Idle Stagger and Recoil

Idle Stagger and Recoil

Staggering, the bane of Oblivion players, is caused by a melee hit or arrow strong enough to make the actor flinch, becoming defenseless for a few precious seconds until he regains his composture. Among the ways to prevent this nuisance is investing more into Agility to reduce the chance of staggering, or... simply having no weapon out. A rough explanation: the way the animation selector works, is that it needs an animation suitably named for the actor's current animgroup in its skeleton folder before it decides to play anything at all. In the case of staggering and human NPCs, you'll see there's an animation for staggering when holding a one handed weapon (onehandstagger.kf), a two handed weapon (twohandstagger.kf), a staff (staffstagger.kf), when holding no weapon (handtohandstagger.kf), and even when swimming (swimstagger.kf), but all these are named so that they can only play when the weapon is out, or at least if the actor is swimming. So what happens when there's no weapon out and the actor is in a regular idle, is that no stagger animation can play. Only an animation named stagger.kf can be played in this circumstance, which would also be the default one that the animation selector would choose if there's no specialized stagger file. But there's no such file in the NPCs' skeleton folder. For creatures, this varies, since some do have a plain stagger.kf file in their model folder while others only have a handtohandstagger.kf or such, which means those also can't play a stagger animation when not being readied for combat. A similar thing happens with recoiling. It requires a recoil.kf file, which is also lacking where stagger.kf does. But this is less serious since under normal circumstances, recoiling only occurs when an actor's hit is blocked, it requires a drawn weapon per design. However, I've added plain recoil.kf files where needed so that the PlayGroup Recoil command can work on idle actors as well.

The meat of it

In this package I've provided three (four) things: []Plain stagger.kf and/or recoil.kf files renamed from any handtohandstagger.kf and handtohandrecoil.kf found in creatures' model folders which lack such a file. This fixes vanilla and SI creatures, and any mod added creatures that use the same folder as those for their models. []A pair of creatures had handtohandblock animation files, but due to what seems like an engine bug, creatures cannot block at all unless they also have plain blockidle.kf and blockhit.kf files. I've given these to the clannfear and Jyggalag, renamed from their handtohand ones. The xivilai suffers from the same problem, but because it only has twohandblock files, these don't look sensical when they wield no weapon, so unfortunately I can't fix it in the same way