I may need to add some of this to the read me file:
I am not entirely happy with the critical hit system yet and I am still tweaking it on each revision of the mod I release. But in general it should work most of the time with known exceptions (see below). It does in all my tests anyway.
Keep in mind the critical hit areas are not easy, they are in general the size of a softball except for the lower leg critical hits and the head. However concerning headshots the game will not allow you to shoot an arrow INTO the head unless the arrow will kill the target in the last one shot (not including the critical hit itself).
Put another way, if your arrow is not "about" to kill your target, the game MOVES your arrow from the head down into the torso or arms. I discovered this running frame by frame tests and was shocked to see the arrows JUMP from the head level down to the chest UNLESS that arrow will be the final blow that kills the target based on the arrows base damage (not including after the hit damage modifiers).
So critical hit head shots are extremely difficult to land as the target must be near death already OR you use very high damage setting making bow and arrow shots likely to kill such as my default setting of 7 or higher.
I am working on trying to find a way around this hard coded absurdity in the game. I do not know why the DEV did this except that maybe they did not want NPC running around with a bunch of arrows stuck in the actors head.
In my Fortress of Fear quest mod I have special Zombies that will die if you hit them in the head with any arrow shot. I do this by lowering the zombies health a moment before the arrow is about to hit the head of the zombie. I may utilize that idea to my Combat Archery mod as well in a future rev of the mod. But that has some drawbacks as well.
So the throat, solar plexus crotch and lower legs are really the only practical critical targets at this time.
Also, the script that detects and calculates the critical hits is on a token in the NPC inventory. So if you did something to the NPC to make them “not move” you may have also effected their ability to process the script.
Critical hits only work on NPC (with the male type skeleton, note that this "male skeleton" is also used by women). They are calculated using the race scale and the editor scale of the NPC and the bounding box dimensions. So any mod that affects these 4 items could potentially adversely affect the script.
Also if you are firing “point blank” this will interfere with the script because you will not give the script enough time to detect the arrow and do the calculations. Point blank shot arrows will sometimes not even enter the game world. They will go from your inventory to the target without “flying thru the air". They need to be in the air for a few dozen frames for the critical hit system to work.
Just play the mod (no funny business with forcing the actors to stand still) and see if eventually in normal play you get the critical hits. The easiest to get are the legs (must hit below the knees).
The game doesn't seem to be processing critical hits. I have tested this against non moving targets at point blank range. No flash, no actor comment, and no increased damage.
» Wed Mar 30, 2011 2:29 am 
Is it possible for these 2 mods to be used side by side? 
