LE overhaul wielding aka the "vanilla handedness limitation"

[AsaRuth]

Hello all,

 

I originally brought this up in the oblivion forum about a year ago and it was meet with little enthusiasm-which I understand, since oblivion lacked the engine to handle my idea. However, considering Bethesda attempt to implement duel wielding, I feel it could be taken further.

 

For those who do not know, right now, duel wielding is extremely limited by bias for the dexteral player. If you hope to play an ambidextrous or sinistral character, the system breaks down. By which I mean, as long as the play style is right hand dominant, you can switch between weapon/shield and spells without too much trouble. Not that it is perfect in the vanilla system. Yet once you try to auto-equip a weapon/spell to the left hand this system becomes cumbersome.

 

Examples:

 

If you wish to wield a sword in the left hand and shield in the right; too bad.

 

If you wish to duel wield two shields...good luck

 

If you want to equip a weapon in the left hand, and a whatever else in the right, you can, if you:

 

1) hotkey the spell/weapon, then...

2) press the hotkey to put it in the left hand, and then....

3) press the hotkey again to move it to the right hand, and then....

4) equip the weapon.

 

and then: (optional, but likely)

5) suffer and possibly die because an enemy hit you three times while you were getting mussing around with your equipment. *sigh, reload*

 

And I'm sure other problems exist in the vanilla duel wielding/lefty wielding system that I did not include, in fact, if you know of any, please share them!

 

My idea to fix this is, sadly, far beyond my meager skills as a modder (sorry all, I earned my degree in psychology- e.g. no background in scripting).

 

Yet, we have SKSE and AMAZING talent in our community, so I'm confident someone could fix this.

 

My suggestion to get the ball rolling would be a key-press script (similar to what script dragon does in iHUD) that toggles which hand the player equips an item/spell. The toggle key, for arguments sake, could be "L" for left and (maybe) "R" for right. In theory, you could favorite a weapon/spell and that would auto equip to the right hand, or you could favorite a weapon/spell while pressing the toggle "L" to auto equip that item to the left hand. What type of item should have little effect. Shields, weapons and spells could all be assigned by toggle to which-ever hand the player wished.

 

Wow, that ended up longer than I intended it to be, but I hope at least one person reads it and thinks "Yeah, that needs to be fixed, and I know just who could do it." :thumbsup:

 

A note on a much further removed, but very much related note: Has anyone else noticed that kill-cams only use the right hand? Duel wielding does not show up properly, and Lefty wielding does not have a kill cam at all that I can tell. :( I'm afraid we will need an animator to fix that mess.

 

If you made it this far, thanks for reading and thank you for (positive) feedback)

 

AsaRuth