Morrowind Mod talk:SetAngle

objects not keeping set rotation

I am trying to figure out how to preserve the x, y, and/or z angle orientations for objects I place in the world in-game. I am not using the CS, just console commands.

Most of the time an object I've modified will not appear to have the same rotation when I return to the cell later. I am not 100% sure if I was seeing this just now, but the book that looked wrong I had placed returned value -180 when I input getangle z . Then when I setangle z -180 it fixed it, as in its appearance was now corrected for me even though the value before and after were the same.

I have noticed manually dropping items is the least reliable way of keeping position/angle changes, so what I've learned to do is place one or more gold coins on/near where I want the object then do placeatme "bk_firmament" 1 0 1

If I get the placement wrong the first time (common) I tweak the position of the coin until its floating in just the right spot midair.

Once the coin placement is right, I do placeatme again, and then I do the finishing touches with x, y, and z rotations. I recall one set of values for a recent book I changed was 90, 180, -90 for x y z for example.

At this point I'm satisfied with the placement, I save my game, and continue playing as normal, leaving the cell to go continue my quests.

But then I come back, and the damn book doesn't look right. It seems to be just a single axis that is wonky. And as I wrote previously, it may be that the axis value is correct but the actual rendering of the object is not right.

I also have questions about the examples given in this article. Is there more someone can tell me about the getstartingangle argument? Is there a "setstartingangle" command?

Also, what is fvalue?

Thanks to anyone willing to help me find answers. Chill fridge (talk) 22:21, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

If you're interested in learning more about the various functions available in Morrowind, I highly recommend grabbing a copy of Morrowind Scripting for Dummies, which goes into detail on every function available in the game. There is a long discussion on the SetAngle function, including the fact that SetAngle X/Y doesn't actually appear to have any relation to the X or Y axes of the worldspace (I think it rotates around the local X and Y axes of the object, but it's been a long time since I've messed around with this in Morrowind, so I may be wrong). It also notes that objects rotated with SetAngle don't always seem to save properly, resulting in the positioning errors you're seeing. "fValue" in the article simply denotes that you can use a floating-point variable in place of giving the function an actual value if you have Tribunal (or later) installed (obviously this only works if you're writing a script, not in the console). GetStartingAngle is another scripting function.

You also might want to consider posting questions such as this one on our Discord rather than the wiki, since the wiki talk pages are meant to be used for discussing the editorial content of articles rather than for help questions or general discussion. You're more likely to get a faster response on Discord since most editors on the wiki are mainly concerned with editing the wiki itself. You might also want to consider joining a forum such as AFK Mods or TES Alliance if you're interested in learning more about the inner workings of the game. AFK Mods has a small but relatively active and very knowledgable group (although sign-up can admittedly be a bit of a pain); I don't know about TES Alliance as I haven't poked around on it much myself. Both sites also have extensive tutorial resources which might answer many of your questions.

Hope this helps! — Wolfborn^(Howl) 01:31, 10 July 2023 (UTC)