Cell Commands.
How to restrict a cell or make it unique.

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I was thinking about the option for a bar fight in a tavern, then I thought how to prevent NPCs from killing each other outright, then I thought about a way to restrict the actions in a cell, then I generalized the idea, and looked at the bigger vista and came to a more general conclusion that can do a lot of functions including restricting actions in a cell.

Different cells could restrict specific action types, and/or restrict usage of specific weapons and spells, so for instance in a bar, the usage of lethal weapons and spells would be restricted and NPCs would not initially try to use them, so when a fight starts, they would use non-lethal weapons and spells on each other.

But for instance, if the player joins the fight and start hacking at them with a blade, then other NPCs, especially guards would start using the more serious weapons and try to attack the offender.

Those restricted cells can be implemented in other ways, so for instance when you are in a shop, cathedral, or an NPC's house, if you draw out your weapon, because that place is marked as restricted cell, you will be reminded to sheath the offender, or else, and after a while, if not heeded, the shop owner, or the host, or the priest would call for a guard to take care of the situation.

Unless you are a true friend with the shop owner or the house host, which would only result in voicing a remark on the quality of the weapon or some such response.

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But those restrictions can be a part of a greater system, like this:

We can have a system in which we can define a series of conditional checks to perform actions based on the conditions, and gather those conditional actions under a group or template and apply those templates to cells.

So a Template can be called "No weapon should be drawn.", or "Non-lethal fights." and so on...

Then we can apply any number of those templates to any cell, and modders could design their own cell command templates and add them to any cell they like to add new effects to an aspect of the game-play in those cells.

Effects like prohibiting fast travel, or making an upward current to make it hard for a person to reach to bottom of a water well, or applying the rules of an arena and its fighting styles, or changing the behavior of the population in a specific place, and so on...

Cell command templates are made of some predefined flags that would have some specific meaning to the game engine, and optionally some rules that add more variation to the cell's change of behavior.

Flags are like this:

• Cell type: Dungeon, city, wilderness, and the like...
  
• Cannot fast travel from here or to here.
  
• Peaceful place, so no weapon should be equipped.
  
• Non-lethal fights, like in bars.
  
• Zero health means unconscious, not dead.
  
• Outland, so gradually force the players to retreat to the inland places.
  
• ...

Rules are like this:

• For each NPC, if the fight target of the NPC has equipped lethal weapons or spells, then negate the non-lethal place flag for the current NPC.
  
• For each NPC, if the cell owner's disposition is friendly with the NPC, then negate the peaceful place flag for that NPC, once.
  
• For each Object, if the Object is sank below water surface more than "D" units then give it a force upwards in proportion to the depth.
  
• For the first NPC that is not in the player group and has seen the player, first run to the big cathedral bell and ring it, then continue with normal behavior of the situation.
  
• For the first NPC that sees a dragon approaching, run to the big cathedral bell and ring it and warn the gathering folk about the dragon.
  
• For each guard who sees the Overseer passing in front of him, stand still, and hail the Overseer, and stand in attendance until he passes, before reverting to normal behavior.
  
• For each NPC in the fight, if the health percentage goes below a specified value, then surrender and run out of the place.
  
• ...

Each rule has a target and a condition to be fulfilled, and then a block of scripts that gets executed any time a target is found for the rule and the conditions are fulfilled.

Just think about the possibilities.

seems a pretty solid idea

though I'm more of a play the game than know how its made kinda guy

anything that makes the game better is fine by me.

I like it. You clearly put a lot of thought into this and all I can see is this improving gameplay. As fo not being able to fast travel well they have already implemented this before so it makes a good example that it is possible. I vote down on the ability for npcs to flee though. Surrender, yes. Flee. Well In fallout it wasn't a big deal, you had a gun. But If I don't have a bow on me I don't want to have to chase enemies down.

Well making the it where the cell decides whether the character wounds the other person or draws a weapon has been used before but having cell commands can also become an issue. The reason why commands are by a character to character basis or a family to family basis is because it will allow for you to have the same effect that you desire without restricting, say guards, with the same thing. It allows for a potential exploit. Now there could be say a daedric temple were no one in it can use magic or whatever, that would work, but on a larger scale it should stay from NPC to NPC and leave it as conditional commands.

You put alot of thought into that. Well done.

Thanks.


I gave the scripted example of NPCs running out as in the arena where they have to empty the arena for other combatants to continue.


Well each interior cell is a cell, so a house hold can be one or more cell, or a daedric shrine as well.

The rules are conditional, so they can select their target within the cell, so there is no need for them to affect all the NPCs within the cell, and it can add a lot of rules to affect some aspects of NPC or other behavior within that cell, and as those rules can be gathered in templates, then they can be applied to any cell or removed from them, then this gives a powerful toll for developers and modders to specialize the general behavior of thing in any place that they like without duplicating a work.

But if you wanted to add those rules to individual NPCs or items in those areas, it would have been a chore and it would add a lot of conflict potential.


Thanks, I have thought about these kind of ideas for year now, but this particular idea came to me within an hour or two as I wrote it down.

Those commands can also be an effective way to discourage players from getting far off the map area, without placing a hidden barrier in the way.

For instance we can give them warning of feeling danger and then spawn some seriously dangerous dragons in front of them. Or something like that.

You could have a Faction Exception List too. Like all guards for a city are in a particular faction so they can have their faction added to a list that can ignore rules in a particular cell. The only problem I saw is the "Unconscious instead of Dead" being an independent rule. That should really be a part of the "Non-lethal fighting only" rule so when the player pulls out his 6 foot claymore and decides to escalate things he won't just knock them all unconscious. Of course for some rooms it would be nice to have that rule independently as well, like certain quest areas or with an example from Oblivion, in the dream realm for that Bravil Quest.

Other than that the only potential exploit I see is a player starting a bar fight, letting everyone beat on each other til people start getting knocked out, then either robbing them blind or just killing them at insanely low health.

I like it, especially for towns where Guards can have different responses based on your actions. Like not trying to cut my head off for stealing an apple, and just knocking me out if I resist arrest. But if I try and stick a sword in someone, they fill me full of arrows.

This is a great idea, thanks for actually thinking of something worthwhile, and putting effort into explaining it. :celebration:

These should have the ability to be changed. If an assassin comes into a bar, then the assassin would use lethal fighting styles, and then other people would also use lethal fighting against him, so maybe a "not effected by the following flags" and a "not effective where/against who" button.

I just read through the posts, "conditional" is the word I was thinking for what I wrote above.


Maybe make it so it can be applied to some armor or people. Imagine a place that has a poisonous gas in it, so it has the "outland" flag checked, but people that have a poison resistance can enter it, but the Outland flag is still applied to all other people. There are other ways to do this type of thing, but imagine it used for other things,

what about hell no ,if i want to kill some one whit a sword inside a bar for no reason i should be able to ,restriction like those dont belong to TES.

Sounds logical, a nice concept/idea. You explain it all very well, almost too well at some points.

Just a tip, the first sections of your post are linguistically hard to understand for some. (I can imagine.) Might want to summerize it quickly in a way that so it's easier to read. Since I think that everyone should be able to understand the now in retrospect, obvious but great improvments.

Cheers.

Stuff like this makes my day. Did you read the OP? There wouldnt be anything restricting you, but NPC responses would change based on what you do.

Yes, i know what a cell is but it would be easier to set rules to an individual family or group of NPCs than make all rules conditional on a cell per cell basis. As I said above, if you want make a daedric shrine that shuts out such and such then that would be cool but giving each cell it's own conditional rules just seems more time consuming than setting those rules to the NPC family or individual NPC.



Problem is if the player is good enough or has consoled godmode on then they can just kill the dragons and then walk off the edge of the world hehe.

Its not like every cell needs to have its own rules. You could just have presets like Default(normal world), Bar, Church, or Town with the ability to fine tune. I guess it would just be like "water level" settings for interiors.



They could just turn off borders with a console anyway , but I can see the point there. Could cause some problems if you could spawn some level 100 dragon and then kite him into a city...

Thanks, it seems that I have found a champion for these ideas.

Those cell commands are optional additional opportunities for designers to fine tune the environment even more.

These ideas only give us more options to be able to change the behavior of the places and the items and people inside them. Nothing more, and those optional additional effects are conditional and can select the explicit targets that they affect and those targets are not changed themselves, which means less conflicts.

And those rules are added or removed to or from cells by templates, and each cell can have any number of those templates attached to it, so here is no chance of conflict either.

A clean and neat solution to let us tweak the behavior of any place and item that we like.

Cheers.

Those conditions can have faction checks as well, and if the developers can think of and implement any flag that would change the behavior of a cell like the "Unconscious instead of Dead" flag, the designers and modders would think of a situation to use them for a good effect, so the more options the better.


If you are fiendish and clever enough to think of such a scheme and can pull it off, then you should be allowed to get the reward.


Yes the scripted block of a rule can result in a very complex and powerful tool to change anything and any behavior as we like.

The conditions select the target and the situation, and the rule block, does the rest of the job.


Thanks, and those condition can check the lawfulness level of the people that they affect, and the people who do not heed the laws, would be excluded completely, or whenever they disliked the target a lot.

Actually this could happen to anybody, so if you can goad any person to a specific level, they would ignore the rules, and it all can be programmed into those rules.


Yes, if by any tiny chance, something like these ideas get implemented in Skyrim or any other game, our imagination would be the limit. Mix and combine those rules and effect as you like.


Sorry, English is not my first language, and I fear I would botch it up further, so if anyone gets interested to the ideas because of the next comments, he would return and read the passages more carefully, and that would do the job.

But if I get enough feedback to be worthwhile to change some parts, I would do it.

Even if it isn't used in the game, I would like to see in it the construction set (if it isn't too hard for Bethesda to do that), so the modders can use it to its full potential.

Well, it would be the height of impracticality, if they provide such a powerful tool, and do not use it themself.

There are consoles out there, where there could not be mods, but maybe we say that they provide it on the last stages of the game production and leave its usage for the next DLCs.