[1] The Undesirability of Random Ingredient Munching. Yep. Totally agreed. With on-demand eating, we should have that problem licked. Extremely hungry players will still run afoul of it, but, hey, you let yourself get that hungry, you're not quite picky or conscientious about it -- you eat the first edible thing you find rummaging through your invisi-pack.

[2] Accomplishing NoM's Goal by Scripting Food Items. It's good, as far as it goes, but on a large scale that idea has been out of favor because it makes large numbers of inventory items non-stackable, and potentially makes for a fair bit of extra script drag. If you make only some items so scripted, you avoid some problems, but then you make for inconsistency. It would be nice, but it's really out of the question for those reasons.

[3] Hunger Points Accumulated per Hour. That's along the lines of what I was thinking of, though I haven't been set on precisely how many points accumulate per hour.

[4] Time Scales: Yeah, NoM becomes too demanding at standard time scales. I use the its 3x setting.



[1] MWSE Herbalism Mods that Check Actual Plant Contents: Actually, while I can't for sure speak for all of them from memory, I can say that I am pretty sure that none of them just assume anything. The most puristic ones use the same percentage chance that the game has for the leveled list, while Advanced Herbalism, for example, uses a combination of base plant difficulty and player Herbalism skill, resulting in not only the chance for nothing, but the chance for bonus harvest and seeds.

So, I don't know if I really see any benefit to adding two more moving parts (the leveled list and MWSE) where it works about as smoothly as one could hope. The way it is, you have everything self-contained and integrated into the script. The other way, now you've a lot of extra complexity for not a lot of difference or gameplay value. I'm by no means an expert, though, so I could be missing the point. (Although we should probably keep this part short, to avoid too much digression from the already-lengthy discussion of ideas for NoM, since we're pretty decisive on its technical inappropriateness for inclusion in NoM.)

[2] Visual Hunger/Thirst Bars: Yep, sounds like a good idea to me. And I imagine an MWSE hunger bar would work with it whether we go the MWSE route in NoM or not.

[3] Basic and Advanced Config Menus: That sounds like a good idea to me, for whatever degree of config complexity we choose to go with.



Hunger Bars. The bars would, I think, be done with MGE, I believe (I'm not sure if that's limited to MGE, or if MWSE is what grants it and thus can do it without MGE), and I imagine they could be togglable. Definitely better than creating yet another UI utility item in player inventory.



Deactivating Hunger/Thirst While Traveling: [Also responding to neildarkstar's and Toccatta's similar sentiment expressed.] Actually, I found this very annoying myself. Whether or not we assume nutrition provided by erstwhile siltstrider pilots and shipmasters, or just hand-wave the subject away, it is just too irritating to arrive and be hit by the penalties and so forth. We'll implement this.



[1] Bathing/Lavatory Integration: Yep, I think it won't be too difficult to patch it, though the functions are quite distinct and separate, and may not even need patches. But be careful... you're just inviting someone to script in a nightmare encounter where you start out with a gorgeous female Nord, pass out... and wake up with Fargoth leering over you. :shocking: [Cue repetitive, staccato, high-pitched screeching violin horror music.] FARGOTH STRIKES BACK: THE MASSAGE.

But yes, not for NoM, but I like the hamams idea. Very appropriate and atmospheric, if done right.


That's actually along the lines of what I was thinking. We'll implement this sort of thing.


That's a really good idea. Perhaps half of the travel time or so could be counted as sleep.


Wow... I've got a lot of processing to do on all this to condense it down to the drawing board.

I think I just lost my fast-travel-time appetite :yuck:

On topic... I like the idea of getting a little hungry while sleeping (that's why breakfast is such an important meal!), and of sleeping while travelling (which the game kind of assumes anyway, since you heal etc while travelling just like when you're sleeping). For hunger while fast travelling - I wouldn't mind if the scripts took the stuff from my inventory on arrival or something, but either way is good and thirst I think should be taken care of while fast travelling (because water is free, so the caravaner/shipmaster should provide that at least).

Scripted ingredients - absolutely not. 1000 non-stackable items in inventory would be enough to turn me off alchemy AND eating.

I have to agree, non-stackable svcks... I've been thinking about it, and here's a thought I had. More gobal scripts and a lot of checking slows things down... but I can envision a local script placed on an item, perhaps a dummy food bag or something, that starts and controls the script then ends it when some event triggers it.

The script could be on a fork for instance, that equips as a weapon with a distinctive sound.... and could be set to a hotkey. Anyway, do a script for getweapon drawn and/or getsoundplaying, then the script does a getitemcount "somefood_01" and sets a local variable to show if it is there or not. The script could end with a messagebox asking which item to eat, and adjusting hunger according to the choice. That could likely be done without MWSE...

If anybody thinks that might be interesting, I'll try to script it, and see what I can figure out... Maybe if among us we do 2 or 3 workable and different scripts we could get something interesting, eh?

I don't really see the point. The other method of dealing with food is to simply assign it a duration of a particular unique magical effect, then have a global script watch for that one effect. Very simple. Very clean. It doesn't need to look for food by ID, so it's completely flexible and allows other people to mod in new items at any time simply by assigning that specific effect of whatever duration is appropriate for the size and quality of food being added. Also, it allows certain complex foods to even have other magical effects beyond simply satisfying hunger.

Preferably, only a limited quantity of special foods would have magical effects, rather that the idea that was expressed earlier in which a very large list of common foods all had relatively negligable effects. That cheapens the concept. On the other hand, having a few recipes that are difficult to cook (or to find) that have useful special effects gives the player something to seek out... perhaps even being the source of a quest or two. And because foods are easily integrated using that method, such a quest wouldn't have to be a part of NoM 3.0 in order to work.

The method you're suggesting would require scripted items, which tend to clutter inventory, and complicated scripts that would check for specific foods by ID, making it much less flexible. New foods from other mods would be nearly impossible to integrate correctly unless the modder used a patch to overwrite your script... and then two modders couldn't *possibly* integrate new foods because whichever one loaded last would overwrite your script and the other would be lost. As of now, there are a number of utilities designed to merge mods, but to the best of my knowledge, a reliable way of automatically merging scripts isn't something that's been developed yet.

Okay, I'm going to hang my ignorance out here for all the world to see... I didn't know you could create unique magical effects. I have no experience with MWSE, is that something it enables?

Anyway, if you are not going to ID foods, are you saying create a unique spell effect for each food? Otherwise how does one choose what one eats?

Fast Travel Hunger/Thirst/Tiredness Accumulation

@Melian:

That makes sense as well. So a sort of treatment like this:

Hunger: Accumulates at a rate of X % of the normal rate while traveling. Say, 30-50%.
Thirst: Frozen and does not accumulate.
Tiredness: Counted as X % resting. Again, say, 50%, so 4 hours of traveling = 2 hours rest.

Scripting Intermediary Items Like Forks for Eating

@Neil and Toccatta:

I can see some advantages in scripting intermediary items, like forks or plates and so forth, Neil, but, really, we have a simple, effective, easily-extensible solution that avoids a whole mess of scripting complexity, and allows for the most intuitive way of eating possible -- just drag the food onto your paperdoll. What you talk about would definitely be excellent for adding on new tools for your custom recipe sets, which could take advantage of the freeing of food from the need to be specifically recognized in scripts, but it does seem to involve the same disadvantages we're trying to get away from. :shrug:

Good ideas and brainstorming. It's always good to explore all options.


EDIT: No, you're right, Neil -- you can't actually create new effects, but the Remove Curse effect didn't get implemented, so it remains out there for other use.

I had no idea that Remove Curse had not been implemented... That's good to know. So, if we implement Remove curse on the food items, the global could tell that a food had been eaten. That's really... a bit elegant. It would indeed simplify things a great deal.

Yep -- that's how Toccatta and Drac did it in MC. Now, once can only imagine the possibilities if OpenMW (or the Crystal Scrolls, if I remember the name correctly, or both) is completed and allow for the creation of more magic effects...


EDIT: Oh, reading my post again, I misspoke a bit. I meant to say, scripting intermediary items for cooking would be great for custom recipe sets and will likely be a great way of modding from NoM on. Doing it for the actual eating functions is the thing that would involve the problems mentioned. (You probably got my meaning, but I just wanted to make sure it was clear for anyone who reads.)

Yeah, I got that. I have one other question though... When you "eat" an ingredient, you get a very short or limited effect according to the ingredient's effects, right? But Remove Curse ( in my understanding at least ) is boolean in nature... meaning you are etiher cursed or you are not. So if the food items are all using the Remove Curse effect, couldn't you then cure any curse by eating something? I mean, that's great for NOM, but mods that use curses as incentives and even the vanilla crittersrs that hit you with a curse would become a very minor inconvenience.

Am I off-base with that?

Actually, there aren't ANY curses in the game. All magical spells fall into one of six categories (ability, blight disease, curse, disease, spell, powers, and spells). Diseases and Blight diseases determine which spell is required to cure them. Powers can be used once per day, abilities are active ALL the time, and spells get cast. The only one that isn't used anywhere in game is the curse.

So the point is moot. Even a spell which has "curse" in the name (like "Grave Curse: Endurance") is just a spell, not an actual curse. Also, there are no alchemical reagents that have the remove curse effect, so a person isn't able to create a potion in-game that could interfere with that method.

As to being Boolean, the name certainly implies that it should be. However, boolean spells (like cures, dispel, and mark/recall) have no duration. Remove Curse DOES have a duration, which is what allows it to be used flexibly to simulate various sizes of meals. One simply assigns it a duration in seconds, and then a global script checks for the presence of the effect on the player once per second (This is VERY friendly to FPS). If someone eats a very large food item, it might have six seconds of remove curse (renamed "reduce hunger") which reduces their hunger by one point per second. A much smaller meal might have a duration of two or three seconds, while a snack might only have a duration of one.

The main benefit of the method is its extensibility. If someone creates a mod and wants to add a new food item, they simply make it a potion, give it a nice icon and mesh, and assign it the remove curse effect for a period of time from one to six seconds. Since it's the effect the script is watching for and not the food ID itself, NoM 3.0 will automatically recognize it without any need for patching anything. Other benefits are the fact that this method is very easy on FPS, allows the player to manually eat the food in an intuitively obvious manner, and doesn't bloat the alchemy system by adding a lot of food items as new reagents.

While having food as a reagent would also allow it to be directly edible, it suffers from the problem that the effectiveness of a reagent is controlled by the player's alchemy skill (while the effectiveness of a potion is fixed), and also that as reagents, a person could use alchemy to create a ridiculously powerful "food potion".

I was initially laboring under the idea that you wanted the food to be ingredients... which doesn't allow for a duration. I tested it out, and an ingredient with a remove curse effect does indeed remove the curse.

Here's how it works out... Remove Curse is as I said, boolean...you are either cursed or you are not. If you eat an ingredient with this effect, if it is going to remove the curse it does so immediately, although there is a duration of a few seconds depending on the alchemy skill of the PC. I presume that this would prevent a new curse for that period of time rather than curing the old one, which it already either did or did not do.

Having food as a potion is far preferable, as long as we are careful to set magnitude to zero. While it is true that the vanilla game does not use curse, I certainly do, and I'll bet there are others who do as well. Curse has a lot of advantages when you really want a dangerous opponent... assuming the PC does not have an apple or gummy bear with a remove curse effect greater than 0.

Actually it was my very first attempt at Morrowind scripting that started me using curses... You see in the very first part of Scripting for Dummies (I don't remember which version that was), you create a trap that uses a curse... a timer and a remove curse. So many of us are given an instant clue as to what might happen if the curse was not removed.
I have found all of this a tremendous learning experience, thanks guys!

Ah, I see where the disconnect was. Yeah, in the OP I listed, as one of the first and more major changes, the movement to using food as alchemy "potions" inducing the Remove Curse effect, and had assumed you had read that, so I was a little confused as to what you were saying.

It will clearly be the case that, if we move NoM to using the Remove Curse effect, it will conflict with other mods that do so as well, and, if what you say is correct (and I have no reason to assume it isn't -- the dearth of Curses in the game didn't lead me to testing it,) it may well allow easy escape from custom-modded use of Curses.

It may also, as I have been made to understand, interfere with the use of Curse to induce certain stat fortifications to avoid running afoul of a game engine bug that manifests when using GCD. (Say, if the off-hand weapons in Assassins Armory have their scripts modified to make the boosts Curses to avoid that bug.) Those seem to be the potential drawbacks I know of.

For a while there curses were routinely used instead of abilities for the player, I'm not sure if people are still doing that. But really, I don't have a better idea for this, nobody else seems to have a better idea for this, there are other ways that the curse/ability effects can be applied to the player, and there is some doubt as to whether the remove curse spell effect really works correctly - so I think using remove curse is the best option. Sure there'll be some conflicts - but probably not major ones, and you can't expect to avoid conflicts completely. :shrug:

I use curse effects quite often to achieve various ends. It is a simple way to control spell effects on both the PC and any NPC. However, I always use RemoveSpell to get rid of it. I've never relied on the Remove Curse effect, it has always seemed somewhat erratic in my experience.

(A side note here: a fun trick is to use Enchanted Editor to make a curse "Cast on Target" then use AddSpell to give it someone.)


I would like to take a moment and clarify exactly what I can/will offer to this project. I have way too much on my shoulders as far as mod projects go, so I'm not willing to undertake any further commitments. That being said, I will gladly offer whatever I already have created, and will modify it to fit in with the scope of this. I will also help with any brainstorming, troubleshooting, and idea sculpting that anyone needs. I work best through PM, I don't read as many forum threads as I used to...so if someone needs any of my MWSE experience or notes, please ask!

I really want to see this completed in the grand scope it is currently shaping to be. Happy to do what I can to help. :hehe:

Well there seem to be a few people who have tested this kind of thing... Is it "safe" to use remove curse if it's only 0 or 1 magnitude? Has this been tried repeatedly and with several applications (in case it's cumulative or something)?

Sorry about the delay, I'm having internet issues.... no internet all night, and slower than dial-up today...

Anyway, the if we use remove curse on food items as potions, we can use duration to filter, but the magnitude cannot be higher than 0. At a magnitude of 1 the potion will apparently remove any and all curses currently effecting the player, or so my testing leads me to believe.

I've never had any issues with using remove curse potions, or remove curse from an activator such as a shrine. The issues with the remove curse spell (or so i believe) result from damages to spell casting often caused by the curse itelf.

Then your "testing" leaves much to be desired.

After reading your post, I created a mod which added a new curse to the game. Then I loaded the game and gave myself the curse using the console. Using Morrowind Crafting, I cooked up FIFTY rat steaks, each with a remove curse effect with a magnitude of 1. I then ate thirty of them all in a row without having the curse removed. I also ate the last twenty all at the same time on the off-chance that the potency of the remove curse effect on potions might be cumulative and that stacking it up to 20 would have a fairly good chance of removing the curse.

It didn't.

There's no reason a magnitude of 0 is required to make this idea feasible.

Sounds great, but if you use curse effect there will be slight problem with my Miscast Mod, since it uses curses as a penalties and allows player to buy remove curse scrolls. Just for your information.
I don't think that it will be too big job for me to make alternate method to remove miscast penalties from player, so that I and other who want to use both mods can do so.

Even a remove curse scroll with a high magnitude won't interfere with the on-demand-eating method we're talking about so long as it doesn't have a high duration. For some reason, a spell with a duration of one seems to occur instantaneously while a potion with a duration of one lasts a full second. If your remove curse scroll has a duration of one, it'll remove the miscast and be gone before the on-demand-eating script can detect its presence. Likewise, since the potions have a high duration, they'll be detected by the global script, but the low magnitude makes it incredibly unlikely that they'll accidentally remove the miscast.

While it would take actual testing to confirm the two don't conflict, I really don't expect that they would. Of course, if the remove curse scrolls have a lengthy duration (and I see no reason why they should) then curing a miscast might make someone lose their appetite for a bit. But given the likelihood that a remove curse scroll costs much more than an equally filling meal, it certainly isn't something we need to worry about being used as an exploit.

That's good to hear

Look, you can take this anyway you want to, and putting my "testing in quotes does nothing to help the witualtion.

I'm telling you that I went into the CS, made a potion with a single effect, a duration of 3 and a magnitude of 1.

I then weent into an existing mod, used the console to addspell an existing curse in that mod, and added 20 of that potion to my mod. I then proceeded to remove that curse 20 times out 9of 20 using the potion. I tried this with a Breton, a High Elf, a Nord, and a Redguard.

I then used addspell to get a different more hazardous curse, and the potion cured it about 1 time in 3. Given those results, how much further testing is required to say that a potion with a remove curse duration of 3 and a magnitude of 1 can interfere with mods that use curses?

It occurs to me that there may be a mitigating factor involved, such as the nature of the curse, or it's school. You also want to consider if your character has any magic resistance. The potion wouldn't cure a Breton so far as I could tell, I think because of the magic resistance, but all of the others it did.

I want this to work as much as you do, because I think it's a great idea... but if you can't get past the notion that some results don't agree with your vision of it, we're going to have problems.

My use of quotes around "testing" is based upon you posting a conclusion drawn from undisclosed results from a nebulous claim of tests, which is precisely why I stated exactly what I had done to test the remove curse function and the results that I got... just in case I overlooked something important or attempted something illogical. That way someone else could point it out. You didn't bother doing that until just now, so don't get your panties in a wad. So far, all I've seen you do is try to create difficulties because your idea of putting scripts on every single piece of food got shot down.

I admit that I'm biased towards the idea, especially since I'm the one that initially implemented it. However, it seems to me that you're unduly biased against it and have gone to considerable lengths to try to convince people to abandon it or alter it unnecessarily.

And yes, it looks like we ARE going to have problems.

Well, all I can say is get over it, eh? I once worked with a guy who made Attila the hun look like "the Nanny", so I can probably get along with you if you don't go out of your way to antagonize the situation. I told you, I like this idea, and I want it to work. I don't think that means we should just ignore bumps in the road.

I didn't bother to state exactly what steps I took because I kind of presumed I was not in a court of law or writing a white paper for scientific release. It seemed that as we were all friendly, perhaps I could be taken at my word, and answer any questions posed...

Also for your information, I have discarded my idea of scripting individual food items entirely, because this is better. Just the notion of non-stackability makes the idea distasteful.

We may however have to get a bit exotic in implementing it due to issues with other mods.

Have you, by any chance, done any testing on potions with a magnitude of 0 to see if that solves the problem? As to the details I left out of my experiment, my character is a race with immunity to cold, but no other resistances, and the curse I created was a modification of Wombburn. The effect (fortify maximum magicka) had a magnitude of 20. I used that because it would be easy to see it disappear by pinning my character stat window and watching for the available mana to drop.

In fact I did, though I mentioned it a bit obliquely earlier. A remove curse potion with a magnitude of 0 has no effect as far as I could determine. I mentioned filtering by duration as you had suggested earlier would probably work fine, as long as we bear in mind the magnitude thing.