, so it wouldn't look out of place as a constant effect.

 

Many thanks if anyone can help - if it's just a case of changing a few settings then I'll gladly give it a go.

[Dragon32]

Pretty sure they use Lady Eternity's Musicians resource. Downloading the original archive may have some instructions for setting them on permanent loop. Edited April 7, 2016 by Dragon32

[Naufragous77]

Unfortunately that link is dead. All you get are 404 Errors when you try to DL anything from that page. As a side note, the same issue can be seen in Animated MW and Animated MW merged. I never noticed, since my character slept mostly by night, but there were a few times I saw the bard in a tavern, and it just stood there. I tried a fresh DL, still nothing... I even tried pulling the musician files from another mod, still the same disturbing results.

When you say loop, is that something that has to be done in NifSkope? I assume it's that play button above, eh?

[Dragon32]

Well, damn. Never thought to check the links.

 

My idea (and no real clue if this would work ) is that the "playing the lute" animation would be already defined in the NIFs. The Cutthroat Mods ESP must use some kind of PlayAnim function as part of a script. So... set the musicians to have a 100% chance Idle animation which is the play the lute one.

 

Please note, I've never messed around with this stuff, that's just based on my understanding of Morrowind and its animations.

[Naufragous77]

Solved it... well, at least for Animated MW, but that should work for the Bard mod. I remembered that in Animated MW there's at least one bard that works, playing his lute by the well. Looking through the meshes, there's a "AM_Bard2" and a "AM_Lute" - only difference I saw was one started playing right of the bat; the other did not. I hit the "play button" on the animation, saved it, tested in-game, and it worked. It looks like it was a slight oversight in packaging, but I'd suggest doing that ViolentRic. The meshes in the Bard mod are named differently, but still essentially the same. Make sure both "play buttons" are ticked, which is the only thing I noticed that was different than what was set up in Animated MW.