So i'm interested in adding some visual as well as audible effects to a certain creature's walking animation.

I've edited the impact data for its footsteps to include decals, hazards and the like, but no dice. When it moves, i can hear the sounds, but no visual effects are generated.

Thinking i may have messed up the impact itself somehow, though i double-checked, i then changed the footsteps' impact sets to point to an already present impact like MAGFlamesImpactLL01.

I load the game, no luck. I can hear the flames' fwoom, but nothing visual happens.

I also applied my custom impact data to a spell and cast it, sure enough it worked as intended - i heard the creature's footsteps and saw the decals.


Is the engine just unable to generate visual effects for footstep impacts, or am i doing something wrong?

No thoughts on this? I just want to know if it's even possible to do, or if there's some hardcoded limitation on footsteps+impact data. Any other way it could be implemented if not? like perhaps a perk running a spell on the actor or something?

I experimented with this -very- briefly, and had results identical to yours: I could not get non-player actors to use footstep/impact data. I know certain actors, like mammoths, have animations like camera shaking in annotations inside their Havok animations, where they essentially can't be touched by modders. I also know that that some effects, like the dragon landing impactset, are supposed to leave footprints and do, when used as a magic effect, but I have never seen a dragon actually leave footprints during normal gameplay.

Perhaps impactdatasets/footsteps are bugged for NPCs?

Bear in mind this what I gleaned from maybe a half hour of experimentation, so it should not be taken as gospel by any means. It's entirely possible I was doing something wrong.

check thread for that issue in Mod Section

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1336303-req-footprints-in-the-snow/page__st__120__p__21411690__hl__footprint__fromsearch__1#entry21411690

... seems that there will be a beta release soon ...