Thanks for the information about Wrye Bash!

About displaying the chance of success: What I might do is to display the level of the lock, not the actual chance. Because the chance is something the character shouldn't know - he might recognize the type of lock (i.e. the lock level) and then calculate his chances by himself, but a lock that says "you'll probably need 5 attempts till I'm open!" seems a bit too unrealistic to me.
With the value of the lock level, it's not that hard to calculate the chance anyway - you can make a pretty good estimation by calculating ( 1.5 * Security - LockLevel ).

The advantage of displaying the lock level is that I can easily change the lock level that way - because that is something I'm a little bit annoyed about - it seems that there are actually only 5 possible values for the locks (0, 7, 40, 80, 99). I might be wrong, but there don't seem to be any values in between. I could get the lock level, then randomly calculate a number that is within the range of the lock type (so for Very Easy, it could be a value from 0 to 6, for Easy from 7 to 40 etc.), then store it in the GMST (and display it that way at the same time) and then change the lock level accordingly. If I exclude the default values, I also have a way of knowing whether the lock has already been adjusted or not.
(I'm actually writing this down so that I won't forget this idea. )


Okay yeah, I agree. It is a lame excuse. The thing is that there are certain actions in the game that "destroy the illusion" of your invisibility, so to say, and lockpicking is one of them (as far as I know, you turn visible when you pick a lock in vanilla, too). It really is cheating if you have that easy way to avoid being seen while picking a lock - while you can't open doors without turning visible, opening the door is not the crime. So you can avoid any crime detection by simply turning invisible, which is cheating and I should do something to prevent that.

edit: Okay, I browsed the CS Wiki and didn't find any function such as DispelNthAE... I'll use that then, and the next version will include it.

I thought this as well, but leveled locks (and most of the locks are leveled, at least the ones on dungeon chests) have numbers in between. As far as I could see it is minimum lock level + player level * 1.5. So a leveled lock that starts as average lock will have a lock level of 70 if the player is level 20 and will become a hard lock with a lock level of 85 if the player is level 30.

I also think I've even seen an average lock with a lock level of 25 - that would mean the difficulty shown depends on what setting is closer to the value. I remember this because I was surprised that my security 5 character could open an average lock. I checked the lock level with the console and it was 25.

Just tested, this code will remove invisibility when you try to lockpick.

;line 53 of the lockpicking scriptIf ( CrosshairRef.GetObjectType == 23 || CrosshairRef.GetObjectType == 24 )					TapControl 5					;etc...

It will display "I have no lockpicks," but you can easily get rid of that by changing sNoLockpick to a blank string. It makes sense to do that anyway, since that message comes up every time you activate a locked door.

Awesome! Well, now that all my problems have been easily defeated by you guys, I'll just go ahead and upload a new version.

edit: http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=31424

That's normal. 0-7 is Very Easy, 8-20 is Easy, 21-40 is Average, 41-80 is Hard and 81-99 is Very Hard.

Just one little thing I thought I should mention, you don't end up getting the usual lockpick in your inventory when imprisoned. I had to pick the passing guards pocket which ended up with a very hair raising escape from prison in which I forgot to grab my stuff.

Nitpick: 0 is unlocked.


This sounds like a feature, not a bug.

Another thing but this one was a bit of a problem. The animation is now working for me since the last update, however if I have my lockpick equipped and go to use it while having someone in lockpicking range, conversation is initiated and the mouse freezes. I can exit the conversation using the arrow keys, I discovered this because I was testing out different clothing meshes because some of them were prone to invisible upper arms in first person with the lockpick animation.

Clicking on an unleveled Very Easy door and using GetLockLevel gives you a value of 0 :shrug:


My thoughts exactly
I was thinking of ways to implement that feature with the one lockpick again, but I never liked it to begin with - I would've just implemented it again so that the whole "escape from prison" feature isn't removed from the game just because of this mod.
Now you're telling me that there *is* a way to escape from prison, and that it is dangerous and exciting and will only work for characters with high Sneak values... sounds awesome.

About the problem that conversations start and the mouse freezes:
I'll have a new version up soon that should fix your problem. I must admit that I was careless when I included the TapControl function, and didn't put it in a proper if-condition.
About the mouse freezing: That is necessary for the script, but starting a conversation right in the middle of lockpicking isn't one of the situations that is being considered by the script so that mouse freezing is turned off again... just to be safe, I'll include another check for situations like that.


Edit: http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=31424. I feel really stupid now for releasing so many new versions in such a short time, but... well, each new version is a little bit better than the last one, so I guess it's alright. However, since v2.3 it's really just bugfixing, and I'm pretty sure that all bugs have been discovered by now.
Unless there are more bugs to fix, the next update will be a big one again, and will certainly take a little more development time. (If I get around to do it at all, that is.)

Story of my life, man. It's just so hard not to share, and of course by 5am you've generally forgotten what "rigorous testing" is...

I never like the hand holding lockpick you get in prison either, I posted about it because its a change to vanilla and I thought it was worth mentioning.

Your statement about the npcs and the mouse is a bit confusing. I never initiated conversation at all, just tried out the animation around an npc and when I clicked the attack button I got a dialogue window I don't lockpick around npc's so find this problem was accidental so I thought I'd post about it. Anyway describing this as "my problem" that you've fixed has made me feel like an annoyance for posting these things.

It is definitely worth mentioning. The thing is that I knew about the problem already, so the other part of your post was even more interesting for me - i.e. that there's still a possible way to get out of prison without the lockpick.


No no no! It wasn't my intention to make it sound like that. By "your problem" I meant "the problem you've described", I just wrote it that way to keep it short. And concerning the mouse freeze, I just wanted to say this: The script has several checks to see if the mouse should be enabled again, but for situations like the one where conversation was started when you "lockpicked" the NPC, there was no check, that's why the mouse stayed disabled. And while something like that shouldn't happen in the new version since I've put the TapControl command now in a proper if-condition (so that it only gets used when you're making a lockpick attempt on a locked door or container), I added such a check anyway, just to be on the safe side.

I'm very grateful that you mentioned that problem, it is not an annoyance at all (well, the problem IS an annoyance, but getting it pointed out by someone is part of the remedy ). I'm sorry that this came out wrong.

Thanks for clarifying that, it can be difficult to interpret meaning behind posts sometimes. I'll continue to post anything thing that I come across to do with this mod.

You know this mod makes one of the biggest changes to gameplay that I've installed in a long while. It does away with pausing the game world while lockpicking which means you can run out of breath underwater while trying to unlock a container, not to mention fending of creatures while your making the attempt. The real time aspect of this is one of the best things about this, and its fun of course.

I've got a fairly simple idea for this mod. I don't know if this idea suits your vision how the mod should be, but I was nontheless reading "Advances in Lockpicking" in the game, written by this guy who's Thief and not a Writer, so he doesn't write very well because he's a Thief and not a Writer. The book is pretty short and the author sounds like he could pick up a few points of intelligence next time he levels up, but it does mention that he's using a torch to warm up the locks and make the stiff springs within the locks soften which alledgedly make them behave in a much more uniform manner.

So I'm suggesting incorporation of this little sprinkle of lore into your mod by providing Lockpicking a slight bonus chance to success if you're wielding a Torch in your off hand while picking the lock. The bonus is counter-balanced slightly by the fact that torches shed light and you're more likely to be spotted and reported to the guard if you're doing something nefarious.

It seems that in updating the mod to the latest version all my previous Morrowind lockpicks disappeared - all 200 of them.

I discovered this while deep in a dungeon.

[edit] Oh wait ... I was using the previous version called Morrowind Lockpickinv2.esp and so updating and all those lockpicks were then classified as being from a whole other mod and hence gone.

I just noticed that this latest version does not count your lockpicks broken when you break them. I am talking about the one stats menu screen in the game...you know the one that also has # of quests, # of quests completed, and all the other stats...

Can be updated using http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/ModPCMiscStat 9, [value, should be 1 most of the time ].

Yes, I actually changed that on purpose. The "lockpicks broken" stat had the connotation of failure, while this system assumes that after a certain amount of uses, a lockpick just gets used up - hence also the message "Your lockpick has been used up" (an information message) instead of "You broke your lockpick" (a failure message).
In the second script, this is different, however. The second script has a chance that the lockpick breaks, which is affected by the number of uses and by your Security skill. The implication here is that for a more careful/skilled user, the lockpick might have not broken yet; consequently, the message for this script is "Your lockpick has broken" (a failure message).

Well, this is how it currently stands. Of course, if people would rather have the "lockpicks broken" stat affected even by the script where lockpicks get used up, I can do that.

Yeah...I think it would be great if you just made LOCKPICK USED UP = LOCKPICK BROKEN

Actually I thought about changing "Lockpicks broken" in the stats menu to "Lockpicks used". Doesn't have the connotation of failure.

News:
The next version of this will be much more customizable. I'm currently adjusting the scripts so that one script, in combination with an INI file, will have the options of the two scripts currently implemented, plus many more. You'll be able to change the quality and the average number of uses of each type of lockpick, and three different factors from the formula for the chance of breaking your lockpick.
This formula looks like this now (Chance is in percentage):

Chance = BreakChanceMax * ( BreakChanceAscent * ( Uses - AverageNumberOfUses - 0.2 * ( Agility + Luck ) ) + 0.5 )

This formula is capped with the values BreakChanceMin and BreakChanceMax. Both of these values, BreakChanceAscent and of course the average number of uses can be configured in the INI.
So, for example, if you want to have Morrowind's system where each pick breaks after *exactly* 25 uses, all you have to do is to set BreakChanceMin to 0, BreakChanceMax to 200 and BreakChanceAscent to 1 (and the average uses of the lockpicks to 25).
But you can also change the values in a way so that you have, for example, a constant chance of breaking your lockpick which is at 1%. Or have a rising chance from the beginning, which however only rises to a maximum of 30%.

Motivation behind this new version: I recently had some lectures that dealt with the Fermi-Dirac distribution, and everytime I saw it I thought "Ha! That's the formula I used for Morrowind Lockpicking!" But in the lecture, the graphs took many different forms depending on all those values you could change, and I was disappointed that my current formula was so static.
Now it's so customizable that the chance of not screwing up the mod by changing the values in the INI file without knowing what you're doing is pretty much zero.


Anyway, just wanted to share the news, since I'm very excited about it... it's my first INI-dependent mod after all. If there's something you wish was customizable, say it now, I might be able to implement it!

I think I'll try to whip up a graph that shows the various probability curves that result from my formula. The differences can be pretty drastic, and it's hard to imagine without some visual help.

Any chance of customizable lockpick rarity? Because I never run out of them
Thank you.

EDIT: On a second thought I could just increase the chance of breaking a lockpick when the new version's out.

Changing the rarity of lockpicks won't be possible, because that is an area not governed by a script.
In answer to your edit: Yes, that is part of why the mod is now customizable... if people experience that their playing style yields them too many lockpicks, they can increase the chance of breaking. However, be careful! The following graphs will show how misleading the simple formula can be.

Like I said, I made some graphs that show the effect of my formula for the chance to break the lockpick at the Nth time you're using it. There are two graphs: The first one shows the chance with which the actual calculation is made after each lockpicking attempt (this is the formula you can customize). The second graph shows the value (Chance of still having the lockpick before Nth attempt) * (Chance of NOT having the lockpick anymore after Nth attempt). Basically, this is the actual probability of breaking the lockpick at exactly the Nth use.
I chose 25 as average number of uses, however that value has no special effect, except that it shifts the graph to the left or to the right.

http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/1918/graph4.jpg
This is one of the two implemented formulas in the current version of Morrowind Lockpicking. You're safe for around 17 uses, after that the chance of breaking will rise fast; the effect is that your actual "average number of uses" is around 22 uses (however these graphs don't take into account the effect Agility and Luck have, so in this case the average is a pretty good estimation).
These will be the default settings in the next version of Morrowind Lockpicking.

http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/4963/graph3.jpg
Here we have the values needed to recreate Morrowind's lockpicking system to the very last detail. As you can see, the ONLY number of uses that has an actual probability that your lockpick will break is 25, i.e. in all cases your lockpick will break after having been used exactly the number of times that is its "average number of uses".

http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/4916/graph2fp.jpg
This is a good example of how misleading the formula is (or might be to some people). If you set minimum AND maximum break chance to 0.1, you get a constant chance of breaking which is at 10%. You'll see in the second graph that your actual "average number of uses" for the lockpick then is somewhere around 9 uses, however it's a broad peak, so the result for each lockpick will vary a lot.

http://img706.imageshack.us/img706/2077/graph1l.jpg
Another effective result that might be surprising. The formula is now a linear function, starting at a chance of 0 and going up to a max chance of 0.1, which it reaches after 48 uses. You might think that this is on average a very low chance, but as you can see, the probability is highest for the 26th use, and the peak is very broad, so you might sometimes have lockpicks with a duration of 40 uses, and sometimes they will only last 9 uses.

You know, OBSE lets you edit leveled lists. :spotted owl:

OBSE may be the cure for world hunger...even AIDS! It is SUPERGREAT!

True.
Implemented it. Problem is that I'm not quite sure how to test if it works correctly, but in theory it should.
There will be two general chance values of finding a lockpick (one for containers, one for creatures/NPCs), and then the relative chances between the four lockpicks that can be found in leveled lists. For example, you might have a 1% chance of finding a lockpick in a container, and relative chances of 10/20 (Apprentice), 6/20 (Journeyman), 3/20 (Master) and 1/20 (Grandmaster). That means that in 1 of 100 cases, you'll find a lockpick, and in 1 of 200 cases, it will be an Apprentice's Lockpick.
All in all this amounts to 6 different values with which you can customize the rarity of lockpicks.