Progress Update: an unexspected discovery

(keep that image in mind. it will come back later)

After trying (for way too long) to get a cruxified Ragdoll too look somewhat natural, i gave up on the Havoc constraints for this particular device and started looking for an alternative.

The Problem with Ragdolls is, that you cannot lock or manipulate the rotation of attachpoints, which will always result in a somewhat twisted looking body and misaligned nails. This Fallout mod illustrates the problem quite well: https://www.loverslab.com/files/file/4902-crx-add-on-dead-restraints/ 

And although it doesn't look nearly as bad in my version, its still a far cry from the visual quality of an animation. therefore, i resorted to trickery. by disabling the actorAI and setting the invulnerable Flag, the victim on the cross can be frozen and the healt bar disabled, making it s behavior identical to that of a corpse. the "Search" option you normally have for bodies is recreated with a hidden Perk.

This Pseudo-Death state is far easier to maintain on GameLoad and Cell-reloads, and the transition from alive to "Death" is absolutely seamless, if the player should happen to witness it. when a "corpse" is removed from a cross via the interaction, the Actor is discreetly truly killed.

Did extensive testing over the last 2 days (and probably nights, dunno didn't open the shutters over the weekend) And it finally seems to work reliably. whats left to do is some timing function to automatically kill actors off after an adjustable time, and to come up with some options for pc-as-victim scenarios. Although i feel like this part of deadly Furnitures is more about decorating hills with jezus-cRosplayers (see what i did there? :D ). for the PC, i still have to fall back on the Havoc constraints, since a pseudo death doesn't make much sense here, but Fortunately, the PC-Ragdoll for some reasons behaves smoother than the NPC-Ragdolls, so the visual end Result is acceptable here.

But wait, there's more.

Take a look at the attached image. After removing a pseudo dead actor from a cross, he should just fall to the Ground and be actually killed by the script. Instead, my dear Silmeria here just got right back up. While i was thinking that the kill-command hadn't worked and was gawking at the code on my other screen, a Guard walked up to her and made that comment. The attentive skyrim player knows that this is a observe-corpse comment, so i naturally was a bit confused. Upon closer inspection, it turned out the the "talk" prompt was replaced by the native "search" prompt, which you would have on an actual corpse. Papyrus and console functions also confirmed, that this actor, who was just standing in front of me, happily playing the normal idle, was in fact DEAD. truly dead!

which in short means: I accidentally discovered a way to kill an actor without breaking the animation. something i hadn't thought to be possible until now.

I did some more digging, and managed to find a reproducible way of having an actual dead actor locked in its furniture, while stile playing the associated looping animation (or a frozen still version of that animation). Since this state will not survive game- or cell reloads, its not of much use for the cruxes, but will hopefully be an asset for later devices, which don't need to have their victims persistent. Given some further testing, of course.

And finally, the actual interesting part for those not interested in technicalities:

playable version for the Beta-Tester tier will likely be available at the end of the week.