Play Animation on Empty Power Armor Furniture

[CylonSurfer]

So, essentially I'm trying to get power armor frames to play their open / close animation without an NPC climbing into them.

 

I'm aware that the main power armor frame.nif is an animated nif and runs an animation within Nifskope, however I can't get an empty frame to play the same animation via a script.

 

What I've done so far is:

 

1. Created a new Perk with an entry point which adds a new activation (Open Frame) to all PA frames

2. Created a quest which gives this perk to the player

 

The above works and I now have the secondary activation of 'Open Frame' when my character approaches a suit of Power Armor in game, I have also tested the perks entry point script fragment which runs a 'debug.trace("PA ID =" +akTargetRef)' and that successfully writes the PA frames ID to the script log file. So this part of my mod is all working nicely, I have my entry point and I can return my target for an animation to play on.

 

However I cannot for the life of me get the Power Armor to play its default open / close animation. I have tried PlayAnimation, PlayAnimationandWait, PlayGamebyroAnimation, Playidle etc and nothing seems to work. In NifSkope the Power Armor .nif has a node called 'OpenArmor' but calling this e.g:

 

akTargetRef.PlayGamebyroAnimation("OpenArmor")

 

doesn't appear to do anything and I cannot find anything that resembles the PA open animation in the CK.

 

Does anyone know how to call the Power Armor Open / Close animation on an empty power armor suit, where I'm going wrong or even where I might look to find out how to call the animation?

 

Cheers.

Edited January 22, 2019 by CylonSurfer

[MarkusTay]

The only work-around I can imagine (because its probably a limitation of the game engine) is to create a 'dummy' invisible NPC that gets in and out of the armor with the perk.

 

Unless you are trying to get it 'stuck open', in which case, I don't know if that's possible without recreating the animation from scratch.

[CylonSurfer]

The only work-around I can imagine (because its probably a limitation of the game engine) is to create a 'dummy' invisible NPC that gets in and out of the armor with the perk.

 

Unless you are trying to get it 'stuck open', in which case, I don't know if that's possible without recreating the animation from scratch.

 

Yeah, that is my 'backup plan' but it comes with it's own set of issues and problems such as getting an NPC to enter a PA ( which isn't easy) and the potential collision problems with the player, so I'd like to avoid that if possible.

 

I'd hoped that getting the furniture to play its open animation would be much simpiler and cleaner if it's possible.

Edited January 22, 2019 by CylonSurfer

[CylonSurfer]

Okay, I got this working (kind of) with:

 

akTargetRef.PlayAnimation("sitStartFromStand")

 

Only issue now is that once the animation has played once on a Power Armor suit it will not play again next time the script is run. It's almost like the PA gets stuck somehow but is working fine in all other respects. Any ideas?

[CylonSurfer]

Okay, sorted it. For reference if anyone else ever needs to do this:

 

akTargetRef.PlayAnimation("standStart")

 

This animation doesn't break Power Armor. The mod is shaping up nicely now :smile:

 

Edited January 22, 2019 by CylonSurfer