Hey!

I'm looking for someone to give me a hand with a racial ability script. To be more specific, I'm looking for someone to write it for me.

Here's what I had in mind:

Highlights

While not suffering effective Sun Damage, the character is weakened by it ? more specifically by the amount of light it casts.
She's adapted to darkness and to life beneath the earth. Underground is where she excels and feels most at home.
She has to return beneath the earth on a regular basis or suffer penalties for the prolonged exposure to the sun.

Note:
Throughout the document I'll be referring to "interiors". I'm debating whether it should be all interiors or just caves and dungeons - please keep that in mind and give me suggestions

Ability

While inside (I):

• +20% Agility, Speed, Willpower
  
• +20% Health, Magicka, Fatigue
  
• Nighteye

Note:
Is it possible to detect the amount of ambient light? I'm thinking that there ought to be a way since the AI has to "see" you approaching so it must know that somehow.
A toggle Nighteye would be good.
Alternatively, a You Are Here variant would be the next best thing, with Nighteye in caves and dungeons but not in other interiors.

While outside in darkness (II):

• +10% Agility, Speed, Willpower
  
• +10% Health, Magicka, Fatigue

While outside during daytime with bad weather or underwater with clear weather (III):

• -10% Agility, Speed, Willpower
  
• -10% Health, Magicka, Fatigue

While outside during daytime with clear weather (IV):

• -20% Agility, Speed, Willpower
  
• -20% Health, Magicka, Fatigue

Sun Exposure Dynamics:

• Each game hour in full sunlight adds +3.
  
• Each game hour in partial sunlight (bad weather ? day, surface) adds 2.
  
• Each game hour in no sunlight (night, surface) adds 0.5.
  
• Each game hour inside reduces it by 3.

If Sun Exposure goes above 25 penalties apply as follows:

• -5 to all skills on 25, -5 for every 5 following (30, 35, etc.)
  
• Skills that reach 0 don't decrease further (if that's even possible).

Note:
I don't want to decrease the playability of this race, so I'm not sure if the following should apply. Suggestions?

In (IV):

• -50% Blade, Blunt, Hand to Hand, Marksman
  
• Allow the casting of non hostile spells/effects.
  
• Deny the casting of hostile spells/effects.

In (III):

• -30% Blade, Blunt, Hand to Hand, Marksman
  
• Allow the casting of non hostile spells/effects.
  
• Deny the casting of hostile spells/effects of Journeyman level or higher.

Note:
Alternatively, what do you think about reducing the damage done by the combat skills instead of reducing the combat skills themselves?

-- End of "the following" --

Lesser Power:
In (IV):

• A means of escaping fights.

Note:
I was thinking 5 seconds invisibility but I'm not really happy with that. Suggestions?
Alternatives would be increased running speed and/or jump speed. Athletics and Acrobatics come to mind over speed, but I'll leave that up to you. Some sort of "Slowfall" effect would also be nice.
There are those Game Settings that relate to the min/max walking, running, jumping speed/distance but changing those temporarily would affect all actors, not just the player, right?
I should note that I would prefer a variant that would be suitable for a "underground" type of character ? i.e. not jumping to extreme heights (due to the ceiling limitations), but falling is OK.

In (III):

• A toned down version of the above.

In (II) & (I):

• Not available.

Final Note:
This is probably redundant, but I wanted to mention that I would really like compatibility with the likes of LAME, SM or MagLite. I mention these because I'm not sure how exactly to determine if an effect is hostile for non-vanilla spells.
Additionally, "needs" mods typically alter stats and skills and having more than one mod that plays with those may be tricky.
But then again, I'm just the guy with the idea, not the scripter.

Useful Links:

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Category:Jumping
http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Movement_Game_Settings
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:The_Complete_Damage_Formula
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Magical_Effects

Thanks for reading!

Cheers!

cc

Hey!

Another request - this would go along the rest of them for now.

I propose using the OBGE - more specifically one of the shaders therein. I was thinking the DoF.

It would work like so - when the Sun Exposure is low, the DoF shader is tweaked to low settings. The higher the Exposure value, the more blurry the screen become and the are of "clearness" shrinks. This would effectively change the player experience as well and would further reflect the light sensitivity of the character.

Naturally, this is one I forgot to mention - the character shouldn't be able to sleep outside.

That's two more. Hope someone picks this up *hint* *hint*

Cheers!

cc

As promised, some extended commentary... I'm not going to commit to any extra projects right now as I want to do some fine-tuning on my existing mods, but the good news is, I think I may have already done a very large portion of the work required, and you're free to steal it.


I'm not sure there's any good way to tell the difference. You can determine whether an interior space is owned by someone (see my Roughing It for a code example), and rely on the fact that most buildings are owned and most caves aren't. Alternately or additionally, you can detect ambient light and assume that near-pitch-blackness is a feature of caves, uncommon in houses. Of course, interior/exterior is easy to detect so if you decide not to make the building/cave distinction it's easy. Whatever criteria you decide on, cancelling sleep should be simple: just have a script with a MenuMode block that instantly force-closes the sleep menu (with a message) if conditions aren't met.


Absolutely, and I've got a script for light-based automatic Nighteye on my TRAP Khajiit. That mod also very robust code for dynamically-adjusted abilities and powers... significantly more dynamic than the ones you're asking for here, in fact. I've got formula-generated cloneforms instead of a few specific versions. Yours can be a simple swap-out and avoid all the array handling... or you could use my framework to have a gradient of effects depending on precise lighting conditions. The "sun weakness" and "darkness boost" effects would be separate abilities, but can be controlled by the same script. Note however that the exact technique I used should ONLY be done for the player (you'll find special NPC handling in all those scripts)... if you plan on having NPCs of this race and want them to be similarly dynamic, you'll have to make a few changes. I think the right code to look at for that application is ShadeMe's Vector, though of course you should contact him separately about stealing any of it directly.


Is this primarily for public release, or personal use? If it's just for you... try it out! Easy to remove. If it's something you want others to enjoy, same answer, just get a few other people to try it out too. The beta testers guild over at TESAlliance would probably be helpful.


Pretty much the same thing. Generally, I'd say unless you have a good reason not to, just stick with skills and attributes. Simpler, more compatible, less likely to break.


Athletics is probably the way to go, though speed could work. The invisibility AND the athletics is probably a foolproof escape.

For the catfall effect, I've had an idea about that, which I might implement (again on khajiit!) in TRAP... detect when the player is already airborne, and give a boost to Athletics, then remove it as soon as you land. This should reduce or prevent falling damage, without letting you jump higher since the bonus doesn't apply when you're on the ground. Assuming the script engine catches you landing before you have a chance to jump.


Correct. Definitely don't touch those.


OBSE has a command which tells you whether an effect is hostile.


Yes. That's one of several reasons why mine doesn't. However, as long as you use magic/ability effects instead of hard-scripted changes, you shouldn't really break anything. It's more an issue of how the mods balance together; having all your attributes reduced to 0 because of a pile of penalties svcks, but isn't a bug or conflict per se.

Thank you for the reply and for the permission! It's truly appreciated!



I would probably use the "You Are Here" modder's resource if I choose to go the way of caves and dungeons. Right now I'm still not sure.



I'm just aiming for the player right now, it's quite daunting as it is



You know, this last bit made me think and I believe you're right. I decided to drop, as much as possible, the penalties to attributes and skills. I'm going to try making this into something different to play, with certain tweaks that would kind of dictate the way one would go about inside her skin. That way, it should be compatible with most other encumbrace and needs mods, as well as other stat-changing ones.

I'll ask here, in case anyone has any ideas - if you can think of a cool feature that would fit with the race's profile, please drop a line and explain what your idea is.

I want to keep the sensitivity to sunlight, as well as the "binding" to the underground.
I'll try using OBGE shaders to actually simulate visibility issues.
I'll prevent sleeping outdoors, perhaps even inside interiors.

I'm trying to think of a bonus for being underground/in darkness, aside from the nighteye. Maybe an additional Detect Life or, perhaps, some sort of constant turn undead?

The old power concepts don't really work under this setting. I could keep the invisibility, but I would drop the speed/athletics bonus.

Just thought of another, albeit not very original, variant. A power that would give "Calm" under light condition and "Frenzy" under darkness, "Rally" under light and "Demoralize" under darkness. It reminds me a lot of your "Ritual" though, tejon...

Well, I'm open to suggestions and comments!

Thank you!

cc

crimson.cosmos asked me if he could use http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=21424 for doing some of this and pointed me at this thread... I thought I'd reply here where everyone can see it; everyone is welcome to use any of my code... just a little thank-you somewhere in the docs will be appreciated if you do.

I'm not sure if the RH shader will do what you want, but you're welcome to try it and see if you can make it do what you want. It doesn't include any sort of blurring. Note that ScreenEffects is another mod that provides various shader effects for other mods, and includes blur stuff. I originally started using ScreenEffects for RH, but then wrote my own shader because I could write something more specific to my needs and more lightweight. An interesting idea for your light-phobic race would be to over-brighten and/or saturate things... you could do this dynamically based on light levels, but you might find that just a constant increase in brightness (and maybe saturation) would give you both the "argh-bright-lights" effect in daylight and a pretty good "night-eye" at the same time.

Also check out the RH disease fatigue and health burn effects... they are an example of how you can make a character "weak" in a way that is compatible with other mods and not overpowering. It will reduce health/fatigue faster when they are full, but slows down as they get low, so it never really kills you and doesn't stop you from "healing" back to full health/fatigue, but you find it runs out a bit quicker. You could also invert this effect to give a "heal/recover in the dark" effect, with health and fatigue recovering a low % of damage each second when in the dark. BTW in the next version of RH I'm going to extend this feature to also burn magica in the same way.

I will second tejon's advice about using ability spells for applying attribute drains. These make it a bit tricky to apply % drains though... you can do it with OBSE scripted commands to adjust the drain magnitude, but it's far easier and simpler to just make them +-5/10 drains and fortify abilities than +-5%/10%. Note that some older leveling mods will not like fortify/drain abilities, and draining below 0 will not make them negative, but might confuse some leveling mods. In general fortify abilities cause less problems than drain abilities.

Also keep it simple... I think many mods like this one go overboard with lots of tweaks to stats all over the place for very little gain. Be aware of how the stats interact with each other and what effect they really have on the game. Most attributes have surprisingly little effect on the game mechanics, with speed being the notable exception. Adjusting skills often has a larger effect, in particular acrobatics is the only adjustment that affects jumping height. Its also interesting how much effect just draining or burning fatigue will have... it has less effect than in Morrowind, but it still reduces attack damage significantly. If people also use any fatigue mods then low fatigue will have other effects that simulate exhaustion, and these alone might be enough without your mod adding extra attribute/skill drains etc.

With regard to nighteye shader replacements: I'm pretty much married to the Circular Expand option in http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=7327.


TRAP has a full framework for doing variable-magnitude spell effects, which works around a great many engine hassles and completely non-obvious bugs. As ABO commented above, I likewise have no problem with others borrowing techniques or entire code blocks, just give credit where it's due! Furthermore, in this particular case I highly recommend it because, again, completely non-obvious bugs. Seriously. Horrible, game-breaking stuff you might not even know is happening unless Scruggs made a random comment on the OBSE thread one time about what he'd seen in the engine, and you happened to catch it. :spotted owl: (Also I've been giving crim.cos piles of additional annotation privately, some of which I'll try to work into comments next version.)


Pretty sure both Realistic Leveling and nGCD play nice with drains now, and Oblivion XP shouldn't have a problem in the first place. Granted quite a few folks are still using KCAS, but they generally don't use OBSE in the first place, so this mod would be out of the question too. Avoiding conflicts within the scope of current modding technology should be a very high priority, but compatibility with stuff that's technically obsolete and has fully functional replacements is more of an "if it doesn't get in the way" thing IMO.


Thoroughly agreed. Determine what is absolutely essential to your mod, try to find the most effective yet lowest impact way to implement it; and if there are other things that would be nice to have but could be done separately, do them separately. This will maximize compatibility and minimize troubleshooting time when something does go wrong (IT WILL). The end-user can consolidate mods if they're out of slots!

And some technical banter...

A far cry from no effect, however.


Absolutely true, though I prefer to avoid this for mostly thematic reasons. Regardless of what something actually does, what it's called also matters to the end user. On a related note, though, be aware of http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Luck! (But also be aware that other mods might add more "lucky" effects.)


Fatigue is... well, it's just awesome. (Says the author of "Fatigue Effects.")

Looks like I should take a look at it too.

@cri.cos, feel free to adapt Vector's code into your mod.