My mod team has gotten permission to use some armor models that make the wearer look like a robot.

I want to create an actor or creature that uses the default human skeleton (characters/_male/skeleton.nif but has these pieces on it so it appears to be a robot.


Two major things I need to accomplish:

1. It must NOT have blood splats when being damaged.

2. It must NOT be able to be blown into gibs. Ever. Because they would appear as the original critter's bodyparts, and that's unacceptable.


Can anyone help me figure this out?

Basically I want it to just evaporate or fall over when it dies...maybe followed by a small explosion which makes it vanish.

One other thing I need to figure out is how to make an actor hold a book in his hand...open or shut, doesnt matter.

I figured it would have to be a melee weapon, but I have no idea how to turn a book model into a club...

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

to make a book model into a club would be easy, just add a NiStringExtraData node and fill in the Sting and Name field Prn and Weapon. And then basically it's a weapon.

Then make a weapon entry for it in the GECK. The only issue is positioning it in object space so that whatever animation set it to use doesn't look stupid. Mines are something that might hold it correctly. Though the attack anim... anyway I would just slap it as a melee weapon for the moment and go from there.

To change the blood splatter effect is done in the race menu, there is a tab for it iirc. So to start with create a new race and see about the blood effect..I think you might be able to make the splatter robot sparks if you'd like.
add the armor, make it non playable.. add that to a NPC of the new race.

gibbing might have a parameter in the race as well. but for starters you can probably just remove all the dismember partitions from the armor nif and then nothing can ever be dismembered.

sorry, been months since I looked at a GECK, and that would have been for F3 to boot. But give some leads.

Is it the robot_nv mod? That is cool, and I plan to use it also. For #1, I have done this using the NPC window, on the "blood" tab. Uncheck "blood spray" and "blood decal", and select "impact material type" of metal.

For #2, I would also like this solution. I have read that the Bloody Mess perk makes this worse, so if anybody knows a solution for both, that would be great. It may be possible to look at some other robot creatures, but I highly suspect gibs are linked to the creaturetype. NPCs do not have creaturetypes.

Already mentioned its a tab within the Base Actors data.



Actually Blood Impact has never existed as part of race data for any of the games using this CS -> Morrowind, Oblivion or FO3/FONV, for MW and OB only Living Impact was ever required and it exists within the individual actors data, and Gibs for FO3/FONV both exist as Body Part Data under the Actor Data tab -> NPC's are HardCoded to use the DefaultBodyPartData and there is no way to alter this behavior.



Copy/Paste all of the Animations you want to use into a new directory and make the actor into a creature as that is the only way to get access to which BPD gets assigned for Dismemberment.



Destruction Data works for actors, think of Eyebots they explode into nothing that is because the Destruction Data disables the base ref and pops a few bits of debris when they die.

I copied the needed skeleton and animations into a my mods directory, which unfortunately means making the mod larger than i wanted, but I dont see any other way.

Then I simply assigned the robot parts to the skeleton and bam...it works...and since they are humaniform style robot frames, all the animations work.

Now I need to know..can I delete those files now that they are assigned, or will they HAVE to accompany the mod? Is there any way to point the model list to the meshes.bsa that comes with the game instead?

The other thing I need to know is, how can I get it to use the protectron OR liberty prime head laser? (I will adjust damage down, obviously).

So, there is no way to make an NPC without gibs? The only solution is to make a creature?

Is there any difference between what a creature can be modded to do, and what an NPC can be modded to do? In other words if I make my NPC into a creature, is there any capability I lose? I assume there must be, or else geck would not treat them as two separate categories.

If you made the Directory Identical to the normal path then yes you can delete the files except for the Robot Meshes.

If your Directory is original then no, those files need to be included for the game to find them.



That is a bit more of an issue because -> None of the Character Animations support firing a weapon from the head visually nor do the weapon entries themselves support this -> you will have to alter at the very least the weapon entry so its embedded weapon points to a node on the character skeleton.



You can disable Gibs for all NPC's or turn this one special case into a creature.



There are a few but none that will be overtly noticeable as an enemy actor.

Having issues getting my bots to use weapons.

I set them to raider combat style

I set them to NVALLWEAPONS

I gave them recharger rifles...is that the problem?

all they do is punch things

We are working on similar things. See http://www.thenexusforums.com/index.php?/topic/286349-npcs-dont-use-the-weapons-theyre-given. Set the combat style to "ranged only".