I have been doing a lot of work on the http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=8734
I have decided to make MW weapons sheatable including all of the http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=6589 and http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=6650 ( both of which will be updated also ).

http://www.fliggerty.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=3530

This will make all of the armors compatible with all of the weapons and they will sheath.

Now,...What I am thinking about doing is taking the left and right pauldrons and combining them to dual pauldrons. They would "equip" to the right clavicle, but show both the right and left.
Leaving the left clavicle open for weapons and quivers. Set as armor but not adding any armor stats since it is not defensive in nature.

By making the pauldrons into one piece, I get around one of the major problems with the whole idea of this mod. When the script runs to add the weapon, if the pauldrons are enchanted you hear the sound each time the enchantment kicks in again.
So every time you draw and sheath your weapon you hear the sound. But, by combining the pauldrons the left clavicle, it will have no enchantment on it. SO, no sounds.

This is the best way I can figure out to make as many sets of armor and weapons compatible as possible and reduce the number of meshes it take to accomplish this.
This would also require me to double all of the stats for the pauldrons and edit some stock enchantments so as no to lose effects.
No pauldrons would be "lost" in the game. Left pauldrons will become dual and right pauldrons will become dual. There will be no difference to them except in the CS.
I will also make new ground meshes and icons for them.

So anybody have any opinions?

I think it{s gonna be great!!... Have a question.

Have you considered the possibility to add HG-12 Better Armor and Weapons to this proyect now that BA and BW are finished?? couse it{ld be cool to have those armors with quivers and sheated weapons and bows/cross!!. Also Bahamut{s donwgraded Mod Armors for Oblivion...(Just to know if you think to add these)

Anyway it{s gonna be awesome!!

I think this is a great idea! I would definately sacrifice the option of having single pauldrons for weapon sheathes. Would there actually be sheath models to go with the weapons? Also, would npcs be walking round with weapon sheathes too?

Sounds interesting, but how will it interact with the Bows and Quivers mod? Would it be possible to use them together, or will you have to combine the two mods into one?

@ Bloog - Most of HH-12's stuff is already in the armor. I haven't added the weapons yet but plan to.
Downloaded the OB stuff and plan to get permission to add them also.

@ Von Djangos - I only have a few sheath models. I would love to have more. Phijama and a few others made sheaths foe their weapon. I pan to add them in.
The only stock MW sheath I have is for the Dwemer claymore by Snakebitten. I can re-texture it for the other claymores and resize it for a few if the other weapons but...after a while it will become a bit "overused".
For the most part the weapons will just be placed in the sheathed position like many other game already do.

@ Helena - I hope to figure out how to make the NPC's equip their weapons. As of now they don't. I'm hoping that add in some sort of force equip into the script will make them do it. Without making them draw the weapon. I'll talk to Fliggerty about it.

It will not be compatible with OBS bows & Quivers. But it will do everything that it does as this is the same idea, just pushed over a cliff and followed.

BTW - @ Helena - I've added in my own version of complete armor joints into the Helluva armor completion. All armors are done including the armor that get completed by the project. It has underwent a big revision. I've gotten rid of several pieces of armor that I really just never liked. I also ditched most of the female pauldron changes in favor of jut re-sizing the larger clavicle pieces.
A 0.15 reduction in size.
http://yfrog.com/2ffemclavcompj

I don't use the HELLUVA mod, but if you make a sheathable weapons version for just the base game, I may use it. Otherwise I'll probably just stick with OBS B&Q.

I don't see making just a stock MW version as a problem. It would just be a base/stripped version. Although it would require a compatibility esp.

I notice that you made a MCA incorporation for HELLUVA wicked weapons. Do you intend to do this for the latest release of MCA? Also it would be awesome if you were to do so for HELLUVA armors and books as well. Having the items only show up in bandit caves and the like seems rather finite compared to the many items added by your mods.

http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=7062&id=7652 made that and I haven't seen him around that much recently.

hmmm... that's too bad.

This still needs to be done though. I wonder how difficult it would be to do this myself? Is it terribly difficult to add things to MCA? I must know :read:.

Fliggerty is a bit busy at the moment. He will be back.
http://www.fliggerty.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3665

Fliggerty's mod just alters the MCA levelled item lists to add the weapons from HELLUVA Wicked Weapons. That's a pretty straightforward thing to do.

I think that, if someone is using "OB_Style Auto Quivers And Bows.esp" any MCA NPCs wearing vanilla armour will also have a quiver, the sheathing part of the script works on the player and I can't off the top of my head think of an easy way to alter it so it'd work with any NPC (as you need to specify the NPC's ID in the script, I think).

For HELLUVA Awesome Armour I think that female MCA NPCs will automatically get the female cuirasses (from the completion set) but anything else would need to be added to the appropriate item levelled lists.

How this mod could be added, I dunno, it's not finished yet

For more examples look on PES for some of Marbred's mods, whilst they're for earlier versions of MCA (primarily 4.* but a couple for 5.*) the idea is the same: add the new items to appropriate levelled lists.
:celebration:

And the mod sounds cool too, Sandman101! :thumbsup:

Thanks Dragon32!
This is my problem right now. I would love for it to effect all NPC's. For the bows, each one takes several scripts to make it work. It won't be as bad with the rest of the weapons because they don't have quivers to swap out.
Some sort of global perhaps?

Hey Sandman,

It looks like you and I have hit the same problem of the limited no. of equipment slots. I've thought up some mods that deal with the problem of equipment just disappearing into thin air when it's not in use. It's very (very) early stages right now. I'm currently getting close to beta release the first mod that places the player's shield on the player's back when they either draw a two-handed weapon (ever wondered where your shield went?), and/or unequip the shield ( so long as it remains in inventory ) - eg. the player has started using a torch in a dark dungeon, or they're wandering around town and want to roleplay not carrying in hand a 20lb 5ft chunk of steel to go shopping or whatever.

The approach I've taken has been to use a global script that watches the players actions then adds, equips and removes the slung shield as necessary, using pieces of armour to display the slung shield. The pros of a global is that I don't need to attach a script to any existing equipment in the game, which is great for savegame compatibility. However, this approach means that I can only really handle the stock equipment and the equipment slot used by my mod MUST be kept clear by the player. ( Funnily enough I've just added a little script for compatibility with the awesome OBSQB that prevents the shield from getting slung unless the left pauldron slot is unarmoured. )

I've sketched out a solution to this free slot problem - very similar to yours - which works on paper. It's purist friendly, but would be a LOT of work on scripting. First off you limit yourself to combining only stock equipment, and only combine a pair of items that have the same mesh. I guess that means sitting down and creating an ESP with about 200 new items with both L & R body parts with double the stats, including variations for the various stock enchanted versions. And then, and this is the cool bit, you allow the player to permanently combine two pieces of matching armour in game using scripting and message boxes. Here's the rough flow, this would need to be a big bunch of branching scripts:

1. Player drops misc item, ring, whatever with script attached onto paper doll.
2. Message box asks what piece of currently equipped armour they want to use as a base: L Gauntlet, R Gauntlet, L Pauldron, R Pauldron?
3. Let's say player selects L Gauntlet, use a script to discover what L Gauntlet they are currently wearing.
( At this point branch to a script specifically for that piece. )
4. Check for a matching piece in the player's inventory.
5. If they have more than one type, eg a Horny Fist gauntlet and a standard netch gauntlet, ask them what they would like to use.
6. Warn the player this is permanent AND they will lose any custom enchantments on both items.
7. Remove both individual items from the player's inventory, then add and equip the new combined armour piece.

I would be a HUGE scripting effort to achieve this but there's some major advantages: Apart from the ring there's no local scripts involved so no savegame problems and mod conflicts are reduced. That combined piece of armour would then be a permanent addition to the player's inventory leaving the opposite armour slot free for the scripts adding sheathed weapons etc. They've not cheated as they already had both pieces to begin with so it keeps purists happy, and because the item doesn't need switching out all the time they can add custom enchantments with no problem.

I'd be interested to know what people think.

EDIT: Typos.

Well it sounds great.
Good to see you tackled the shields. That was on my to do list also.

I get the concept of your idea and I like it, but if it only works with stock Morrowind, it won't do me a lot of good for the Helluva series or any other mod added armor.
I would love to see sheathing accomplished with globals and not have scripts on the armor. The scripts Fliggerty wrote for OBSQB are only on the armor and not the weapon.

Question though. If they decide to use, say the gauntlets for an extra slot, all of the meshes will have to be made to make it work for that body part. So essentially every weapon would have to have 2 meshes one for ?wrist and clavicle. I guess the clavicle just makes more sense to me for weapons.
Are you using the wrist slot for the shields?
I've stayed away from the wrist slot because then you run into more compatibility issues because of clothing. Gloves and gauntlets occupy the same body slot and can't be worn at the same time. Hence more issues.

You are right though, the limited # of body slots causes issues. If a good solution could be found that would free up a clavicle and a wrist slot, it would definitely help the community continue to make great items.
But in my opinion it needs to be mod friendly.

Are there any functions in MWSE that could help? Possibly xHasItemEquipped or xEquip?

It just seems the simplest solution is to make the pauldrons into sets(dual) . The Helluva mods will be set up so that if you don't want the sheathing weapons, you will still have dual pauldrons and therefore, an open body slot for any mod to use with any included armor. What I an thinking about right now is making all of the left and right pauldrons into dual sets assigning the type as right pauldrons in the cs and doubling the stats. Except on the
original left pauldrons. They would have a zero value. Characters may have 2 pauldron sets but only one would be in use and only one would be worth anything although they would offer the exact same protection. That would help with the balance side of things.

Your dead right that the simplest thing to do is just double up the mesh, by far the simplest and cleanest way to do that is in the NIF files themselves, then just edit the ARs, weight and so forth to double them. The only problem there is it requires the slightest knowledge of working with 3D objects, which puts it out of my reach.
( I got the meshes for the slung shields from here: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1731 )

The way of doing it I was going is to take advantage of the fact that armor an armor piece can be made of multiple body parts, and the body parts don't have to be in the same location on the body as the equipment slot they use. So if you create, eg. a right gauntlet which has both the right and left body parts it looks like two gauntlets, but only uses one slot. This is a fudge through, especially regard pauldrons as the obvious place to attach items is the player's shoulders. So the problem is that if a double set of pauldrons is equipped on the right and a weapon, bag, whatever is equipped that's visible the left clavicle, the left clavicle piece of the armour disappears. However, it is just the pauldrons that need new doubled meshes, as nothing covers the hands or wrists apart from a robe.

I don't use MWSE, but I don't think the extended functions can fix this limitation, as it seems hard and fast rules in the engine that no scripting functions can overcome. In theory MCP can as it edits the executable directly, but I suspect the patch would be complex and possibly even break compatibility with the Construction Set! If you do end up creating double pauldrons for the stock armour I would be really, really grateful if you allow other modders to use them, it would be a really great resource.

If I can help your mods out with the scripts I'm writing I'd be more than happy to share them so you can have them adjusted to work with your mods. Once the logic is in making them compatible with third party equipment is no harder than adding or changing the references to the object ids. So far I've done an arrow script that knows what type of arrow is equipped and how many are in the player's inventory ( there's no function for counting the no. of arrows equipped, so this was the best option ) and a matching script that swaps out Dongle's quiver meshes with the correct no. of arrows visible as the player runs low. This needs to have bow sheathing added to it yet. I've just cracked the shield swapping script, I'm moving onto the sheathing scripts next. I'll be more than happy to share them with you once I get them functioning.

Sorry for double post. What tag do I use to put in code that only shows when you click on it?

Well, I'm not an expert with meshes by a long shot. I have learned just enough in Nifscope to make me dangerous.
But I think that if you were to make dual meshes (as in right and left) for pauldrons they would not fit on males and females properly nor each race without making a separate mesh for each for each location and race/six.
The engine can recalculate and flip meshes designated in the CS but it can't move a mesh that is a fixed distance apart.

What may be possible though (and I have to test this out), is to combine the pauldron clavicle, upper arm and forearm pieces into one mesh. That would potentially free up 4 slots out of the 6 possible slots a set of pauldrons can use.
[runs off to do some testing] :user:
After a quick look at the meshes, I don't think that will work either. I don't think they will move properly with the animations.

It really appears as it there is no easy solution to this problem and it may just take exactly what I an doing now. To make each and every weapon with their possible armor piece like I did for OBSQB.
I guess then what we have to ask then is what it the least used slot and the most compatible.

Choice 1
12 armor pieces that use the wrist slot ( bracers)
All gauntlets, gloves and shirts would need to be edited to remove their wrist usage. This could potentially cause conflicts with certain mods and would need to be researched(better clothes,etc..)

Choice 2
Pauldrons
Clavicle(pauldron) 22
Forearm 16
Upper Arm 28

Of this location the forearm is uses the least.
This would conflict with any modded armor that uses that slot Complete armor joints. But compatibility would be easy to achieve with in helluva.
Limited testing shows that the sheathed item moves around attached to this point.
Clavicle point doesn't move around.

Choice 3
Neck
10 races
Would need to be made compatible with modded races. But potentially require the least amount of meshes.

BTW - anything I make if free for usage. If I am using anything other than stock meshes and textures, permission's will need to be received from that modder.

Edit - Increasing testing is showing that the neck and the clavicle are the only to real options to attach anything.
The real problem come into the type of armor to use these pieces as.
There are only 11 types of armor and only 7 types of useful clothing types. Of these only the 8 right and left ones are of any use since the sheaths will have to take over one of the types.
No matter how I look at compatibility I keep coming back to the clavicle.

Hmm, I would need to check in the editor later on to answer this question: are there any clothing pieces OR any armour pieces apart from robes that hide the neck? If not then necks look like a viable option worth looking at. For the humanoids you can just say everyone who would use this kind of a mod already has better bodies, point the neck part to the appropriate BB texture and create 16 NIFs from one with minimal editing - that have another bonus of are seamless even if the player uses a BB texture replacer.

Also, and this is a personal preference, the neck part doesn't have the exaggerated breathing motion of the shoulder when the player is stood still. Load Ultimate Sheaths and sheath a claymore to see what I mean, the blade kind of rotates around the shoulder and, well IMHO, it just doesn't look quite right.

The one limitation I can think of is that you've only got one neck part to mess with, but if you take the clothing and armour layers identical neck parts are being added there should be no visual change apparent to the player? I would need to test this to be sure.

Anyways, just some off the top of my head thoughts to see what people think.

Several mods use the neck slot for cape along with some armors (noteably Hedgehog 12's) and such but I agree. The neck may be the direction to go.
I can't find any robes, shirts or cuirasses that block the neck slot.
Scripting wise it might even be easier to do race checks for equipping.
The neck only has one bone. There fore it can only handle one item. Where as the chest has 2 one for clothing and one for armor. So you can't do a armor and clothing piece at the same time for the neck.
This picture shows how it can be set up and work.
http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/7688/test01n.jpg
The admantium pauldrons are set up as dual to free up the left pauldron type slot.

EDIT: Never mind, Bloke answered my question.

Would it be possible to have shields sheath? Kinda like in the Legend of Zelda games for the N64 and later systems? I've always hated that your shield is always equipped when it's not really necessary.

Looks like me and That Bloke will be teaming up to accomplish an integrated sheathing project that hopefully will encompass weapons and shields!
:foodndrink:

Yup, indeedy. I'm working on global sheathing scripts so we don't have to attach scripts to weapons themselves; this keeps things compatible with save games, and Weapon Rotate. We've all seen the excellent quality of Sandman's meshes in the Oblivion Style Quivers and Bows mod, so I hopeful for a successful project. :tops:

Right now I'm bashing my head into the keyboard trying to tackle The Clavicle Problem that Sandman had to work so hard to overcome in OBSQB. It looks like the slung shield needs to have a clavicle part added, which multiplies the no. of meshes and body parts I need to add by a factor of over 20. :facepalm: However, I've worked out how to add another option to the slinging the shield, which is to have it on the back whenever a weapon is sheathed, so players can choose any combination of:
1. Slinging the shield on the back whenever a weapon isn't drawn.
2. Having the shield slung whenever a two handed weapon is drawn ( this doesn't work for fists though, because of a bug in the GetWeaponDrawn function in the engine)
3. Having the last equipped shield on the back when unequipped, so long as it's still in inventory.

At the moment though things are only compatible with the stock equipment, but I'm look at making it easy(ish) to extend.

One thing I want to ask people's option on. I can avoid using any extra equipment slots by using the shield slot for the slung shield, instead of eg. the pauldron. The downside here is that when the shield is slung you'll loose the armor rating of the shield whenever a two-handed weapon is drawn, which doesn't happen in the default game. I mean, this seems more realistic to me - after all how can you expect protection from a shield you're not actually able to hold? But it will add a slight disadvantage in combat, which some people may not like. Thoughts anyone?

My current issue is the neck. 20 meshes is a lot to deal with for each weapon. If there is a actual sheath then it's 40. I'm trying to figure out some sort of universal neck. That would cut them meshes down to 1 per weapon and if there is a actual sheath 2.
I've been playing with the Chuzi "neck" off of the helm. but no success yet.
Another issue I've discovered is that when using the neck, beast races don't show the sheath unless you do it as clothing not armor. :banghead:
With Westly's help I have located BB neck's Checking them out now.

I like this approach - a shield should be employed properly between you and incoming attacks to warrant any sort of AR. The default game implementation is just another kind of exploit. <_<