Bear Trap Improvement [WIP Progress Report]

 

I recently stumbled upon the fact that there has been no proper improvement for the traps in Skyrim. They are apparently less than mediocre since there is no further interaction except for incoming damage from their hitbox and camera shaking effect. It's so dull and no fun at all. I want them to be more deadly and fun. So I am giving it a shot. Here goes nothing they say, right?

 

But There are few things I need to figure out before I make any progress. There might be reasons no one gave it a try. I made 3 steps to see whether my plan is feasible.

 

1. Is it possible to replace animation?

 

 

I expected it to be plain and clear. I created animation for replacement to see if it was going to work. The quick answer is it worked. Yes, it's possible. But it's kind of expected.

 "Confirmed"😆

Let's move on to the next step.

2. Is it possible to edit Behavior.hkx?

 

Maybe you are not much familiar with Behavior. Simply put, it's about how it excutes events, animation and when to play animation. This whole process is called "Behavior Graph". You can see some of certain nif files are linked to it.

It means this nif follows the behavior flow from the one linked to it.

At any rate, this question matters because what I am aiming for is to give some changes to Skyrim's dull trap mechanism. I don't only want to add new animation and its sequence to it but also add new triggers(events).

Fortunately, once I converted behavior.hkx to xml form, it seemed it wouldn't be hard to add animations. From what I understand "character.hkx" seems to handle animation list.

There are only two animations for beartraps. Open and Close. I need 2 additional animation so I added them. Thankfully, it proved to be easy.

But the real problem hasn't started yet. Editing Behavior.hkx seem a real pain in the neck. It looked almost impossible to edit it in notepad++. Lucky for me, there is a useful tool that I can make use of. Thank you whoever made the tool.

From a glance, it appeared it excutes in 4 steps.

Open(Standby) -> Close(Motion Play) -> Close(Standby) -> Open(Motion Play)

Animations do not play by own themselves. They have to be in specific categories. In the categories, animations are controlled by certain trigger commands and events(Behavior Graph) which decide how to operate, when to play them in the game. Is this animation "Loop" or "One Time"? Is it supposed to be in sequence? All theses need to be placed in a right timing and place. Behavior graph deals with these kind of tasks.

Although there are only two animation, the sequence consists of 4 steps. I intend to add more chains to it and add the animation below.

 Bear trap is supposed to be the real bear trap! It has to make a victim to be stuck and trapped. I am not sure it'd work properly though. My biggest concern is the timing with the animation and the script code. Anyway that's probably another story.

It should be like this.

Open(Standby) -> CloseStuck(Motion Play) -> CloseStuck(Standby) -> CloseStuckEnd(Motion Play) -> CloseStuckEnd(Standby) -> Open(Motion Play)

I converted it to hkx form and testes it. Seemingly it worked(I wasn't sure at the time because I didn't edit the code just yet.) So I took it as a success. Let's head to the next step.

3. Is it possible to make a new whole addition instead of modification.

I has been known that you are not able to add a new animation set. FNIS does not support it. But this is nothing like adding a new race that use independent behavior routes. It's just one trap we are talking about.

I simply copied the whole beartrap set and pasted it. And... it worked! It is so simple as it is. Actually there was one thing that concerned me. Some of you might know that Skyrim organizes all the animation set and shoved it into one txt file "animationdatasinglefile". But it seems like it's not related to this matter. How lucky for me!

So the answer will be "Yes"😁

 

It almost feels like I set sail to unknown territory. Everything is uncertain. Anything can go haywire. But I think it's gonna be worth it. Maybe I can make something of erotrap.

I will let you know once I make any meaningful progress.