Paired Animation Improvements

This is a small plugin that I made after learning about issues with paired animations work in Skyrim - namely the fact that adding animation events as annotations inside animation files doesn't seem to work.

The plugin in itself doesn't really do anything new - it simply enables animations to do some things they couldn't before.

Technical information for those interested:

After reverse engineering quite a lot and figuring out how it all works, it turned out that the annotations are in fact being read by the game - but the game expects a prefix (NPC or 2_), so it knows which event is supposed to play on which actor. Fair enough... except events with prefixes are actually supposed to be included in behavior as well. So events like the dummy PIE event from Payload Interpreter would not work, even with a proper prefix (NPCPIE/2_PIE), because the event with the prefix does not exist in the behavior graph.

The whole thing seems unnecessary as the game does in fact convert the prefixed events to the non-prefixed ones anyway. The prefixed ones just had to exist to be recognized.

The plugin simplifies all that by removing the need for the prefixed events to exist in behavior graphs. It strips the prefix right away while it's being read.

The plugin, as a sort of a side effect, also stops the synchronized clip bindings from being pre-created when the behavior graph is loaded by the game, reverting to an actually fully implemented (and unused?) vanilla feature that creates a binding on demand. This frees up a few hundred animation slots that can now be used by animation replacers.

• []Animation events included as annotations in paired animations are now recognized by the game

  []Synchronized clip bindings are no longer pre-created by the game on launch, taking up valuable space that could be used by animation replacers.

  It's okay if you don't have any idea what that means :) The plugin is just going to enable animators to do some things they couldn't before.

  • []SKSE

    []Address Library for SKSE Plugins

    Use your mod manager of choice.

    • []Should be compatible with any non-ancient Skyrim version, including 1. 5. 97, 1. 6+ and VR.

      []Incompatible with Open Animation Replacer older than v2. 0. 0.

      []Compatible with Open Animation Replacer v2. 0. 0+.

      []Compatible with Dynamic Animation Replacer...

      ...and all other known mods.

    • Legendary Edition version?

    I'm sorry, but no. Special Edition's engine is much more stable and frameworks like CommonLibSSE allow much easier implementation of a