I'm Eckss.
I'm one of Hothtrooper44's co-authors on Immersive Weapons and the Author of Guard Dialogue Overhaul. I'm the one that's responsible for adding what Hoth was kind enough to call, 'all that sexiness' to the upcoming Immersive Armors v7.

I thought I'd write this article to let people know what's coming in v7, now that testing has begun on the project.

My goals while working on Hoth's pride and joy were:

• Take as much of the workload as I could from Hoth so he could concentrate on the Artistic side of things, which I know is what you all actually want.
• Test potential new Armors & Identify issues that need to be sorted out before inclusion.
• Incorporate new Armors seamlessly with those already in v6.
• Rescale Armor Stats to provide Armor options for every play-style from the beginning to the end of a character's career.
• Overhaul and Standardise Crafting Recipes.
• Expand the distribution of Armors in the game so that more NPCs can use more of the Armors.
• Make the Armors available to buy from vendors.
• Look into making Immersive Armors the best Mod I can.
  

Adding MECR Classic Nord Shields presented a particular problem as the sheer number of variations available (Eg Over 80 different Nord Target Shields) would make the forging menu vast. So I chose 1 of each type to be the 1 that can be crafted and put a Shield Painting Rack up at the Skyforge where you can put your Nord Shield and scroll through the variations to choose the design you like. I later added the Bandanas to the same Rack, so that you can change the Bandana color there as well.

Another thing I wanted to do was to make Immersive Armors customisable by users. I decided that the best method was an in-game configuration menu, but no one had done anything like that at the scale that would be required for Immersive Armors, so I kept that secret from users until I knew for sure that I was able to make it work. I didn't want to disappoint anyone if it turned out that Immersive Armors was just too big for this to work. Once I knew it definitely did work, I told Hoth and He announced it in response to user comments.

The usual way to add Armors to NPCs is to edit the NPC records to add them directly. This causes compatibility issues with other Mods that edit the same NPC.

The usual way to add Armors to Bandits and other generic NPCs is to use leveled lists, which is why people need to make a merged patch for themselves if they use more than 1 Mod that affects the same type of thing.

I worked out how to do all this in a different way that means absolutely No NPC edits and only Minimal list edits.

In the menu, you will be able to decide, for Individual Armor sets, whether they will be Distributed throughout the world (At appropriate levels), whether they will be able to be Crafted at the forge (Once appropriate perks are obtained) and, for sets that come with options, which option you will use in your game (Eg Whether a particular Mage Robe is Heavy Armor, Light Armor or Unarmored). I have also added some general settings like whether Armors are available to buy or not and whether Guards get varied Helmets or not.

Once a setting is changed, it has an immediate effect in the world (Once the configuration finishes - it takes about 1 minute on my machine). It will not affect Armors that have already been added, but it will affect all new spawns and you can keep your Forge Menu as neat and tidy as you like.

I hope this gives people an idea of what we have coming in Immersive Armors v7 and I hope you'll understand why we didn't mention the configuration options before we were sure that they'd work.

At the time of writing, Immersive Armors v7 is in testing and will be released as soon as we are happy with it.