» Wed Sep 01, 2010 9:27 am I have been itching to work on my old Combat Magic project the I never finished. But this time I want to take an entirely different approach to the way the mod will do the behind the scenes work.
Combat Magic was a Proof Of Concept project to make fighting with magic "feel" more like RL fighting. One of the most interesting revelations I discovered in my years of RL combat was that there are universal concepts that apply to all combat and all weapon forms no matter if it is light or heavy weapons or even no weapons (H2H) , arrows or crossbows or mêlée, blunt or cutting blades, throwing a spear (or in this case throwing a fire ball) etcetera ...
They all shared fundamentals such as defense and offense geometry, timing, accuracy verse initiative, speed (or rate) verses power and much more!
I do not see why fighting with Magic would necessarily need to break this universal combat law.
See The Work In Progress Video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTOynB6Z-Rw
NEW:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LLGoyUMX2I&playnext=1&videos=k4gvlFT_TkU&feature=mfu_in_order
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 in my mod if he had not been so gracious and generous with his help.
So Combat Magic expands on this concept. The core of my project was a defense called an omni shield, it can block "all" magic attacks but prevents the Combat Magic Practitioner from attacking at the same time. Add to this extremely lethal attacks, where the closer you are to the combat magic practitioner and the better your combat geometry the more deadly the magic attacks can be!
The concept actually worked extremely well but I ran into issues with the inner workings of the scripts in that it was difficult to actually make the Omni shield work with the rest of the games magic system with out a lot of bugs. One of the issues that plagued my project was sometimes the magic users would become immortal and could not be killed. Their health would get stuck up at at 10000 points and would regenerate as well. But now I found a way to create the Omni Shield so this will not be a problem anymore.
I am more than 50 percent done with the first draft of this mod. But Halloween is coming up fast so I am not sure how much I can work on this mod over the next few months.
PM me if you are interested in Alpha testing this mod.
Finished Work In Progress:
Omni Shield is done and works very well. This will stop almost all attacks such as missile attacks, spells, melee attacks, touch spell attacks and h2h attacks. But each time it is hit with an attack it eats the Combat Magic Practitioner's 's Magicka. It will only block attacks from the front (like a melee shield. It has the appearance of a blue force field like floating DISK about 3 foot in diameter.
The OS can block spells or bound them back at the attacker depending on the Combat Magic Practitioner's skills and timing. The lower your PC skills the tighter the widow of opportunity will be for the player to do this. Blocking such attacks eats more magic than bouncing them. Bouncing them in a random direction will eat less magic than blocking but not less than bouncing (in a controlled manner) back at your opponent. This only works on Projectile type spells.
This Omni Shield must be turned off in order for the Magic Practitioner's to make any kind of attack (not including summoning).
Silence magic will work to stop the OS from going up but only if it is inflicted on the Combat Magic Practitioner's before they get up the Omni Shield.
The OS will work for you even if you have a shield, staff, 2h weapon, sword, bow, or any other blocking weapon in you hands as long as you are not attacking. You only need to be holding your block button to turn on the OS.
A New powerful health potion (but it comes with a risk) is carried by the Combat Magic Practitioner. this is both your reward for killing them and another threat if they use the potion for themselves. This potion will restore health extremely fast but in the process makes you 100% weakens to magic for 60 seconds.
All REFLECT MAGIC and REFLECT DAMGE has been neutralized to remove their effects from the game. These two spell types are the worst thing about the oblivion magic system. Please do not ask me to make this an option. It will not ever be made an option for this mod. In part because it would prevent the mod from working as intended and most importantly because the REFLECT DAMGE magic effects group is cannibalized by my mod to create the new Plasma Magic attacks for the Combat Magic Practitioners.
The mod will change NPC reflect magic items or reflect spell items in their inventory into resist magic and shield magic items. Player also gets a spell to do the same thing for their own inventory if needed.
Plasma Attacks:
Equip your Combat Magic Kit (in your spell list) to use the Omni Shield, Magic enhanced H2H and Plasma attacks. Anytime you block (with a weapon or your hands) the Omni shield will go up to protect you as long as you have a little magicka and you are not incapacitated by things like knockdowns, staggers or low fatigue.
Taping your cast button will discharge a high speed arc of plasma at your target. This is a low power attack that cost 10% of your magicka.
Hold the cast button down for more than a tap will cast a slow but powerful plasma ball.
Hold the cast button for more than 1 second will cast a touch spell that "dumps" all your magicka into your target drowning them in a extremely high power attack. You are exposed (cannot block) for that moment of time! This is true of the other attacks as well but for much less of a duration.
Note: You will not be able to "load" the Magicka "dump" touch attack and just wait for a target to walk up to you before you release it. If you hold your cast button for too long (1.5 seconds) your magicka drains to 0 and you will be unable to cast a magic attack until your magicka is back up over zero. A sound effect will warn you of this magic drain before it happens. Custom sound effects will clue you to most of the timing concerns.
Poor player timing can be compensated with good PC stats and vice versa because many of the important timing windows are based on your PC stats. This is an idea I have had for combat games for years. Because of Oblivion I now am getting to try the idea in a real game.
Damage of all CM attacks (except for the plasma balls) will be a % (as low or high) as your magicka. But that percentage will rise and fall depending on the following factors:
Attributes
Level
Fatigue
How well your "kinetically cast" the spells (your moment toward and around your opponent).
Player Timing
The Fast plasma Bolt attack and the Touch attack damage magnitude is calculated by your level, willpower, intelligence and your currant level of magicka modified by your fatigue percentage. Your target's magic resistance defense is also used in this calculation. I could not do the same calculations for the Plasma Ball for technical reasons. There was just no practical way to record all the stats involved and attach this data to the projectile without it also effecting all the plasma ball spells moving in the air during combat. So the Plasma Ball would hit with a random power depending on who cast the last plasma ball attack. This was not a issue with the touch attack and the arc attack because the spell is near instantaneous where the ball attack can take up to 10 seconds or more to reach the target. So the Plasma Ball is set at 30 cost to magicka and 30 BASE damage .
All Combat Magic damage will be scaled by the difference from the vanilla WeapSteelWarhammer compared to your to your currant WeapSteelWarhammer weapon. So if you have a mod that increase your WeapSteelWarhammer to 2 times normal the Plasma ball will hit at 2 times 30 points.
I designed this WeapSteelWarhammer damage comparison "script trick" to be used to detect your level of preferred damage and it applies to all the Plasma Attacks. In this way the Combat Magic is automatically in balance with your chosen level of mêlée damage.
Please note that to make the fast bolt attack hits at lighting speed, I had to change the shock attack in the game from a slow bolt to an instant hitting bolt. This again cannot be an option for technical reasons.
The CM attacks and the Omni shield all have custom made visual and sound effects that provide the player with obvious clues to timing as well as make it all look really cool!
So far I have not found a practical way to upgrade the magnitude (how much damage they will cause) for all the other elemental attacks in the game such as Fire and Frost attacks. This is a real shame.... but may change with new OBSE revisions in the future.
Alas...for now it is an unavoidable disadvantage of this mod. But not one that I will let stop me from making this mod. For now the NPC will just not be allowed to use these weak attacks in combat as long as they are classified as a Combat Magic Practitioner.
All Actors that are labeled in the CS as "Class Specialization Magic" get the Combat Magic "kit".
Ghost Dodge
I wanted to try something other than the "bullet time" dodge or the cliché transporter (pop suddenly from here to there) type of dodge, I wanted something very different that is not seen in games often and would offer a slightly different kind of result (a magical one) then normal dodging but still keeping the fundamental timing and limitations (strategy) found in normal dodging.
See a video of the Ghost Dodge here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LLGoyUMX2I&playnext=1&videos=k4gvlFT_TkU&feature=mfu_in_order
It will give you almost complete immunity to attacks but it will cost a lot! The magic drains fast as you trigger the ghost state. so you must learn to only enact it when absolutely needed and for a as short a burst as you can (to just avoid the attack). Also you cannot attack block nor move around during your ghost state in the "magic dodge".
I had to add this 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:
If paintimer > 0 then you will not be able to ghost dodge. So if you are burning "painfuly" 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 very low (about 2% or less of your health) . As said this also effect the NPC in the same way.
You must have the Combat Magic Kit equipped and then you press (or rather TAP) the Left and Right and Back Move buttons (I use the arrow keys) all at the same time. My other mod that does the bullet time dodge will detect this and not rigger at the same time unless you are out of magicka.
Mod Summery:
The bottom line is that COMBAT MAGIC will be like fighting with weapons were you must maneuver for combat geometry as well as attack at the right time to maximize your effect on your opponent. And the more powerful your attack the more you may open yourself up for counter attacks.
Throwing spells will have the same types of advantages and disadvantages as are found in my combat archery mod and blocking spells will have the same strategies as found in my Melee combat mods.
My own test fights with the Combat Magic Practitioner's s now are AWESOME! They are extremely lethal at very close range. If you are a sword fighter you must constantly keep just at your own weapon range so that they cannot touch you!
As an Archer it is especially challenging as most of your arrows will be deflected by their Omni shield.
But if you time your shots correctly the arrow will plunge into their weak small bodies when they lower their Omni shield to throw a magic attack at you!
For the most advanced SCA combat with sword and shield:
http://www.spookyfx.com/book/tromp.html
bliviongate: I'm loving the sounds of this, now to take a second read through to make sure I understand what Im reading. 
