It would appear that Bethesda had to hardcode in the new Crossbow tech, as even if Dawnguard is not loaded in the Creation Kit, the Crossbow weapon type appears as an option when creating weapons, and all ammo now has an optional "Bolt" flag. It would appear the only thing missing is the meshes and the condition setup; that is, the animations should still be in the files, but the conditions have not been created for them to actually play, so presumably the weapon type does nothing. The animation events for crossbows are still in the game, and could probably be rigged up under Gameplay->Animations with very little effort if one were to replicate what is in Dawnguard.

Presumably if someone could create their own meshes and rig up the proper animation conditions, then crossbows could work outside of Dawnguard.

Can anyone confirm this? Try to get a dummy crossbow working without Dawnguard, I'd like to see if it's possible to make a crossbow without it if we provide our own models and such. If it works, it'll mean great strides for modders.

Has the CK been updated to account for the new features?

Well, the CK shows "Crossbow" as a valid weapon type and ammo has a "Bolt" check-box, and "crossbowAttack" and "crossbowDwarvenAttack" are valid anim events under Gameplay->Animations, plus there are two new actor values "VampirePerks" and "WerewolfPerks", so I believe it has.

Yes.


The Behavior files may be updated (which is why the events show up in the CK), but the animation HKX files for crossbows are inside the Dawnguard.bsa. So if you want to get crossbows to work without Dawnguard, you'll need custom made animations as well.

Are you sure? Weren't said animations added to the main game files in a patch or something?

If I remember correctly, with 1.6 crossbow files (mesh and texture too) were added to Update.bsa werent they? We were flipping out over that. So technically if that's true you could just make an esp that hooks them to a crossbow item ingame.

Speaking of, how exactly does the game load separate animation .hkx files? There's the idle animations dialog in the CK but that doesn't show how it knows which .hkx files to load.

if a nif uses a loose hkx, the path is defined in the nif itself. for example the nightingale bow has a BSBehaviorGraphExtraData module that points to its own hkx file

No, the Behavior file for crossbows was added in an update, the actual animations exist only in Dawnguard.bsa.