How do horses work?

[JanusForbeare]

I decided to take a day off from my main project to experiment with an idea I had for a new mount. However, I'm having trouble "attaching" the player to the steed... that is to say, I can control the mount, but the player simply hovers in one place in the mounted position.

 

I suspect that the answer has something to do with the animations "paired_mount.hkx" and "paired_dismount.hkx", however, I have no idea how to go about manipulating .hkx files or attaching them to a race. Am I on the right track, or have I overlooked something much more fundamental?

[porroone]

In order to make something rideable you need to take 2 things into consideration, keywords and skeleton. Since I see you already got the keywords done, you need to create a custom race with a custom skeleton, use nifskope to add a new bone to that skeleton, name it saddlebone, check the horse skeleton to get around orientation and position, make the custom race use the custom skeleton and then you wont be hovering in the air anymore and the char will be parented to the SaddleBone.

[JanusForbeare]

Thanks for the quick reply!

 

I actually attempted that earlier, though it didn't work out. After your post, though, I think I understand why. I never renamed the new bone to saddlebone, I simply copied that branch from the horse skeleton and attached it to the new steed. I'm making the changes you suggested - if this works, I'll give you a shout out in the credits when I release the mod!

 

EDIT: Alright, tested, and there's some improvement. After renaming the bone, the player does ride the steed, but the orientation is clearly off (yeah, I skipped that step... I got excited ;D ), so at the moment the player faces the ground and spins like a breakdancer while mounted. That's easy enough to fix.

 

However, the steed is now invisible. Any thoughts on what might have caused this issue?

Edited March 3, 2012 by JanusForbeare

[porroone]

Yea probably the player is inside the world and not rendering the stead, try fixing the orientation. Also what creature are u trying to ride ? I only found issues while trying to ride the player skeleton(we all want to ride lydia), the rest works fine.

[TehPinkPantZ]

Hi, could you guy explain a little bit more about how mounting work ?

For example, I want to make some kind of Dwarven machine mount, so just attach saddlebone in that machine's skeleton ? Is there any script to trigger animation, link player control (tc command ?), ...