Better Third Person Selection - BTPS

Introduction

Ever since Skyrim was first released, I was annoyed with its 3rd person mode. As somebody who loves 3rd person RPGs most out of every game genre, It's underwhelming to say the least.

Now with the advent of mods like True Directional Movement and SmoothCam, 3rd person is finally starting to be fully playable and enjoyable. But in my quest to play Skyrim without ever going into first person again, I still noticed one glaring issue: selecting objects from 3rd person can be incredibly annoying - the smaller the object, the more annoying it gets.

The game's crosshair selection was developed with first person gameplay in mind, and in 3rd person it just feels clunky and annoying.

What does it do exactly?

With Better Third Person Selection, selecting objects works more like in true 3rd person RPGs. Instead of aiming directly at an object, you just have to aim in the general direction of it and BTPS will choose an object for you. It then seamlessly ties the result back into the native game code to ensure maximum compatibility with other mods.

This makes it much easier to select small objects, such as gold coins in dark environments, or arrows in high grass. It's also a lot easier to use with a controller.

Skyrim has tons of clutter that can be picked up by the player. Most third person RPGs avoid this, because it makes it more difficult to precisely pick up the objects you want.

With BTPS I had to come up with a few things to improve this; obviously I can't just remove all the clutter items. Alongside camera angle and distance, here are a few more factors BTPS uses to determine the selection target, all of which are fully configurable in the MCM:

• []Object Type: misc items are focused less likely

  []Object Value: depending on the gold value of an item, selection is favored

• Native Selection: this can be used to favor whatever object the native game's selection came up with. In case BTPS fails with a specific item, it will still take into account what the base game came up with - this way you don't end up with things that just can't be interacted with for whatever reason. If you raise this to the maximum, BTPS will always select what's under the crosshair, if present.

  Another thing to improve precision is the ability to cycle between all objects in range, using (default:) shift + mousewheel. This will cycle between objects based on their priority determined by the selection algorithm. Basically, if you press sh