I had an extra hour to mod and email while I was waiting for paint and glue to set up on my current Animatronic job. So I added in a system to the Combat Magic punching to maintain your fatigue level as long as you are landing good blows with a decent amount of magic in your Punch. Fatigue will be taken from your opponent and given to you based on how much magic you were able to put in your punch. When you get into a good rhythm you can keep up the attack without worrying about your fatigue zeroing out on you. I am attempting to give the player a "speed bag" effect, but this needs to be carefully balanced or it could end up being over powerful (game breaking).

Sorry Azureal but their is just no way I can RELZ any part of the mod sooner than when the beta is ready to be tested. The are too many complicated loose ends in the mod that still need to be tied up. And I will not have serious free time until after October 31.

Understood... and yet still very excited! =)

Too freaking hot to work in the shop, so I flaked and did a little moding today after adding a hotswap removeable harddrive to my PC for backing up disk images. (I wish I had not I wasted my money on that useless carbonite online back ups service! :meh: )

Speed bag feature is working. If you hit your opponent with several punches in a series inside of a short amount of time (about 3 or 4 inside of about 2 seconds) you will absorb some of their fatigue and they will stagger helplessly for a second. You can then press the attack, as long as you strike on target and come in with a good rhythm this speed bag effect will continue until you run out of magicka. This sounds like it could be too over powered but in my tests I find it is not easy to do more than 2 of these at a time. A miss with your aim or timing will kill the rhythm and force you to try again.

This is good to use if you are having a hard time circling your opponent as this feature will not require you to be around their flank to work. Of corse this feater willl only work whne you are in Combat Magic H2H mode.

Once you have landed the required number of fast blows inside of the time limit a stat comparison is done to see if it is possible to overtake your opponent.

target's strength + resistmagic times their fatiguepercentage must me lower or equal to player's current magicka to succeed.
If this check is good then fatigue is drained per the following formula:

(player's current magicka times .005 ) times the opponent's current fatigue

So an opponent with a current level of 80 fatigue and a player with 60 points of magickia will absorb 24 points of fatigue.

The cost of magicka to do this is %5 of the player's current magicka. You will know you are in the "speed bag" cycle when your opponent is stumbling around after each of your hits and you will see flashes of blue, green and red lights splashing on your opponent.


So now the opponent has about 56 fatigue, player has 57 magic, a second cycle would get the player about 15 points of fatigue. This means that the opponent's fatigue will never be totally absorb to zero. In this way this feature cannot be used to "knock out" the opponent, only keep them at a exhausted level. However the normal H2H game system may still knock them out as each hit will reduce the opponents fatigue a little per the vanilla system.

It seems interesting to say the least. Though I am still a bit shaky as to why I am absorbing their fatigue at all. I will be interested to see how this all pans out as the mod is kinda becoming more and more mana intensive (with the 1 exception of absorbing spells by punching them). Also with most of these abilities be based in power off of "maximum/current magicka" I can see this becoming a balance issue, giveing huge advantages to certain races/birthsign combos as opposed to making these effects based off a skill such as destruction or hand to hand itself.


With the current implementation it seems like high elf apprentices with multiple "fortify magicka" enhancements will be the way to go.

Wrong, in fact the opposite!

Because it is a percentage of your magicka rather than a flat cost to magicka PC with larger amounts of magicka will have a slight advantage but only by a little.
1000 magicka - %10 result 900 magicka left. this means this PC could "act" 10 times before they are out of magic.

10 magicka - %10 result is 9 magicka. this means this PC could "act" 10 times before they are out of magic.

Get it?

Now where it is an advantage is in how hard you hit with a spell in some cases, but this is true of fatigue in mêlée combat as well!
The more fatigue you have in reserve the more damage you do with your weapons. The Magic combat in my mod is balanced in the about the same way mêlée combat is balanced.


And on top of that you are not allowed to put in massive amounts of magicka into a CM spell unless you cast the spells properly and have the stats to support it.

As a "weak" magic user you are not normally going to have a great body with lots of endurance. With low levels of fatigue you will DESPERATELY need to steal fatigue as you throw a series of punches, it goes fast unless you only one punch "every once in a while".

If you train your body to be strong as well as practice your magic lessons, good for you, this will give you an advantage over those that cannot or do not (in combat anyway).

Combat Magic (if I do it right) will require you to have a balanced PC ( physical and mental stats) to excel in this martial arts form.

Ah that clarifies things! Looking good in that case.

Looking super-cool. Par for you, of course.

Thanks Lyobovnik , I was worried that my lack of computer artistic ability would handicap the "look" of the mod. I can "clinically" use tools like corel paint and ACAD but without artist talent and experience such things can become sterile or cartoon looking and not realistic enough to inspire the feeling that it is powerful magic.

For example I tried for many hours to make a realistic "flash" of light for my CM punch. Nothing I tried looked right. It allways looked like something you would see in a comic book. I then gave up and surfed on the web for work by REAL artist's and found a sample that at first I thought looked terrible. It had large areas of black line art segments that in no way seem like a flash of light. But guess what? Once it is rendered for only 300 milliseconds the image creates an optical illusion in your eyes to produce an extremely real looking flash of light! I do not think I would have ever figured that out on my own via trial and error for years.

AND thanks to JDFAN for his work on the magic spilling from the hands effect. I textured it for multi colors but he did the REAL work and I would not have this necessary effect in my mod AT ALL if he had not been so gracious and generous with his help.

Now I am good at making shaders (the exploding magic effects) but only because it is a mechanical operation in the CS that I have had dozens of hours working with and do not mind spending hours and hours of trial and error creating/tweaking one until I like it.

The magic power up effect (the rainbow colored Persistence Of Vision halos when you charge up a spell) took me a whole weekend to do, but it is entirely my own work straight from my warped little brain to the PC!

WO--WHOOOOO!!!
I had a sudden inspiration:

The way that was not working for NPC but would work for the player:

let AdjustedSpells := OSNPCUSer.GetSpells

So I had an idea and tried this instead:

let AdjustedSpells := OSNPCUSer.GetCombatSpells

YESSSSSS!!! THAT WORKED FOR THE NPC!!! :celebration:

The amp up the damage modifier in my mod is set by calculating from a compassion of a particular vanilla mêlée weapon to the players modded weapon damage level. Thus all the following spells will be automatically adjusted per the players general damage preference.

FIDG Fire damage
ABHE Absorb Health
REHE Regen health
SHDG Shock damage
FRDG Frost damage
DGHE Health damage
DRHE Restore Health
DIWE Disintegrate Weapon

The reason Disintegrate Weapon is included is because anytime you amp up weapon damage you must also amp up the health of the weapon otherwise the weapon will break too quickly.* Thus the magic to break a weapon must be amped up relative to the increased damage a mod has done to the mêlée weapons.


* If your preferred mêlée weapon mod dose not do this already then you need to bug the author about this to fix the issue.

Now, keep in mind all the potions will STILL not be amped up and many script only spells will also not be amped up and scrolls will not. But this is far better than I had hoped for!

That sounds great, Always nice those inspired moments :celebration:

Must admit been following your work for a while, and I'm eagerly waiting for you to release something for us to play with. I have even considered changing the rules of the universe to accelerate time, past Halloween, but let everyone get the abundance they deserve from such an event, so my very act would still bring balance, alas the settings of the universe are still a mystery to myself, I change one thing and a whole host of other stuff I never thought of goes wrong.

Joking aside, really glad to hear your making progress, hope Real Every Day Life is going as well for you, and I'm so looking forward to seeing this mod, keep up the great work.

(bows low with a little flourish)

Glimiril

This had to be added to the ghost dodge for technical reasons:

Significant pain will prevent you and the NPC from triggering the ghost dodge. The pain duration is determined by the Willpower stat.

The the more will power you have the shorter the time the pain will distract you. For will power stats from 1 to 100 the pain duration can range from 1 ( plus 0.1 second to 10 seconds more or less). The more damage done the longer the pain may effect you, but this is countered by the Will power:

PainTime = ( 1 + ( ( 10 * ( ( HealthMeterOld - player.GetAV health ) / player.getbaseav health ) ) * ( player.getav willpower / 100 ) ) )

if paintime > 0
set paintime to paintime - getsecondspassed
endif

If paintimer > 0 then you will not be able to ghost dodge. So if you are burning from a 5 second fire spell you will not be able to ghost dodge in the middle of that event unless the amount of damage being done to you during that time is very low (about 2% or less of your health) . As said this also effect the NPC in the same way.

So you could fire off some machine gun dot type spells for some annoying npc that keeps dodging in order to get them to "hold still?"
Or a small aoe spell with 2-3 sec dot and aim for the ground just past them. They dodge, hits the ground, explodes and hopefully they're still in the radius?

HEY! Who said you are allowed to be so clever! :nono:
(yes that will be a necessary tactic with many of the better NPC).

Haha good stuff. Glad you had some inspiration, seems like a nice little adjustment. Still waiting more or less patiently... :foodndrink:

Dying for another update, though I am starting to get worried! The mod keeps growing more and more (which is good) but pushes back the release (which is bad). I want it all! But the magic shield is a 100% must have asap, I have completely stopped playing oblivion until it is released. I just cant imagine magic combat without it now. :goodjob:

I took the day off (vacation time) this Monday. Part of the day will be devoted to only working on this mod.

Most of what is left are technical loose ends such as adapting the punching featers (scripts) to the NPC so they can use it, and then tweaking ALL the settings to try to get a good balance of "dish out the damage" to "take the damage" time and ratio.

However there is one serious issue I am worried about, there is an occasional CTD bug that I have been unable to find in the mod somewhere. That bug will be what holds up the beta and the final release. But I will still release the ALPHA of the mod for play-testers with the undertaking that this bug is still in it.

I am now considering HOW Combat Magic should be given to the player. My Original idea was to make it a quest, but I have to admit I am not up for that now and that would delay the mod release a great deal longer unless I made the quest very generic.

I would like to make it so that the player must learn this from the mage guild, and make it so that it is not "easy" to get so that any player that is not really into the magic of the game will not get it. If you are a hack and slash "Sword Jock" player or a thief type then you should find it difficult to get this Combat Magic.

But any Battle Mage type should have Combat Magic as it was invented by the battle mage "community". It is a Battle Mage Martial Arts.

Also I may to try to put Combat Magic BACK into the destruction category instead of the Conjuration category. Although I still believe it makes more sense in the conjuration category, it will make the mod more lore friendly and fit in more with the "game reasoning" of other magic mods. However this is only if I do not need to overhaul too many scripts. I will need to dive into this for a while to see how feasible it is to make this change at this point in the mod's development.

I always thought of alteration as manipulating physical energies - but mostly I see these categories as arbitrary. Is there really a difference between mind and body, etc.

A bit off topic but somewhat related - I'm really taken with what has been developed with http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=31918 and some ideas on extending it http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1120085-need-gameplay-opinions-for-my-mod/.

I will be using this in my next game as it removes spell buying yet uses the 4 main magic overhauls as masters for distributing spells along an alternate magic development system with classes and specializations. It needs more work to flesh it out, but wow so impressed with what I've read.

I hope there is a way to incorporate this mod in with that scheme here is what the http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1120085-need-gameplay-opinions-for-my-mod/page__view__findpost__p__16470537 said about compatibility:

anyway not trying to detract or distract just letting you know if you've not seen it.

Hi,

Just an idea on how to implement your magic system, it could be given in the training room of Arcane University. Hence a player must have gained access to the university and outside often amongst the scholars you'll hear them saying about how a discovery has led to a different way of looking at a certain magic, and an excited reply of "if it's right" normally happens.

Then perhaps the shield can be given, and instructor throws a plasma ball (or whatever your choosing to call it) at the player and it must be reflected back and forth up to say 10 times, or you witness two mages sparring as such, and you are approached to learn this skill, before perhaps another lesson is given. Pretty sure this wouldn't interfere with any other mods, and then upon ranking up in the guild and perhaps certain skill levels met, the introduction of more of your magic system. This I feel would add to the immersion, but also perhaps keeping it less complicated and without need of changing any other world space.

Thank you so much! This has my mind chewing on ideas that are more fun then mucking thru hundred of lines of script logic to find a CTD bug!

You made a great observation of an undeveloped plot line in the game that can be used to tie in my Combat Magic to the game in a way that would seem like the developers intended it to be so.
Your suggestion is clever and very deep with possibilities but not ridged or sweeping to the point of boxing in the goals I have for my project.

I really like these kinds of suggestions.

I installed and tested this idea today in Combat Magic, it works really well, no surprise as it was taken directly from one of my combat mods so the concept has already been tested throughly. The idea is that if you stop and do not exert yourself in anyway you can fast rest or in this case "meditate" to regenerate your magicka a little faster than normal. I basically used the same script and just inserted the word magic where fatigue use to be. Again the intention of this is to help make ENERGY level less important than WHAT YOU DO with your energy.


;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Stand still to FAST REST and recover Magicka faster

if ( player.getav magicka <= ( player.getbaseav magicka * .1 ) ) || player.isattacking == 1 || blocking == 1 || player.iscasting == 1 || player.IsDodging == 1 || player.IsStaggered == 1 || player.IsMovingForward == 1 || player.IsMovingLeft == 1 || player.IsMovingRight == 1 || player.IsMovingBackward == 1 || player.IsJumping == 1
set Fasttimer to 0;-- FAST REST works if you are standing still and in no way excert your body, and only works if you have a CM spell selected for use.

elseif fasttimer > .1
set Fasttimer to 0
set fMagic to ( player.GetbaseAV MAgicka * .01 )
Player.ModAV2 Magicka fMagic

elseif Fasttimer < .1 && CMActiveSwitch == 1
set Fasttimer to Fasttimer + getsecondspassed
endif

Well look at this! I'm glad to see you are still working on your awesome mods. I myself pretty much gave up on modding Oblivion as being a mage was completely lax to me, even with things as neat as Midas and SM it still felt like mindless hack & slash action (though melee could be quite fun with your SCA mods and Deadly Reflex). This is one of your mods I always wondered if you'd continue. I'm also a bit confused as to the direction you've gone. Are you making ranged magic combat obsolete compared to the "Martial Arcanist" system you've implemented? I do like the defenses you've given mages, very awesome.

There sure are a lot more innovative magic system enhancing/altering mods around, all them mentioned in this thread. Makes me want to look into scripting again, maybe even get better .

er...well...I do not think so, the plasma bolt is super fast and is the equivalent of a bow and arrow shot with high end equipment. The Plasma ball is defiantly NOT a close in attack!
I am tweaking the combat AI to try to keep the NPC mage from charging in (although it is amazing how difficult this is, so far the hard code in the game is overriding most of my brute force attempts with the combat styles).

And Getting in close is EXTREMELY dangerous for both the player and the actors, it will be a constant struggle for the player to stay out of touch range! :shrug:

Will this AI affect other spells a magic user may have at their disposal? In other words are you going to override the spell casting of other ranged spells?

Or will it be more like if the NPC meets certain requirements they will get a token that then gives them preference for this combat?

Yes to both, I would like the Combat Magic practitioner NPC to prefer the CM over other spells, however they will still have all spells from vanilla and other mods at their disposal as well. (except for the GOD AWFUL reflect damage and reflect magic as I have explained in earlier posts.)

So far (with how I have the AI set now) I see the CM practitioners use CM spells about half the time and all the other spells the other half of the time.