Hello there,
I'm currently really fascinated by this idea - replacing the current implementation of certain features with an animation and a progress bar that goes up. Think of it as in the Assassin's Creed games when you loot a body or open a chest - the character does a looping animation with his hands, and meanwhile a progress bar fills up, and when the bar is full you've succeeded. Meanwhile you have to hold the button that starts the action, and if you release it the action gets canceled.

Possible fields where this could be used:

• Looting bodies or containers (inventory screen appears only after 1 second of searching or so, which makes it more difficult to loot during battles or in that one second that the NPC isn't looking)
  
• Lockpicking (Time it takes would be dependent on skill, this way you'd have a realistic real-time implementation that doesn't rely on a chance system and is more exciting because you have to stay hidden the whole time)
  
• Persuasion (instead of the minigame, there could be a sequence where your character and the NPC are seen making gestures and talking about stuff, then Speechcraft determines how much their disposition goes up)

So I would really like to try this. Unfortunately, I have no idea whether looping animations are possible, or if they would have to be simulated somehow. I would also like to know whether progress bars are in any way possible (something like the breath meter while diving, only the other way around, would be ideal).

Edit: I should maybe mention that there would, of course, be more to such a mod than just these two things. In fact, if you really want to replace how a skill works in vanilla with this, then it quickly gets quite complicated. So I'm not looking for someone who tells me what I have to do, and then I release that claiming it was my great idea and stuff; basically, I want to know whether an elegang implementation of the mechanics I'm thinking of is at all possible. For Lockpicking, I already have thought of a nice system that should feel pretty cool, but if I have to do it with ugly non-looping animations then I probably just won't bother.

I don't know a thing about animations, so I cannot help you with that, but can help you with the two others, the bar and the coding that change how looting etc work.

The bar can relatively easily be added using MenuQue. You can edit it in yourself by modifying the HUD xml directly, but that would make it incompatible with any other mod doing the same. But the easiest option by far, is to make my HUD Status Bars a pre-requisite mod, and you get the bar for free by adding 3-4 lines to HSB's ini file. Deadly Reflex does this for its momentum bar.

For the looting, you could disable the activation control whenever a container is in the reticle, and then monitor whether the player holds down the activation key - and while he does so, count down while displaying the momentum bar, and finally simulate a tap of the activation key, or call activate on the container. I do something very similar with doors to player-owned houses in Enhanced Economy if the player hasn't paid taxes (disable the activation key when such a door is in the reticle, and open a menu when the player holds the key down). Doing this would easily make your mod incompatible with EE, but that's nothing that cannot be fixed with OBSE, if you want.

Oh, but that seems to be exactly what I was looking for! Thank you very much for all this information.

I'm looking at your readme and INI file right now, and one thing confuses me: You say Deadly Reflex uses HSB, but there are no lines for it in the INI apparently - does that mean that it overwrites your original INI file when installed? Because that doesn't seem like such a good thing for compatibility :huh:

It's also good to know that EE uses the system I wanted to use... since the lockpicking part of the mod would cause complications in this area, but I guess I can circumvent them if I only enable that feature for locked doors with a lock level smaller than 100.

I guess it can best be answered by copying a part of DR's readme:

So it comes with an ini file for HSB that must either be renamed, or - recommended - where the player can copy the relevant part into the main HSB ini file.


That would avoid any problem regarding doors and EE for sure, since EE only uses this for the unlocked player house doors (thus simulating that they're locked).

Funny you should say that, as I recently (like half an hour ago!) put out the Alpha version of my http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=37519 mod. Which currently has no such animations, but does have a lot of the rest of the mechanics in place. So a solution to this problem would suit us both!

I also thought that maybe alchemy could be brought into game mode, where you put your apparatus on a table, then activate and select ingredients in a similar manner to my persuasion mod, which coincidentally does so though the wonderful http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34905 mod, discussed in this very thread. Incidentally the lockpicking idea has already been done largely as you describe it in http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=17894 mod.