Feral dragon form would be cool. If you're going to do that, I'd suggest using this one rather than Saiden Storm's akatosh dragons since it has four limbs plus wings:

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=26013

Thanks for pointing me towards this, although I already knew it. Chances always are I don't.

Well, Akatosh's a Wyvern in traditional thinking, no western dragon. It's skeleton is useless for my intentions by definition.
Times ago, when I still couldn't do many things myself, I was looking for other 6-limbed skeletons to rig some meshes to. But these are things of the past.
When I go and create a feral form dragon appearance in the future, then rest assured I'll make my own skeleton perfectly fitting the shape I intend.

I'm doing this already for the Anthro-Dragon, though closely sticking to humanoid shape for clothing and armor items of course.
So how could I possibly not do that for the feral shape? :angel:

I'll still finish the feral-style walking animation for the anthro though... as it might look quite funny to walk on all fours while still wearing armor and such... and, the most important cause for myself, Drake sometimes does exactly that.

Coming to think of it further... Drake's quite a young dragon still, there are many far elder ones in his story... couldn't I make it so when shape shifting into feral form it will use your "age" to determine which of the feral races it will give you? I mean they aren't only "looking" different, they're also "moving" differently and all that.
He's not a "hatchling" anymore, so cute hopping around and flapping with little wings and tail to keep balance won't really be his kind of motions anymore... but still trying to do all this is quite tempting to me now. :whistling:

edit: Hey, what made me sign out while I was still editing this?! "No permission" to edit my own posts, yeah sure. Are the forums still in development?

Well, it's a pain there are so many ideas and still no opportunity to even start with it!

Playing a FERAL dragon would be incredibly hot. I'm amazed by all the work you've done so far on this!

I'm getting a bunch of errors with the "new" update to the forums, including one really pesty one that jumbles all of my words together in the upper left hand corner forcing me to have to have the URL that goes straight to sign in. Otherwise, I can't get my cursor over to it. I've also noticed some weird errors when trying to reply or make a new topic too.

As far as ideas and what type of feral dragon to use, you could tie it into the shape form the humanoid shape is using, ie no tail or no tail and wings, full tail and wings.


On a side note, I'm just about finished with my project Drake. I'm still tweaking the spines to my preferences and having some strange probelms with the hands disappearing, but I should be done soon. I'll post some pics here and then send you the final folder if you want it.

Oh yeah, I need to keep those hybrid-settings in mind when doing a feral form as well. Thanks for reminding me.

I'm glad to hear your project is coming along. I'll be waiting for those screenies now.

Now to some progress...
I was reported clipping issues with the new long claws when you're making a fist in hand-to-hand combat and the like.
I thought this could be taken care of when I'm doing my own complete set of animations anyways. However, I thought it wouldn't hurt if I make them retractable anyways. So I quickly came up with some new bones specifically only affecting said claws.

Now because those new bones aren't affected by any animations directly, I can simply use a short 1-frame idle animation to retract them and they would stay that way.
http://img695.imageshack.us/img695/116/retractableclaws1.jpg
Another 1-frame idle kicking in and they'd be back in combat stance.
http://img688.imageshack.us/img688/2479/retractableclaws2.jpg

Putting this to good use inside the upcoming custom animations would even make it yet more useful, as when there's an animation you can't perform with claws out, said animation will simply include them retracted and vice versa. And when I make it happen over more than 1 single frame, i.e. smoothly interpolating, it will even make for a quite cool growing/retracting effect in my eyes. I've seen it in Blender already, so I know what I'm talking of. :hubbahubba:

that sounds really cool, its simple things like that, that can make a mod :goodjob:

Are your new animations going to have the dragon punch like humans or slash with a claw?

As there's nothing done yet they will be whatever I decide them to be, and I haven't decided yet, so I'm open for suggestions.

However, as for Drake it depends on what foe he's fighting. He won't ever severily hurt a human or a living being, so slashing with claws against those would be no option, he'd always prefer a civilized fist fight or martial arts unarmed combat. Demons and other magically created, i.e. summoned, creatures however will be sliced into pieces if necessary.

with the different animations, how would you do it?

from what i've seen, it is a bit hard to make charachter-selective attacks

If you mean Drake's unwillingness to hurt living beings, well that's something I'll figure out myself sooner or later. It's nothing though I'm going to force anybody into for sure!
I'm not going to think about this point too much for the project itself.
As I said I'm yet undecided about what kinds of animations I will do in the end, but having the ability to do everything I want in this regard is really a great thing from my point of view... well, at least I can "try" to do everything I want. :whistling:

From the techie side though I could start and detect the type of foe I'm fighting with first. Then I'll sure figure out some way to "prevent" certain types of attacks from happening. But that's to come in the distant future. There are way more important things on my list right now.

with this new idea, the static wings wouldn't be a problem would they?
because when you make all the new animations it wouldn't be that hard to add in wing movement

That's the whole point... well, one of them, actually.
It wouldn't have been a problem to begin with once I had implemented my animation system before I got these new ideas...
...now with the "seperate skeleton" approach I don't even need the initially planned complex work-arounds anymore.
So consider proper wing movement so nothing will clip anymore as included from this point in development.


Now, on a different topic, I have a request some of you could be so kind to help me out with.
Over at the Nexus I got a report of conflicts with the testinghall and Hawkhaven as well as crashes when playing any other race than a dragon.
The person even gave a non-endorsemant for this, so he/she must have been seriously annoyed.
Well, you know I'm currently unable to look into it myself, but if there really are such issues, I by all means have to figure out their cause and fix it.

So if anybody wants to do me a little favour, please give it a try and play as a different race while my 0.0.7 plugin is activated, and report back with any crashes you encounter and maybe also the obse.log or whatever helps in tracking it down.
As for those conflicts, I don't know what this could be nor how it could be caused... please tell me when my plugin appears to be "dirty" in this aspect or if there's something yet more serious going wrong from my side.

Oh and don't care about the non-endorsemant, neither do I. This is not a "release" to begin with, so endorsemants are quite irrelevant at this point... not that they ever will be anything else... :angel:
"Crash-reports" however are a very serious topic though!

i normally play as other races while your mod is active and i've never had problems.....it might be a conflict with another mod that person has maybe? i have a pretty fresh install. your mod and the mods needed for it to run are the only ones i'm running right now. (not even running my own yet.)

i find that when using your mod i can only use the default hair on any other races, not that this worrys me, i only eva really play the dragon....

this could have something 2 do with the huge ammount of mods i have tho

Thanks for helping me out with this. It's much appreciated.

The crashes were reported to happen when "coc"-ing to the testinghall or hawkhaven "after" the initial configuration menu was passed. Which is quite logical, because until you configured your dragon race there will be no tokens or anything actually working.

First I was thinking what a nonsense it was to have this happen even when you're not playing as a dragon yourself... but then I remembered why it was actually done. You can have draconic NPCs with my plugin without being one yourself! I totally forgot about that aspect already.

My custom skeleton is coming along nicely.
The legs and feet are now naturally-digitigrade, all joints at their respective proper locations, and I don't even have to adapt any leg clothing/armor anymore.
The tail will be straightened out downwards for rigging, so it won't look as bad as it does now when bending down too much, and elongated to make it the agile multi-purpose tool it is for Drake and his kind.
The only thing causing me headaches is the elongated-neck idea. The Upperbody mesh, clothing and armor items are actually partially rigged to the "head" bone, and because I have to move this one to the end of the new neck-bone-chain, it will heavily distort everything worn in the process, when I go too far away with it. I might even have to scrap this idea completely due to this annoyance... what's the point in making adapted leg items no longer required when at the same time I'd make all non-adapted chest items useless??
I also thought about leaving that bone where it is and adding further ones onto it till up to the new head bone... but it seems most parts of the head (eyes, mouth, tongue, teeth, etc.) are in no visual way connected to the head bone, so it must be hardcoded, and thus I can't change it to use a different bone.
Headaches, headaches, headaches... all I want is to make the neck a little longer and bendable... but all I get are headaches again... :banghead: <-- should stop doing that, maybe it'll hurt less then, silly dragon.

edit: This time it didn't even tell me I was logged out... it just didn't finish loading after I clicked "post"... they definitely need to work on this.

there partly rigged to the head?

hmmmmm
would it be possible to just attach the body parts to the rest of the equiptment? or is that just a stupid idea?

and it is saying that i'm out of synch with the server 2/3 times.... i aggree drake, they need to fix this

damn, sorry to hear about the Drake, sadly i cant think of a work around either.

still, good luck

Did anybody try "coc"-ing to the testinghall or hawkhaven, after configuring the dragon races but not "being" a dragon, and received a crash to desktop yet?

I don't really know what "attach the body parts to the rest of the equipment" means in this case, but I'm not even thinking about messing with meshes while I still have to mess with the skeleton first. :shrug:

this whole new skeleton, would it remove the dependency of the dragon race on the robert body?

Edit- might want to think about starting a new thread drake, it's getting close to 200

Sure. I'm always keeping an eye on the post count when it's getting close to the maximum. But as long as I get thread #200 to post the link to the new one, there's no need to hurry. And my threads have never been that active anyways. But thanks for helping me keep it in mind.

As for your question, I fail to see how it possibly could do that. Skeletons never created such dependencies on body mods to begin with, so they neither can remove them.
It's my meshes like the feet, claws, wings, blades, spikes, tail, etc. (all created from Robert's base meshes) which is making the other body meshes required to be fitting to Robert's meshes as well. This and the textures I created being Robert's Male full-body maps. For the females it is of course the same, TFF is the base of all meshes.

All the whole new skeleton idea actually achieves for me is a yet more custom shaped unique body, stand-alone animations no longer clashing with any existing ones in your folders, and almost 100% freedom of choice in my design decisions.
Oh and don't let us forget they will actually "move" like my dragons and not like some petty humans which just look like wearing dragon "costumes" all the time. :whistling:

To remove these dependencies I need to add in full support for other bodies, which means everything I ever created or will create for this race has to be done twice, thrice, 4 times, 5 times, I don't know how many times in succession, each time with/for a different body.
Quite honestly that's nothing I'll even consider while I don't even have something complete so far for 1 single set of bodies to begin with.

Oh and just to get this right, what's a cause for not wanting this dependency in the first place? Using Vanilla Male bodies, the only alternative to Robert's Male? Due to me using the hand texture slot for the sophisticated wing-membrane textures doing mesh and texture support for Vanilla will be a real pain. I'm simply running out of texture slots, because Vanilla needs them ALL for itself, none left for me. :shakehead:

Sorry for not responding sooner. I did indeed test the coc crash and it didn't happen to me. I was a different race when I had the dragon mod loaded and nothing happened.

I'm back again !

I'm going to re-install my Oblivion, your mod will be in my LO for sure .
Tell me if there is anything I can do for you.

Then welcome back!

Well, you could update your adapted NIF files to fit in with the latest state of my meshes found on TES Nexus... but given the fact that the new skeleton won't require that many adapted files anymore and when still, then they'll have to be adapted to different meshes not yet created, I'm not sure if this is really a needed task anymore. It would be only for usage with the pre-beta release... and I don't know if this is worth the effort.
However, it might very well take a while until I'm able to take up modding full-scale again, still need to buy this damn new pc of mine first, and when there's one thing I really hate, then it's letting people wait!

When I'm finally done with the basics there'll be more than enough to do... the most concerning matter would be this damn savegame-bloating by the non-cleaning-up string_vars in my current release... and I still have to figure out why none of the few testers who dared attempting the step-by-step manual upgrade instructions I've given ended up with working scripts... there must be a really silly and unobvious mistake hiding somewhere deep inside these new scripts I posted... I can't wait to finally track it down! They're so comprehensive, so "complete"... damn, just why are they so non-functioning?! :banghead:

edit: only 1 more post! Leave the 200th to me please. :angel:

I ve got a question...
You are going to create modified skeleton so armors are going to deform itself, right ?
So what about feet, do we need to adapt meshes for every boots in game ?

@EDIT

200th post is for you

Well, mostly they will be deformed by the skeleton, at least the leg items won't need actual adaptations anymore.
However, this is not the case for the feet. No skeleton in the world can deform a boot for human feet to magically fit dragon feet out of nowhere.
There will still be adaptations necessary, many of them actually... they just won't be that many anymore.

If I find a way to change NPCs' skeletons on the fly without knowing all of them by name, I will even attempt taking over this approach for Argonians, maybe Khajiit. Just imagine proper Morrowind'ish beast skeletons in Oblivion... even when they first won't be able to wear boots unless there are adapted ones... :rolleyes:

And here's the 6th thread already... I just wish there would be as much progress in the project as in the discussion threads...

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?showtopic=1085068