Since CuteUnit brought up the whole subject of rideable creatures, I decided to take a look at what I could figure out about skyrim's implementation.

Most of this was playing with console commands, namely setrace and tc.

Here are my findings so far.

Merely being a horse does not make one rideable - I've changed other creatures and character's races to horserace and the ride command is not available. On the other hand, changing a horse that is already rideable to another creature keeps the ride-command available, and it works...to an extent. The player has control over the creature and follows its camera, though it does move with it. Rather, the player floats in place. It seems like rideability may be something that is set per-instance in the CK (or possibly that the rideability flag does not get flipped when using setrace).

Certain races will disable certain interactions - you can't 'talk' with a character that has been changed into a horse, but you can talk with a character that has been changed into a dog! Fascinating stuff.

I'm pretty sure creature riding works something like this:
1. An instance of the creature is marked as rideable in the creation kit.
2. When the player choses the 'ride' interaction with this creature, they play a riding animation (followed by a riding idle), and try to root themselves to a specifically named node in the creature's skeleton (this is how it worked in oblivion). Failing it find it, they just hover in place.
3. After parenting to the horse, an internal version of the command "tc" is run on both the player and the horse. This switches the player to being AI driven (where they do absolutely nothing), and the horse to be driven by player commands.
Choosing to interact again while on the horse reverses this order of events so the player can dismount.

What I find *really* interesting is if you can convince a character or creature to go into the combat stance, and then take over with 'tc', you can make them attack! If we end up with a way of convincing the creature we are riding to enter and stay in combat stance, mounted combat will be possible.


Sorry if this is a little illegible, it's kind of a brain dump.

Oh my God war mammoth here I come! Or getting Lydia to carry me everywhere.

I believe the rideability issue is a little more complicated than that. Namely, you can't necessarily make non-horse animals rideable because their skeleton (or mesh) isn't designed to "seat" your character correctly.

To make new rideable animals, you will likely need to update the various meshes for the animals to create an appropriate saddle point.

I agree that is exactly what is needed (just as it was in oblivion). I might as well just open up the horse file and see what the bone is.

Suddenly I want a character 1/8 (maybe) the size of a human and a rideable ferret.

...yeah, that was easy.

I am now riding a goat.

Open horse/character assets/skeleton.nif in nifskope.
You are looking for NiNode 98: SaddleBone

In the hierarchy it is:

NPC Root->Horse_COM->HorseSpine1->HorseSpine2->SaddleBone

Right click SaddleBone, copy and paste that branch into the creature of your choice. (Make sure to rename the pasted branch back to SaddleBone in the new file!)

At the moment, you have to take an existing rideable horse and set its race to the creature you changed - but low and behold you can ride it and stay on board.

I want to sit on the shoulder of a dwemer centurion.

Well this is interesting.

I attempted to make a rideable thalmor. The problem being - as soon as you mount the thalmor, they also assume the horse-riding stance. It appears that when entering 'riding' mode the rideable creature tries to use a certain set of animations that may be different than normal (or maybe quadraqeds in skyrim use slightly different animations to begin with). The rider tries to mirror these animations. The horses movement animations correspond to the rider's poses for things like sprinting, backing up, etc. If you get the thalmor out of riding pose (by jumping), then the rider starts copying the non-riding animations while still attached to the saddle bone. It looks hilarious and wrong.

Pictures please!

I'd love to ride sabrecat, mammoth and of course a dragon.

Now only if there was a dragon riding animation...

Want screenshots.

How about a ridable bunny?

Oh for the love of rideable goats, pics please!! I LOLed when I read your comment. xD

There are your screenshots, people

http://steamcommunity.com/id/yarharhar/screenshot/594704695999177169/?

Lydia: I am sworn to carry your burdens... but this is a bit excessive.

Screenshots that are not black on black so black you can't see the black would be a lot funnier.

So where is the goat? You seem to be riding thin air?

The Horse Riding animations are defined as part of the Character Actor(player/npc's) they are no longer part of the creatures animations -> which means we can only ever have one set of riding animations.

What about special anims? Think it would be possible to force something?

lol i think this thread is borderline on beastiality with all the talk of mounting animals


and mounting the Thalmor? Well they kinda deserve it

Game doesn't seem to use an IdleManager any longer as all of the Idle anims are defined within the Character.hkx file and conditioned within the Behavior.hkx file's so the old IdleManager would no longer be required -> also none of the idle anims make an appearance in Skyrim.esm -> also the IDLE subrecord does not seem to exist any longer.

So basically unless we decode these two files we are not going to be adding any new animations or weapon types or anything really -> we would be just left with replacers ~shiver boring!.

I tried race changing a horse to a rabbit and then mounting it, but the horse turned invisible, and when I mounted it, I could only move the camera sideways... lol It was like I had a freefly camera that could only go kittycorner of my current direction.

The dragons have an ride mount animation ....

I installed NifSkope but I don't even know what file to open. Something in the data folder I guess?

You need to extract your bsa. Should be info on uesp/wiki regarding that.