G'day,

A few people have asked about a starting a general thread for discussing mods I've developed. In the past I've just let discussion about them happen where it happens... but sometimes the discussion gets a bit too detailed and probably starts to look like thread-hijacking. I'll still follow up on discussion threads wherever they happen, but if you feel you have a question about my mods that is too specific to clutter up another thread with, feel free to ask here. For the record, my mods are;

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=12801 - This is my personal collection of OMODs I have created for mods that don't have omods or omod data available. I find OBMM's OMODS to be the easiest way to distribute, install, and manage mods. However many excellent mods are not distributed as OMODs or with omod conversion data. After spending hours of reading mod installation instructions and creating omods, I figured others could benefit from my efforts.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=13879 - This mod changes leveling and attribute advances to be more realistic and provide better game play. Level and attributes will increase naturally as your skills improve, without the need to micromanage them or worry about what skills to use to optimise your advancement.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=10925 - Tweaks all fatigue/encumbrance/movement settings to be more realistic and provide better gameplay. Adds immersive blur/pant fatigue warnings. Adds to all actors fatigue drains for health/encumbrance, fatigue burns for standing/walking/climbing, fatigue/movement based chance of stagger/trip, and NPC/creature panting/grunting. Includes repair fatigue utility.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=21424 - Adds immersive indicators for low health and disease. Adds blur and tunnel-vision-fade low health warnings. Adds blur and peripheral-vision-colors disease warnings. Adds slow fatigue and health burns for disease.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=10901 - This is a modification for Elderscrolls:Oblivion that removes the ability to run backwards continuously. It allows you to quickly dodge backwards for a step, then forces you to walk.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=21661 - This is a modification for Elderscrolls:Oblivion that makes most sacks in the game carryable. Crouch and activate to look at the contents, stand and activate to take the sack. Sacks can be put into other sacks. All Items except for items within other sacks weigh half as much when carried in a sack.

I've transferred my post here from delte's threads. I've edited the post as well as it didn't make much sense initially as I posted in a hurry before checking what I'd written. Thanks for opening this thread too Abo.

I just posted my reply on the other thread cut-n-pasted here;

Note that each time you make a clean save without Realistic Health installed you "reset" the diseaseStart time, so it will take another diseaseTime/3 hours to get to 1/4 intensity. When you activate the test disease in the config, it will still take the required time for the disease effects to build intensity. If you want to see what full intensity is like when you already have a disease you can force the disease start time to 0 by typing this at the console;

set aaRealisticHealth.diseaseStart to 0

Your horse was probably still complaining because its health was not fully recovered... I don't know exactly how/what MMM's wounding does, but if you horse is not at full health, then it will not be at full fatigue.

The horse was at full health, I checked his stats with the tdt command. The horse is also stumbling when I have that setting turned off, so I'm pretty sure it is MMM's effects which I have seen happen in the game prior to using a fatigue mod. I like the fact that the horse takes a while to recover though from such a traumatic event.

With the disease effects I did the clean save when I realized that I was getting no effects from helljoint at all. Then I uncommented the disease test in the ini and left my character waiting for hours with the default ini settings and nothing happened. Then when I came in contact with zombies got Rockjoint and the effects happened on schedule. What I am doing for the time being is sticking with the default settings, If I happen along a disease with no effects I'll keep a record of which it is and post about it. I'll also try the console command

(kuerte likes this.)

abo and ekkalux: i forward ekkalux's query that was posted in my mods thread a few days:
sorry, ekkalux, that i missed your post. i usually try to post a speedy response but i've been a bit busy lately.
abo is the author of RF. he'll be able to help you better.

cheers, guys!

This post was not cut-n-pasted from a different thread. I hope that's OK. :hehe:

I just wanted to say that I've used your Realistic Leveling mod for three or four games now and I really, really like it. I haven't had a single problem running it and it works like a charm. It took a lot to wean me away from my Balor but, by golly, your mod did it.

I also wanted to mention that I've been reading Arwen's mod list recently and her enthusiasm for your mods has convinced me to try Realistic Health and Realistic Fatigue in my next game. I'm slightly concerned that Realistic Fatigue's encumbrance penalties may become frustrating but Arwen is such a saleswoman that I've decided to give it a shot anyway and see for myself. Your settings sound pretty configurable and that's reassuring. Heh, I actually enjoy tweaking mods almost as much as playing them.

So, anyway, I don't have a problem or anything I just wanted to thank you for creating some really nice, well-designed mods. :thumbsup:

Realistic fatigue is good, especially the latest update. You actually get more carrying capacity than vanilla, and fatigue actually means something. It does mean you always have to travel light, so additional 'bags' are required (like horse saddle bags and/or pack guar). Plus carrying lots adds to your strength skills slightly, which I like alot.
Fights become much more fun/epic with you and enemies falling over and tripping and stuff. Fabulous!

Some people have suggested Realistic Health (or rather the OBGE plugin it relies on) can cause stuttering/freezing. See http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=961442. I don't use it so can't comment. Just thought you might like to know Abo (if you don't already).

Big thumbs up for the Omod versions of many other mods too. Nice one man! :goodjob:

Abo-

My handle on tesnexus is soloplayer - I was helping debug Proximity based sneak mod: http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=945852&view=findpost&p=14006361

You stated on nexus: I'm not sure what your asking me to do here???

I'm posting about it here because - well - I like this forum better.

Thanks for making this thread

I had never tried your Realistic Fatigue mod before, saw this thread, thought I'd check it out, and ... Awesome mod! I always hated how you could ride a horse at full gallop for miles and miles and the horse never tires. This mod fixes that and so much more.

I also love the fact that you made it configurable with the .ini file. I have long wanted to tweak the default walking values, so that walking no longer feels like crawling ... Thanks to your .ini file I was able to adjust walking speeds to my liking. Only one small problem though--the sounds speed up too, and instead of sounding like you are taking longer steps, the way you would if you were walking relatively fast, it sounds like you are taking a lot of really small steps, VERY quickly, as if your feet were tied together and you were trying to run that way. I'm guessing this isn't your mod but just the game, but if you know of any way around this little quirk, I'd love to hear it ...

So glad I saw this thread and decided to give Realistic Fatigue a try. Thanks for all your hard work!

Wow... what a flurry of posts... there must have been a lot of pent-up-need for this thread after all

ekkalux: encumbMult is the setting you want... the lower this is, the less effect encumbrance has on fatigue burn. Also encumbDrainGain can be reduced to reduce how much your fatigue is limited by encumbrance. Alternatively you can increase fActorStrengthEncumbranceMult which will increase your carrying capacity, which will reduce your encumbrance and thus reduce your fatigue limit/burn. If you use the OBMM installer it will present options with descriptions that will help and suggest settings. Also remember that making encumbrance easier for yourself will also make it easier for all other actors... reducing the effectiveness of things like burden spells.

Torrello: It is certainly true that shaders add extra load on the graphics card which could cause an FPS hit, and the more shaders you stack on top of each other the more likely you are to hit graphics card limitations that can cause things like crashes. Also, it is possible that things like OBGE might have compatiblity problems with some graphic cards and/or driver combinations. However, the Realistic Health shader is very light weight, and I've not experience any problems or measurable slowdown with it. If you are starting to push your graphics card to its limits with large textures and many complex shaders, then you will eventually have to decide what things you really want and what you are prepared to sacrifice... maybe RH is just not as important as pretty sunsets?

Psymon: thanks heaps for all your debugging help on the Realistic Leveling and Proximity Based Sneak Penalties compatibility problem. You don't really need to do anything... I was just curious if you could see that the sneak penalty was being done by a drain ability... it should show up in the magic menu as a sneak skill drain spell. I'm 99% sure that is the cause, and in the next release of RL I will include a fix... it seems that abilitys can now support drain effects, and RL is not compensating for them. Apparently nGCD also doesn't compensate for them, so there are probably a few mods that don't expect and get tricked by drain abilities.

jamesrh: Sorry, there is nothing I can do about the fast-walking sound. For you to notice you must have bumped the speed up really high...and aren't all the other actors moving around at a fast trot too? Note the RL defaults are calculated so that the peak walking speed is 2.5m/sec which seems pretty reasonable, and gives a top running speed of 10m/sec.

Yes, I did bump it up pretty high. I'd like to set it so that walking is the default mode, instead of running. That's the way I play most other games, which I find to be much more realistic--you walk, and then you sprint for short distances when you need to get away from someone or something. But the default walk speed in Oblivion seems way too slow to me. My guess is that everyone who plays this game uses running by default, since walking is so damn slow ...I didn't actually notice much of a speed increase with the level set by Realistic Fatigue, so I thought I'd crank it up to make sure it was working. Didn't notice other NPCs walking fast, but I'll try again and look for that. Is there a way to adjust the .ini file after the OMOD is created? It seems like the only way to do it is to remove the OMOD and recreate it each time, because once you make the OMOD you can't reach the .ini file anymore ... or at least I couldn't find it in the Oblivion directory ...

Thanks again for your awesome work. Everyone should give this mod a try. They'll see what they've been missing!

The normal way of doing it is to create the OMOD from the raw unmodified download, activate it, and then manually edit the config in Oblivion/Data/RealisticFatigue.ini. However, be warned that each time you deactivate and re-activate the omod the config will be deleted and recreated from the OMOD default. This can be handy if you mess it up... just deactivate and re-activate to go back to a fresh config.

The run speed is also a function of your walkspeed, so if you boost walkspeeds you also boost runspeeds... you can reduce other settings to bring the run-speeds back down to reasonable levels.

Thanks ABO,

I just love the way that Realistic Fatigue is so configurable and organize, but the problem is that sometimes I have a hard time understanding stuff.
Anyway, how's the progress for Carry Sack? And thanks Kuertee for reposting my post

Abo I just thought I'd let you know, I've set the set aaRealisticHealth.diseaseShaderGain to 0 and it's stopped the pulse that happens when a disease is caught even though the effects have not started. I don't know why the disease effects weren't starting before but it seems fine now.

Thanks for your help.

Setting aaRealisticHealth.diseaseShaderGain to 0 will totally turn off the disease shader effect, leaving only the blur and health/fatigue burns. I did some testing and the diseaseShader effect is definitely much more obvious for very dark or very bright scenes, probably too obvious. This is because it includes a radial change to contrast, which shifts dark/light colours towards grey. When the scene is mostly all dark or mostly all white, this looks very obvious even at very low diseaseShaderGain settings. In the next version of RealisticHealth I will try to improve this, probably by reducing or removing the contrast effect and rely on the saturation effect more.

Just a quick heads up... I've just release v1.12 of http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=13879 that correctly handles drain skill/attribute/health ability spells which fixes the compatibility problem with http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=15025. The changelog is;

2009-03-27 v1.12 by Donovan Baarda (abo)
- Add protection against advSkill settings going negative if other mods decrease base skills.
- Add correct handling of drain health/attribute/skill ability spells.
- Change to clear levelup icon in combat only for mode>=2 and force iLevelUpSkillCount = 100.
- Change to always recalculate on loading or when sumStats is cleared even in combat.
- Fix install script OBMM version check to 1.1.2.
- Improve Readme explanation about side effects from other mods using setAV.

Thanks. Realistic Leveling and Realistic Fatigue are among my really, really must have mods. The only downside to a new version is that I have made my own private modifications, and have to go in and do that again.

I have dropped my special version on luck calculation (which you may remember from some months ago), but now I have started to modify how RL calculates Health. It occured to me as my character leveled up that one of the main reasons for the gain becoming less fun for me is that the steadily increasing Health makes the combat less and less dangerous. This is of course not RL's fault, but RL made it easy for me to do something with it.

So what I did, was to add a new setting in your mod (and in the ini file). When this setting is 0, everything works as before. But when this setting is higher than 0, RL will totally bypass any Health calculation, and use the setting's value directly for Health. I now play with this setting on 180, meaning that my base Health is 180 regardless of strength or level. I find this more realistic (I get better at fighting when leveling up, but a good hit with a sword can still kill me), and more fun (not so easy to become 'God' when experienced, and not so easy to become slaughered on the lowest levels).

I guess this change is a bit too specific to include in the official RL, but if you're interested, tell me so and I'll give you the code. It's actually only 3-4 additional lines IIRC.


Anyway, thanks for making those essential mods

Making the retroactive health adjustments optional was a feature that's been on the list but not very strongly requested. If I added this then you could have your own little separate mod that did the health stuff for you. If you really really want this I can add it in the next release.

Note that you might be able to achieve something close to what you want by just changing the health related game settings in the RealisticLeveling.ini config file. Health is calculated using the formulas documented at;

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Health

If you change fStatsHealthLevelMult to 0.0 and bump up fPCBaseHealthMult from 2.0 to 4.0, then your health will always be based only on your endurance, and have nothing to do with your level. This would change heath as you go from level 1->50 from ranging ~80->550, to ranging ~160->400. This is not quite the ~260->380 range your approach has, but it's a bit closer.

Not a big deal either way. I do my personal changes to RL in five minutes and don't have to add another mod into the calculation. But it depends on what you mean by making the retroactive health adjustments optional. If you could do so that the mod either calculates it as now, or set it to a specific value ini (0-x) value, then it would fit my needs exactly, and I would of course love that feature.

Thanks, but I know of all this already, and it doesn't fit what I want. I wasn't clear in my previous post, but in addition to setting the health calculated by RL to 180, I also set fPCBaseHealthMult to 0.0, thus having completely static healt at 180.

In other words, I don't want my levl 50 char to have 400, nor 550 health - I want it to have to still be alert in combat with its measly 180 health. It will be a master blocker and swordman, but still nothing close to invulnerable.

attributes-based and skills-based damage modifiers: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=23062
should address this issue.
(sorry for plugging my wares in your thread, abo. feel free to do same in mine. )

Abo the problem I had before with the sleep to level up message doesn't happen any more, I've updated to 1.12 and its working well.

I've figured out why my last update to http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=13879 didn't totally fix the levelup problems caused by "Proximity Based Sneak Penalties". That mod applies a drain 100 sneak ability, but Oblivion limits the drain intensity so that getBaseAV sneak is only reduced to 0. When RL iterates through abilities it sees the 100 sneak drain and doesn't know that it was limited. So say your getBaseAV sneak is normally 40, after the drain ability it is reduced to 0, for a total drain of only 40. RL iterates through the abilities and sees a 100 drain ability, so modifies your starting racial sneak of 5 to 5-100=-95. When it sees your baseAV sneak is 0, it sees this as advance of 0 - -95 = 95, which is much higher than the correct 40-5=35 and thus triggers level advances.

The bad news is, large ability drains that are truncated like this make it impossible to figure out how many skill advances your have made... when getBaseAV returns 0 and there is a drain of 100 applied, there is no way of knowing if it was drained down from 5 or 95. There may be tricks like applying a fortify of 100 to counter the drain and see what the skill is really at, but that gets ugly and might not work. I can't think of a nice way of dealing with this right now, and am tempted to just declare RL incompatible with mods that do this.

I've left a message on the Proximity Based Sneak Penalties thread explaining this, and maybe DuggeDank will switch to a modAV solution which will fix the problem.

Greetings, I made a post asking this question, but I thought I'd add to this thread instead:

Anyways, I'm just trying to grasp the significance of major skills and how they relate to your Realistic Leveling mod. Is it that they just simply start higher and level up a tad faster? They dont play that huge role in leveling as they did before? So I no longer have to choose MAJOR skills that I plan on NOT using just so I can control my leveling? For example, for my "Mageblade" I can now choose Blade / Block / Armor / Destruction and not worry about leveling too fast by playing my character the way he is designed? (And thus "gimping" myself?) If all skills contribute to leveling, then is there really a point to designing a "class" ? thanks.

Sorry for taking so long to answer... I've answered on the RL comments in detail... but basically you are right; major/minor/specialisation makes less difference with RL, but it does make skills start higher and advance faster. The main point of designing a class is this defines what skills your character is good at, and you can then play it naturally without worrying about "gimping" yourself. Your level/attributes/health will be a function of your skills, and it doesn't matter how you got your skills. Two characters of the same race with different classes that have used/trained their skills to the exact same values will have exactly the same level/attributes/health.

Hi ABO - as you may remember, I'm a fan of your mods, and count this and Realistic Fatigue among my must-have mods

But the recent discussion about differences between nGCD as well as the questions above lead me to think a bit more about this, and made me wish for a new option in RL.

First and foremost, I do like the fact that a Blade skill of 50 counts equally to your Strength regardless of how you achieved your Blade skill, so I don't want RL to become more like nGCD in that regard. But I was thinking that just as some skills are leveled more easily, it would be great if there could be an option in RL that if turned on, made it so that some attributes would level more easily than others. To me, that would be more immersive, as it would retain some differences between races, while still keeping the principle that it doesn't matter why/how you got your skills.

What I'm thinking, is something like this:
1) Calculate a factor for each attribute (except luck). This factor could be (StartAttributeVal * no of attributes / [sum of all startAttribuesValues]). Ex: if your start Strength was 50, your start Intelligense was 30 and the remaining 5 (still not counting luck) were 40, then the calculated StrengthFactor would be 50*7/280=1.25, IntelligenseFactor would be 30*7/280=0.75 and the rest would be 1.0

2) When calculating the attribute increase for each attribute, multiply the increase by its AttributeFactor. This would make some attributes increase naturally faster than others. Ex, with the above factors, Strength would increase 25% faster than other attributes and Intelligense 25% slower.

3) To make this possible to adjust a bit, add a factor modifier (set in the ini), and for each of the above AttributeFactors, calculate AttributeFactor^modifer (set StrengthFactor to Pow StrengthFactor factorModifier).
A factorModifier below 1 would reduce the differences, while one above 1 would increase them. EX: If factorModifier is 0.5, Strength would only increase a bit less than 12% faster.


I'm aware that I'm suggesting quite a lot here, and maybe even something you're not at all interested in. But this is something I would like, and I think it would fit quite well in with the rest of RL. So I would appreciate if you could indicate whether you think this was a good or a bad idea. If you don't like it, then I would probably implement it in a private version. If you happen to like it but don't have the time, I would be happy to have a go at doing it and send it to you for review.