As per usual my unique mix of incompetence, ease-of-distraction and dysfunctional biochemistry kind of knocked me out of modding for a month, but now OBSE v18 is out! So without further ado...
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=31821
Disclaimer: This is dependent upon a function currently in Beta. It may be slightly unreliable.

NPC & Playable creatures provides a tutorial on how to create playable or 'proper' NPC creatures- goblins that can wear clothes, minotaurs you can talk to, that kind of thing. It also includes a couple of examples of the techniques in use, playable/NPC Fire Atronachs, Spider Daedra and Minotaurs, capable of wielding many weapons and some capable of wearing clothes.
Proof, if proof be needed:

In Pictures

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/31821-1-1274532884.jpg

• http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/31821-1-1274489224.jpg
  
• http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/31821-2-1274489224.jpg

In Motion

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtuNTATeVf8&feature=player_embedded
  
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo8Ow2SDXv4
  
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_y5yLKqlZI
  
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aetdDz02yAw

The NPC creatures can be used pretty much straight away in as resources new mods. The Playable versions are fairly basic- they're more proof that the system works than fully-featured mods as there's not much work put into making them unique as races beyond their animations and skeleton, so there's plenty of potential to flesh them out. Not exactly suitable for hardcoe roleplayers, unless you can some up with a reaaaally creative reason for how they managed to arrest a Flame Atronach. The playable creatures also suffer from one or two slight flaws, for example I was too lazy to write a script to counter the graphical glitches when you play a Spider Daedra in first person, although it's certainly possible (I did for the Flame Atronach).

The tutorial is not hugely long, and not particularly difficult; anyone with a decent grasp on nifskope will fairly rapidly start wondering why they never figured it out earlier. Fairly extensive guidelines and template .esps will help pretty much anyone with a bit of modding experience convert most races to become playable, and the process doesn't take more than a couple of hours at most, including time spent getting distracted by the iPlayer, so it'll be faster for anyone not in the UK.

So, if you want to make companions of the existing races, or turn the get-you-by playable races into fully-featured ones, or make new ones, then Playable & NPC Creatures is what you want.

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A vast amount of thanks to XMS, Da Mage, the OBSE and Nifskope crews for exposing the guts behind the process, and making it actually feasible to use.
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Got any questions? Comments? Suggestions? Post in the thread.

ill be the first to say.....*yoink*

Gotta check out what you did to make the CS accept the skeletons, also, I though the skeleton changing function was still flawed?


EDIT: The other day I started working again on my mod to allow custom race meshes with the new NifSE, it will go great with this when done.

Nice

Is this what you do instead of revision?

Er, really? I thought it was out of beta now. I thought it didn't work in first person, but since I only call it during chargen you're in 3rd person all the time.

AliTheLord: Suspending years because of illness- gives you a looot of time to work on stuff.
(I shoulda got a lot more done this year, really)

I remember the biggest thing was that both the third and first person skeletons got set to the same value, which is fine for the creatures, but do you set it back again for the regular races? I can remember that the showracemenu would reset the skeleton path, but did it do it every race change? also, for the palyer it resets on game exit, so you'll need a script in place to put it back to the right value each time the game loads.

EDIT: Also, the player skeleton change function is still in beta, hence why its not in the OBSE documentation yet.

Hear, hear! I can't find NPC Purchasing Power's thread, dammit!

So awesome.

I can't find SetPackageLocation, so it's unfortunately not possible. Trying to get NPCs to refer to placed objects from outside their cell is a bugger and a half, believe me.

da mage: I reset the skeletons for non-creature races, it seems to be working fine like that. There's a script written up and in the example .esps that handles it all. Plus yeah, it gets reset after load. If it's still beta even though the rest of OBSE v18 isn't though, that's kind of a bugger. I'll add a disclaimer it's running off a beta function, but I'm going to have to post the Playable Goblins thread too :/. Ah well.

Im guessing the game might be coming along and 'fixing' the skeleton paths on the regular races. Yeah, it was put in as BETA because it came in very late in the development cycle of v18, but apart from not being able to set the third and first person seleton seperately (which is the only reason I've left it wout of my testing), it works fine.

Very cool mod, now we have can have fallout 3 style dialogue convosation with our 'creature' companions.....

Eh, have to wait till the next OBSE?

Oeh very nice. I wasn't even aware that OBSE had a SetPlayerSkeletonPath function, it's not in the doc.

Now this is excellent. Excellent!

Now its time for me to go looking for that Sload model again....

I wonder if it's possible for their mouths to move according to spoken dialogue.

Yes and no. Yes in that you can take the heads and rig them up as proper morphable things that can move their lips, can be changed with face sliders, etc.
No in that I think only Throttlekitty's actually done it, and I have no hope in hell of managing to.

kyoma: Ah, like Da Mage said- it's currently in Beta. It was supposed to be coming out a bit into v18, but I didn't think to check if it had been.

Well, thank goodness it can be done. I'm sure it will be in time, by someone.

Ah, yes!
You did it!
Wonderful excellent awesomeness!
Think I'll restart a new char with one of these.
Thanks so much.

Incredible, your mods are always top notch.

Utterly, totally, absolutely amazing work!

Well, you know what they say: If you want something done, don't ask scruggsy - Pester him. And kill Baldrick before you start.

Yeah, the command table has this to say - "Added for TalkieToaster. [The command]Will attempt to kill anybody else who attempts to use it".

EDIT: Apparently, it's less of a maniac in v18.6 - The comment's been changed to "undocumented, for testing by 2 or 3 modders".

Isn't TK and Saiden working on something about rigging bones for talking that would support what you modded? I seemed to glanced on a subject somewhere like that but it didn't have much detail nor do I remember where it was. :facepalm:
Good job though Talkie, very nice work.

then why was i not killed XD

Im hoping Scruggs gixes in a v19 beta of OBSE

Really? That's interesting, I haven't been on the forums for a month or so, so I'll have to check it out.
I didn't know they'd rigged SetPlayerSkeleton to self-destruct, either . It's a miracle nobody got hurt.

shadeMe: I don't want to pester Scruggs any more than I already have. Particularly because I pestered him about getting SetPackageTarget for NPC Purchasing Power, and it turned out to not be enough. Plus for the 'change-anims-on-the-fly' project.

I've started building a new quest featuring a Minotaur NPC, and I notice that when you're in dialog the huge head means you're much closer to his face than you would be normally. Is there a way to fix that with a skeleton tweak, or is the camera distance for dialog fixed?

Ah, hadn't considered that. The camera snaps to the bone Neck1- that may have been a default minotaur bone, in which case there's no solution, or it may have been one I had to add and so will just be glued to Neck and can be moved about, rather than in a proper chain of Neck->Neck1->Head.

Fortunately the Minotaur is not using his Neck1 bone for anything else, so I added a translation of x:6, y:20 which points the camera about where the nose ring is. Much improved! Thanks for that detail.

I take it that the Camera "bone" is for the reverse situation - 1st person viewpoint?