How difficult would it be, to add bending/type magic? Ideas!

Types of Elements, Basics:

Fire
Earth
Air
Water

Sub-types of Each Element:

Fire: Magma, Electricity, Light
Air: well. . . just Air, lol
Earth: Stone/earth, Sand, Metal, crystals
Water: Ice, Water

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What I am curious about is it possible? To add the basic and sub-type elements to the game, in which can be used as spells, but their are multiple varieties of power and level to such, each which different effects?

Also, like for sand and water, and wind is it possible to get the flow effects with them, to work neatly?

I must admit that I'm not sure what you mean by 'bending'.

Anyway, it is possible with scripting, but you can't add truly new spell effects without a new engine. There is Elemental Magicka I/II by NMZmaster, which seems to be the closest to what you seek. The only other thing I can think of is Scripted Spells.

http://www.youtube.com/user/NMZmaster

I grew up with consoles and J-RPGs, so I guess I've always kinda missed things like wind and earth in TES.

I was referencing the Last Air-bender show; Though my mod idea/suggestion isn't similar really at all, it just I thought an easier term or way of describing what I meant.

Ah, yeah I've never seen it.

I haven't seen it either, so I assumed you meant this kind of http://images.wikia.com/en.futurama/images/1/1f/Titanius.jpg.

Elemental Magic looks amazing! When I can upgrade my computer to handle a heavy load of scripts and effects like that, it'll be one of my first downloads!

Esoptros - how close is Elemental Magic to what you had in mind? Do you think you could expand on what was done in that mod?

I am merely pondering upon the idea; I have yet to delve into the world of Scripting, so it'll be a long shot if I do try. Keepin' my options open though. Mainly, What I am looking for is Magic that involves Sand. Because I want to Implement an Rp character I have created over the years into Morrowind.

Well, chances are, it's possible to script at least something that you envision, but it might not be perfect. Making the flowing effect could be a lot of work, depending on what you want to do, but it seems plausible. A sandstorm would be pretty easy, for example, like the wind in Elemental Magicka, just with a different texture. It'd all come down to animated activators/meshes/textures anyway I imagine, with scripts of course.

A lot of my work in Elemental Magicka is indeed inspired by Avatar the Last Airbender, as I've mentioned in a few past threads. These were linked earlier in the conversation but I wanted to separate with a little bit of explanation.


Elemental Magicka:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ect2AyrAOxg

v1.0 contained a diverse set of spells (around forty if I recall correctly) spread across earth, fire, frost, and air/storm. There were some interesting effects but the flavor of it probably did not fit so well with lore, and the scripting techniques were weaker and inconsistent as I was learning throughout the work. Personally, I found it difficult to play with due to actual gameplay integration into Morrowind -- for instance, the Circle of Fire spell was a barrier that many NPCs would end up committing suicide on. I can't recall if Scripted Spells had that problem with the Wall of Fire spell, I never looked at the scripts. Furthermore, the spells did not scale as the player improved -- the boulder always knocked an opponent down for the same amount of time, and a Hailstorm always dealt the same damage per hit.

Elemental Magicka II (so far):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be3Yj9A3kuk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z11v6erxYoE

For EM II I started over with a new blank ESP, and based upon what I knew from v1.0, sat down to write some scalable/universal scripts that could power 90%+ of the effects (I hoped) before I ever created a single spell. The intent with EM II was to create higher quality gameplay mechanics with my new spells, and not have the same problems that were in v1.0. I also built the scripts in such a way that they could easily be applied to an NPC casting addon at some point (that's still on my list!), and all spells scale with the player's attributes for a total of four spell levels each. No spells were directly copied from v1.0 but some -- like Circle of Fire -- were reincarnated with their issues fixed (in that case, Circle of Fire is no longer a physical barrier, but they will take damage walking through it). On the whole I feel like my framework in EM II has accomplished exactly what I wanted it to, and as I get time, I intend to work on more modules.

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Now, all of that said, scripting this kind of stuff has a lot of limitations in Morrowind. There are very few math functions, and so calculating projectile paths are relatively slow using Taylor series expansions for sine and cosine. Instinctively, I don't think any calculus would work very well due to this, either. Secondly, it is entirely feasible as I've done to have discrete objects moving about to form an effect, but fluids (sand, magma, water, and air) would be REALLY difficult to do with scripting alone, depending upon the spell. If you had an artist and an animator, multiple techniques could be tied together to accomplish it. For this very reason I find that in EM/EMII my limiting factor is usually the available art resources.