Scripting Tutorial: Modify Weapon On Equip

Modify Weapon On Equip

This article covers modifying a weapon when equipped. After searching many websites including this one I decided to write an article on what I learned about onEquip and OBSE 18. onEquip has its own challenges for what it can run and OBSE works great when applied properly. Lets get to it.

The scope of what I was trying to accomplish was: equip a weapon, have the weapon modify itself and become enchanted conditionally, and to not need a user action to make this happen other than equip.

Because I am a novice Oblivion scripter I went for the first solution. Run everything from the onEquip function attached to the object's script. Wrong! I spent a lot of time trying various things only to get strange results or simply it didn't work. At one point I found I could create a cloneform of the base form of an object, but when enchanting inside the onEquip function it would enchant base forms and clone forms alike. Not what I wanted to say the least. So once I realized the folly was putting everything in the onEquip call it was time to look outside the event.

The next step I took was trying to get onEquip to "Cast" an enchantment that did exactly what I wanted. However, like before I ran into it just won't work from onEquip syndrome. The next thing I tried was adding an object to the players inventory (a ring) that had the spell. This created a whole bunch of issues and still didn't work. I even tried calling EquipItem2 but that crashed Oblivion. What to do...

Finally I figured it out. Don't try to do much of anything inside onEquip! Don't daisy chain calls, spells, etc. Set a flag and let another script service the flag/event. What would be able to do that? A quest script can. So, here is some basic code to show you what I mean.

Part 1: OnEquip Method

OnEquip method for object script sets event flag in quest.

begin OnEquip Player
 Set WOLEvents.EvEquipWOL to 1 ; Set event flag
end

Part 2: Event Flag

Event flag detected in quest.

if (EvEquipWOL) ; Detecting event flag
 PrintC "Cloning weapon"
 set Weapon to Player.GetEquippedObject 16 ; Get the equipped weapon base type.
 Call WOLCloneWeapon Weapon ; OBSE 18 Function call. Reduces code in scripts.
 set EvEquipWOL to 0 ; Event flag reset
endif