I have been pondering this little concept since MAO came out (So sad that it's not getting updates... It might have grown into something like this.), but is it possible to create "Smart Animations"? Allow me to elaborate by creating some hypothetical scenarios.

Lets say that "John Smith the Imperial assassin" has just escaped from the sewers and is a VERY low level, and is clunking around with the rather bland Vanilla animations. After getting to lets say, level 25 in Acrobatics, John becomes an apprentice and now utilizes a new jumping animation. No more jumping like an ogre that believes it is a chimp. At the same time though, nothing too fancy. After quite a few more levels, he becomes an expert, and now obtains a flashy jump animation a'la "Amazing Jump".

Jane Doe the Breton fighter (a strange combo I know) has been a fan of one handed blades for some time, and loves the elegant and lightweight nature of rapiers and epees. She decides to wield one but much to her dismay she can for some reason, only swing it around as if it weighed two to three times what it actually does. She decides to train herself in the use of blades and and works to become more agile. After becoming an journeyman in blade and reaching 40-50 in agility, she can now use her lightweight deathstick much more appropriately by being more light on her feet in combat, and using "hit and run" tactics (Princess Stabbity-esque animations anyone?).

I have a few more hypotheticals but let me just right into it. Oblivion basically does this already with the weapon skills by giving you new power attack animations as you gain rank. Is it possible to accomplish the same thing with mods using a slightly different system? Jane Doe would have been swinging her rapiers around like normal longswords for a while but could a script "unlock" a set of animations after flagging her agility and blade skill after they are sufficiently leveled up, as well as checking the weight and reach of her equipped blade? We wouldn't want her to swing that much heavier longsword the same way she can with her rapier after all! A system that unlocks animations after skill, attribute, and equipment checks would eliminate the need for "special anims" and mods that only allow the player to use custom animations, by only allowing APPROPRIATE characters to use them.

Maybe this is just wishful thinking but a mod like this would be EXTREMELY immersive in my opinion. If anything here is unclear please let me know, because if something like this IS possible that would just rock my world.

Not sure about Vanilla Oblivion, but as for a mod in conjunction with OBSE? I can't see why it couldn't be done.

... of course, I'm one of those people who think that OBSE is some kind of mythical program that can do anything you can think of.

I don't see why it couldn't be done since Vanilla does it already. However It might require an overhaul of the game's coding to teach the game to use new methods for "unlocking" animations. If a mod like thise were to ever grace the Oblivion community with it's presence it would be equal in priority with FCOM for me. I watched MAO since it started, hoping that it would grow into this, but as I said in my previous post... It's not getting updates anymore. *sob*

If it is not possible at this time, or if OBSE would need some big updates to pull it off, I'd like to know. I'm constantly looking around for an animation overhaul mod that does this, hoping that one may have slipped under the radar. However, my search has been fruitless, even checking foreign sites have turned up nothing. I don't even see anyone bringing the topic up, it seems that animation is not a very high priority to me. Perhaps I'm mistaken and I have simply not noticed it, but that's just how it seems to me.

idk if its possible or not but man that would be awsome :icecream:

Indeed it would be. I cannot put into words how awesome it would be to have one agile swordsman using a rapier correctly, while also having a paladin using a heavier one handed sword and shield with animations to reflect it. I really hope I'm not just moving against traffic here. It would be great if this could be done.

Yeah this concept can be expanded from just melee power attack animations to just about any action. I like this idea.

Scripting would not be a big deal. If you stay within the standard skill ranges for the different attacks, you wouldn't even need any scripting. Just use the Ob's naming conventions for the names of the animation files (like handtohandskill4attackforwardpower.kf) and the animation name in this file (like attackforwardpower in this example). The Game engine does the rest. If you want to do it more complicated you could activate these animation files by simple OBSE scripts, whenever a specific target is reached. Just a couple of lines.

The problem are the amination files. It's extremely much effort to make reasonably looking animations. And you are talking about many of them.

Yeah, I can see how the animations themselves would be an ardurous task to make. Could a mod like this be made as a medium or possibly a small scale utility then? A way of "plugging in" animations that the user has downloaded so that they could be used appropriately?

Like without any user scripting? How do you define the conditions if you don't know in advance what you get?
And where do you get those "downloads"?

There is not much I have ever heard of. Have you ever looked at Dealy Reflex on Nexus?

considering UV and DRboth add new combat animations, it is indeedvery possible to script innew animations,the hard bit are to makeall the animations.

OBSE adds the ability to toggle animations on and off.

What you'd need to do is once say lvl 25 is reached, toggle off the default jump animation and toggle on the slightly more fancy jump animation, when you reach the next higher level, toggle off the slightly more fancy jump animation and toggle on the even better jump animation, etc.

Shouldn't be too hard to do.

These "downloads" are numerous on Nexus. I have 11 (8 non-DMC and the 3 DMC animation sets) different fighting style animations all from Nexus and all of superb quality. My personal favorite is the KTSN Heavy Blade Stance, I recommend checking it out. KTSN Spear stance is way up there too. These are from Nexus alone, I have no doubt that there are more than this on the net. In any case, existing animations are not scarce; a way of using them in this way IS missing however.




Yeah I have known about Deadly Reflex since I started playing Oblivion on PC about two years ago, as far as I know it overhauls the combat system, smarter combat AI, new moves activated by different button combos and such. That's my understanding anyways, I'll start using it after v6 comes out.


@Breeze

I didn't think it was as "simple" as toggling them on or off when conditions are reached. If it is indeed THAT simple.

I'm not trying to make light of accomplishing something like this, as I do not know the first thing about scripting/coding. But from what I have been hearing, the main issue would be the animations (which are readily available atm). My main point was that if a person already has the animations, would this be a feasible thing to do? From what info I have gathered here, it seems that it is. I hope I'm not the only one here who would make use of such a thing... It would be pointless to do if I am.

When you create a new NPC and go to the animations tab, you can select to enable animations there. For example, if you have the "sixy female walk" animation installed in the correct folders, with the correct animation names and animation groups in the .kf file, then it will replace the walk animation for that specific NPC if enabled. This is what Bethesda did with Sheogorath to allow him to walk with the cane. The OBSE functions do the same thing from script.

Of course, you'll probably need to disable/enable the NPC or use the update3D function to get the change to register and play. But it works something along those lines.

This sounds like I'd have to do this with every NPC that meets the right conditions individually, including ones created by mods. I was hoping to make animations available to any NPC that meets the right conditions, be it a random Dremora, The Grey Fox, or even a normal citizen NPC. Is there a way to have a script apply universally, or would one have to go through every NPC in the game and apply these animations manually? I pray that the latter is not required... That would take an ungodly amount of time. I'll do it if that's the only option but, I was hoping that OBSE would offer other methods.

Should be possible. All you need to do in theory is go through all NPCs in a cell (by using GetFirst/GetNextRef) and check their skill values. Then you toggle the needed animations on/off. Not sure whether the animations will update like they should if the actor is already loaded. It will probably work, but I've never tried.

Unfortunately it's NOT possible at the moment. There is a problem either in Ob or OBSE. You can only activate more than one specialanim for an NPC with OBSE, if this NPC got at least 2 special anims already set in the CS. I don't think there is any vanilla NPC who has this property. If you toggle another special anim, the 1st one will disappear.
I stumbled over exactly this problem a couple weeks ago and have reported it to the OBSE guys. No solution yet.

Meh, I never liked the idea of special anims. So according to what fore says, special anims are out. Good riddance I say, didn't wanna manually add them to each individual NPC anyays. But that still leaves normal animations. Still sounds like a completely feasible thing to do from what I have heard. Especially if someone makes a medium for using existing custom animations. No need to spend a long time making your own. Perhaps I'm just missing the point here, but the more I hear, the more I wonder why someone has not done this by now. It seems that if the "easy" part was the code/script, and the "hard" part was making the animations, why hasn't someone used this method by now since animations are available? Makes me think that it's not as simple as I'm hearing, unless animations are not as popular as weapon/armor, companion, quest, ect mods.

Now you got me confused. When you started this thread you were talking about "John Doe" who is increasing his stats and by that gets better fight animations. That's why i wrote it's easy.
Because you described either the player or a specific (script driven) NPC, not a vanilla NPC. For player and specific NPCs (like companions) scripting animations is easy, for the vanilla NPC it's not. The reason is, that you cannot add a script to the vanilla NPC. So you would need something like a quest script which determines if the player is attacked and then calculates the appropriate fight animations. Is this what you have in mind?

John Doe is a common name for any unknown person (at least in America)... I wasn't refering to an NPC named John Doe, I was referring to any NPC whose stats were an appropriate level. What I was getting at was something like a script that runs in the background and applies itself to an NPC as long as the appropriate flags were detected. Hence why I brought up Vanilla doing this. Any NPC in Vanilla uses new animations for power attacks if they have a higher rank in a particular weapon skill. I was wondering if this was possible to do with a mod and if it was, if it would be a difficult thing to do.

Just wanted to inform that with OBSE 19 Beta 3 it's now possible to add more than one specialanim to ANY NPC using toggleanim. (I tested it with 4 additional anims, but should do many more as well).

So what you have in mind is doable. Changing base attacks or adding power attacks is fairly simple. A little more challanging is the question how you make sure that all possible attackers are toggled before they attack, without putting too much load on the system.

Is it really that simple? I thought you could only replace the Idle that way. If you can swap out any animation... holy hell. A lot can be done with that.

It IS that simple. I'm doing it with different BBB animations (8 walks, 4 walkfast, 1 sneak and 4 idles). With toggleanim you actually don't swap out standard anims, you over-rule them with what you toggle in the specialanim folder. I'm planning to release this as a BBB mod.

I'd be happy just to get something that stops male pc's/npc's from using animations from a female walk mod.

I've always thought this would be cool. It seems strange that the way your character swings his weapons never changes but the amount of damage he does does. I'd love to see animations progress as you get better so a master of blade with a dagger charges into battle whirling it round and making lightning fast stabs and slices.