DAR -package development

[poporaltemporal]

I have handful of dar packages and my animations are bloating over 20000 and packages run over each other. DAR is getting sluggish on the game side. I get stall pose before it really fires up. Added to that some packages even they contain good animations there are some that are bad or simply out of place.

Are there any easy ways to:
1) preview animations
2) write / check conditions

3) I would like to do DAR package for high heels. Walk, run, idles. Any ideas which is the best way to check in dar if character is wearing high heels?

4) I know there are many mood / expression mods. But is there anyway actually check character mood outside those mods in dar?

[s3ngine]

Greetings,

 

perhaps I can be of assistance:

 

1)

Just recently, I discovered this: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/86254/

Its a small tool (outside the game) which allows you to preview .hkx (animation) files and play them using a scrollbar. Easy to setup (you merely need to copy your body meshes and textures into the right directory, so the tool may show a proper actor, it's all in the description) and very handy to look through big collections of animations.

A word of caution: The root folder of the tool contains a folder "tmp" which fills up pretty fast when viewing animations. I had a couple hundreds of MB in there after going through a list of .hkx files. It's safe to delete the contents of the folder when done viewing the animations, tho.

 

2)

You mean conditions in DAR? As for writing, you should check the Nexus page for DAR, from what I remember, there should be a basic explanation of the available condition functions. Additionally, you may check how other DAR mods do it. As for checking conditions, I am not sure what you mean. As in, which conditions may conflict or overlap?

 

3)

That depends on the particular high heel mod. I don't think there is a common keyword or identifier for most high heel mods (someone correct me on this, please). What I did: I created a patch, using TES5Edit, which added a custom keyword to every high heel boot and then I checked for that keyword in DAR. Do let me know if you need more input on this topic, as I already did that for my setup, and it is fairly easy, too.

 

4) As far as I know, mood/expression mods create the moods in the first place, there is no "mood variable" in Skyrim per se. Outside of dialogue expressions that is, but those moods are strictly tied to the Topic Info records, I believe.

 

Hope I could help.

Regards, s3ngine

 

[poporaltemporal]

4 hours ago, s3ngine said:

Greetings,

 

perhaps I can be of assistance:

 

1)

Just recently, I discovered this: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/86254/

Its a small tool (outside the game) which allows you to preview .hkx (animation) files and play them using a scrollbar. Easy to setup (you merely need to copy your body meshes and textures into the right directory, so the tool may show a proper actor, it's all in the description) and very handy to look through big collections of animations.

A word of caution: The root folder of the tool contains a folder "tmp" which fills up pretty fast when viewing animations. I had a couple hundreds of MB in there after going through a list of .hkx files. It's safe to delete the contents of the folder when done viewing the animations, tho.

 

Hey, briefly tested it. Skyrim SE version rendered rough avatar but animations did not render correctly. Not sure if its related to that the tool comes with its own skeleton that do not have all bones or what is causing it. Its kind of shame as this looks pretty much what I was looking for.

 

4 hours ago, s3ngine said:

2)

You mean conditions in DAR? As for writing, you should check the Nexus page for DAR, from what I remember, there should be a basic explanation of the available condition functions. Additionally, you may check how other DAR mods do it. As for checking conditions, I am not sure what you mean. As in, which conditions may conflict or overlap?

Yeah, conditions for DAR. Have not looked the docs yet myself just thought that it is kind of pain in the but to look for the ids and write them in the text files then debug if you did typo or so
 

4 hours ago, s3ngine said:

3)

That depends on the particular high heel mod. I don't think there is a common keyword or identifier for most high heel mods (someone correct me on this, please). What I did: I created a patch, using TES5Edit, which added a custom keyword to every high heel boot and then I checked for that keyword in DAR. Do let me know if you need more input on this topic, as I already did that for my setup, and it is fairly easy, too.

Because the mods add heel sounds and for example racemenu high heels and lazy heels detect heel level somehow there must be a way to detect the heels some other way than making your own way. Either you figure out what racemenu hh or lazyheels does or you ask in dar if actor is running racemenu hh magiceffect etc...
 

4 hours ago, s3ngine said:

4) As far as I know, mood/expression mods create the moods in the first place, there is no "mood variable" in Skyrim per se. Outside of dialogue expressions that is, but those moods are strictly tied to the Topic Info records, I believe.

Ah bullocks. Then if you wanted to link such data to animations you would have to query expression mods for mood seeds.

 

4 hours ago, s3ngine said:

Hope I could help.

Regards, s3ngine

 

You did thanks!

[poporaltemporal]

Wow, if there is good preview tool for hkx files it seems to be under a rock.

[moody132]

Havoc Content Tool lets you preview HKX, but it isnt good.

 

 

This fucking punching bag cannot be removed, or i have no clue how to, so technicly you can preview them, but in reality you cannot see most of it

It is version 2010 x32, this is important. That is, for LE. SE need propably different version.

[s3ngine]

Greetings again,

 

glad I could give you a few pointers.

 

13 hours ago, poporaltemporal said:

Hey, briefly tested it. Skyrim SE version rendered rough avatar but animations did not render correctly. Not sure if its related to that the tool comes with its own skeleton that do not have all bones or what is causing it. Its kind of shame as this looks pretty much what I was looking for.

 

You mention it rendered a rough avatar. Did you copy the needed meshes and textures to the appropriate folder? I just looked at the Nexus page for the SE version (using LE myself) and found that it does not mentioned that you have to do this, unlike the LE version. Either the tool for SE does not require it anymore, or they forgot to mention it in the description..?

 

13 hours ago, poporaltemporal said:

Yeah, conditions for DAR. Have not looked the docs yet myself just thought that it is kind of pain in the but to look for the ids and write them in the text files then debug if you did typo or so

 

I'm afraid it is just like you said, better watch out for typos

 

13 hours ago, poporaltemporal said:

Because the mods add heel sounds and for example racemenu high heels and lazy heels detect heel level somehow there must be a way to detect the heels some other way than making your own way. Either you figure out what racemenu hh or lazyheels does or you ask in dar if actor is running racemenu hh magiceffect etc...

 

Indeed, there are some things worth considering.

-) Heel sounds are added by altering the footstep set of the boot, which is located in the armature record. I don't know of a condition function in DAR which allows to check for footstep sets, tho this information may very well be outdated (again, LE user).

-) I am unfamiliar with lazy heels. From what I could gather, it's a dll mod for SE. Again, hard to say if it exposes any information that may be read by DAR.

-) HDT Highheels uses, from what I remember, a magic effect to achieve it's goal, and checking for an active magic effect is definitely possible in DAR

-) racemenu high heels produce their effect via altering a specific node through NiOverride at runtime by reading a specific set of data from the mesh itself. I don't think DAR has the option to read from NiOverride data.

 

Regards, s3ngine

 

[poporaltemporal]

45 minutes ago, s3ngine said:

You mention it rendered a rough avatar. Did you copy the needed meshes and textures to the appropriate folder? I just looked at the Nexus page for the SE version (using LE myself) and found that it does not mentioned that you have to do this, unlike the LE version. Either the tool for SE does not require it anymore, or they forgot to mention it in the description..?

 

Didn't copy anything into the tool. SE version has skeleton and textures preplaced. You probably could copy your own there. Directory structure seems to be similar to skyrim data but the skeleton resides on the base of the data folder. Textures and meshes are in their corresponding folders. Tool creator might have had idea to integrate it to read data directly from skyrims data folder.