Back in the age of Arena, Daggerfall and Morrowind, weapons had the ability to thrust, slice and chop their way to victory either through janky and confusing mouse movements or the direction your character was moving. This would determine their damage rolls and their reach with each swing and some weapons were more proficient at different attacks than others. For example spears would do more damage with thrusting attacks and you could stay at a distance and axes would be better at chopping, doing a lot of damage but requiring you to stand still.

This mod doesn't do any of that. But what it CAN do is use the power of DAR/OAR and dTry's Key Utils to at least let you have different animations and pretend like they make a difference.

The main file is just a bunch of blank folders with conditions set. They are meant to be filled with animations of your choice but if you would like something a bit more plug and play, the optional file includes animations from Animated Armoury and CFPAO. Though they only work for first person at the moment and some animations might be a bit janky as they were made with other weapon types in mind, so expect things like hands gripping the blade of a greatsword.

These animations are also only for the player character, as enemy AI was not built with these animations in mind and so they would instead sporadically go from stabbing, to slicing, back to stabbing, to chopping, etc. with no rhyme or reason

Installation
Install as you would any other mod through your mod manager.

However for those that decide to manually choose your animations you will want to drag and drop animation files that have attack in their name like "1hm_attackleft.hkx", the power attack animation corresponding to the direction like "1hm_attackpowerfwd.hkx" and the recoil animations like "1hm_recoilleft.hkx"

If you want to use battleaxe/warhammer animations for greatsword or the other way around, you will need to change the W in the files name to an M and vise versa. For example if you want "2hw_attackleft.hkx" to work for a greatsword you will need to change it to "2hm_attackleft.hkx"

Compatibility
Being that these are just DAR folders they should be compatible with other animation mods as they will either overwrite or be overwritten by other mods with lower or higher numbers. Though depending on what animations you have there might be some strange transitions between attacks and idles, sadly this is impossible to avoid when you're mixing and matching different animations and would only be avoidable by having custom made animations that are built to transition between each attack. perhaps someone more talented than me could do that? wink wink

I have not tested how this works with MCO, but being that it locks your movement it probably doesn't work very well. If you want something similar for MCO then I would recommend trying Stances

After experimenting compatibility with MCO, this mod actually has an unintended side effect that is really cool. If you put different MCO movesets in my directional folders you can chain different combos on the fly! So that's cool. Still do try out Stances if you want to as that is also a great mod with a cool addon as well.

For those of you using True Directional Movement you will probably want to go into its MCM and in the Directional Leaning tab change "Directional Movement (Drawn)" from Directional to Vanilla Style.

(Potential) Future Plans
This mod is more so meant as a framework and proof of concept so I'm not sure how far I'll take this project but depending on how many people actually like this as well as my own interest in taking this further I might try and take a shot at doing more with this. This is literally my first ever mod, which is something I've never thought I'd be saying, so my experience with all of this is severely limited.

However I would like to at least provide support for mods that add in new weapon types like Animated Armoury and potentially find some fitting third person animations in the future for the most part, done with the exception of one handed "chop" animations. When that will happen entirely relies on my own ability to hyper fixate on this project... and my attention span is akin to Tigger from Winnie the Pooh on at least 5 shots of espresso.

Credits
This mod wouldn't have been possible without these absolutely amazing people:
Felisky384 for Dynamic Animation Replacer
Ershin for Open Animation Replacer
dTry for dTry's Key Utils
PolarRobotFrog for Comprehensive First Person Animation Overhaul
NickaNak for Animated Armoury
ShoryukenBruh for FPCAO
KyrgyzGuitarist for KG Animations - Two-handers
and finally Vektile for showing me that this mod is actually possible to make
All of you deserve the finest cookies