This looks very interesting. Will watch.

This looks pretty neat. A question about the "overlord" type NPC/creature you can hire with gold. You said they were more intelligent. Do they command lesser minions for you?

Oh, and also, can you control a whole group of minions? Or can you only just have one designated minion?

There. Added a repair system now, though frankly it feels a little overpowered, just find yourself a minion with a repair score of over 75 (for the +25% bonus to equipment), give him all the hammers you find and you can forget needing to invest any ranks in armorer yourself AND he keeps all the other minions in full repair xD - Like most things I gave it a toggle though in the menu screen so you can turn it off if you feel it's unbalanced.



I meant you are the overlord and hire your minions for gold (in the respective game mode anyway there's a few game modes with different methods of recruitment. Default "freeplay" mode you just cast the minionise spell on any NPC in the game to recruit them, no catches or hoops to jump through)

You can have as many minions as you want, by default the game engine complains if you recruit more than 5 but theres plenty of mods that extend that, for all practical purposes theres no limit short of crashing your PC. You can command all of them, at present you can't "hand pick" a minion for a task, but rather if you issue a command using left click a single minion will volunteer and handle the task on his own if he's not already busy, if you issue a command with right mouse button it sends all minions who arn't already busy to go deal with it.

Thanks for the reply. This sounds very cool indeed! I may have to make a vampire character now just for this and have an terrorizing army >:D

Progress report 9/9/10 =p
Installing OBGE broke my Oblivion installation and had to reinstall it >.< - got it set back up in record time (and got OBGE to work in the process). Been having trouble finding a reliable way of recognising a player's summons. Also summons seem to be hard wired not to respond to AI package modifcation so I can only get them to follow attack/follow commands, not loot/harvest/repair/pick lock/carry. Still for disposable meatshield being able to command them to lead into battle is a big improvement

Still polishing up what I've got, trying make it feel as natural as possible. I think i might scrap the "game modes" idea, for a list of different recruitment tools (Recruit friends, recruit faction, auto-minionise commanded creatures etc), and you pick off the methods of recruitment that sit well with you/fit your character since there's so many different scenarios I can envision xD.

Also, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWwi5rO5ES8.


The ability to queue tasks isn't something really I'd put much focus on previously but it's been in since the beginning. Looking at the video I can see I need to have the minions fetch a new task immediatly on completion of an earlier task, the reason the wolf keeps running back to me in the video is because he's completed his task and it takes a couple seconds before his AI looks at the task list again and picks up his next goal. I can fix that tommorow.

Looking good! I love the flavour text - Get 'em!

Some questions about the loot sack: is it a container you select in the world (ie, one already in the vicinity) or is it something you need to drop/spawn to get minions to fill? If you give the gather/drop loot commands, does it pop up automatically at your feet? Can you pick it up and take it with you?

Are you going to include configuration via ini file for things like weight/value ratio and drop/keep potion toggles? I'm a chronic restarter (though not recently, strangely) and I hate having to try to remember all my "default" settings for all my mods.

I could include a configuration .ini now you mention it. I hadn't really seen why anyone'd want to use an ini when they can do it at runtime but yeah I can see now why some people'd prefer it =p - the flavour text is changable from the options too. Currently got "goblin" ("Lookin' fer shinies boss!"), "commander" ("Search the area people!"), "animal trainer" ("Fetch!")

At the moment the moment the loot bag is a static container which:
- Appears automaticlly in front of you when you issue a loot related command and there's no existing bag nearby
- Appears by the minions feet if you tell them to drop what they're carrying and there's no bag nearby

But small minions have trouble reaching the container to open it as a static prop so I'm gonna replace it with a movable item that can be grabbed/moved/psuedo-picked up (It'd add a dummy version with added weight to your inventory, difference being that when you next use a loot command the loot container'd retain the items that were inside it because you "carried" the bag with you instead of threw down a new empty one), I might even try your own trick of adding the value to the bag like you did with your storage sacks so you can pick up the entire bag and just hand it to the merchant at the end


Can't really see any refinements to it I can make. My biggest worry is finding a way to balance the distance at which it decides to create a new bag, too far and the minions might deposit loot off-screen and the player isn't sure where it went, too near and the player might accidentlly delete the old bag and lose loot he wanted to claim, the only other solution would be to have the player cast a spell to summon a bag IF he wants one handy but that'll add more clutter to your (already burgeoning) spellbook when "minimal clutter" is the focus of the mod's design

Take it from me: the sellable sack idea is a pain in the [censored]. It could be the steps I take to retrieve the empty from the merchant and return it to the player, but it seems to crash half the time for half the mod's users.I don't use it myself, usually preferring to shop around for the best price - I use Enhanced Economy and never seem to have enough money as it is.


One way to help the player find the bag would be a unique texture. It doesn't have to be a garish red bag or anything, just something to set it apart from the usual grain sacks. As for how to place it in the gameworld, you could include a misc item that the player can drop and grab to finetune the placement, or that gets auto-dropped when the right command is used. Of course, most of my characters are physical wimps so I'd let the minion(s) carry the loot back to town anyhow.

edit: I just re-read and saw the bit about "deleting and losing loot"... Have you thought of having a remote container than stores the loot, and using an activator bag to access it? That way you're not actually handling a container at any time, and can't accidentally nuke your loot. Of course, the AI might not work properly if it's not actually a container in the room with the minion...

Say this mod sound like fun, but what would it require? I read the first post but I didn't see what expansion etc it would require besides the game itself.

It'd be easy enough to just teleport the bag, container or remote activator alike and retain it's contents (The AI isn't a problem, the FInd package will get a minion to activate whatever the target item is, so the onActivate block can handle everything for me) - it's just the player could theoretically dump an unlimited amount of loot into the and take it all home that way, whereas the commands are in place to let you tell your minions to divide up the loot between them and carry it if you want).


Only http://obse.silverlock.org/, which is pretty much a requirement of any mod these days

Development Update
Phew, busy day - got so much done thanks for planning it all in advance.

Loot bags: Polished up the loot bag system to a mirror shine. You now know whether you are in range of an existing bag you now get given a new bag and the old one deleted as soon as you leave it's catchment area. The actual loot bag itself is no longer a simply static container that is placed when the command is called but is now an actual sack with havok physics which you can grab, push or even pick up and add to your inventory. The bag's value and weight reflects the value and weight of the objects contained within it for easy reference and you can access the bag's contents from inside your inventory so you can use the bag as a portable container, and if that wasn't enough you can actually sell the bag (and it's contents) directly to a merchant for one-click vendoring.

Task optimisation: Minions now fetch a new task immediatly instead of waitting once a task is completed so no more dopey minions like in last night's teaser video.

Summons: Finally cracked the summons problem with the latest OBSE 0018 commands so now summons are correctly identified and minionised. They still only obey the "simpler" commands like attack and follow (and they can queue tasks) but that's still a big improvement on default summons "let's wait til it hits master and then attack" approach to fighting.


Also on that note 2 new videos... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ybc1B1k2_Jc.

This time, summoning 3 (Supreme magicka enhanced) skeletons, and then assigning 3 seperate targets which the skeletons proceeded to split between themselves and attack 1 target each; and then die gloriously. Note the background music - I never actually enter combat mode as I was being stealthy, traditionally your summons won't attack unless you enter combat.

...and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIh6vn_PZnA.

Just demonstrating the new one-touch sales feature. Granted in this example it's not exactly one-touch as I had to load some items I could find again in the shop window, but normally you'd have been loading up the bag in the course of your adventure (likely your minions will've been loading it for you) and not in the actual shop...



Anyhow. I predict it'll be ready for release in a day or two now =3

wow, that was fast. reading through this makes me want to load up Overlord and start playing that again. lol. Now I can have an Oblivion flavor to the theme

Very cool, and can't wait.

Just wondering, though: What's that bow you use from? Looks like a handy weapon, being able to use it as a melee weapon in a pinch.
Also, what race is that? Doesn't look like any Khajiit I know.

Progress!
As I said I've been tidying up the recruitment methods today and polishing up the existing mechanics, Got quite a list of tweaks today...

• Removed follow/follow distant toggle and removed stop command. Now the LMB follow command tells them to drop what they're doing and come join you immediatly.
  
  
• RMB + No Target is now a hold position command which is context sensitive. If you issue the command in sneak mode, your minions will hide at that location and wait for your signal. If you issue the command with your weapon drawn your minions will guard the location and attack hostile NPCs on sight, and if you just issue it normally they idle at that location and chat/play animations.
  
  
• Minions can now use scrolls, and extended the no-potion-turn-in to cover scrolls too
  
  
• Greatly improved response time to loot commands (Down to 0-2 seconds from 2-7 seconds)
  
  
• Creatures/NPCs effected by Command Humanoid/Creature are now treatted as minions and obey attack commands.
  
  
• Started adding the recruitment abilities so players can pick and mix recruitment options that suit their character, such as recruit from faction, recruit friends, command undead
  
  
• While adding recruit from faction I had a brainwave and added a "Join faction" ability that lets you join any non-quest faction (such as bandits, necromancers, goblins etc.) by simply casting the spell on a member of that faction. You can only join one special faction at a time, but it means you could say... live amongst a goblin tribe or bandits and have them adventure with you by using the recruit from faction ability. Lots of roleplay options there.

Also, due out tommorow!



Figure someone'd ask xD

Both are custom, the Khajiit is a snow leopard style khajiit I did like 12 months ago, but the few people I sent the test model too gave it poor reviews, didn't seem worth all the effort expanding it to make it more end-user friendly if it wasn't really that appreciated, plus Slof made (his, her?) own fluffy tailled snow leopard anyway since then so too much competition to make it worthwhile now ;p. The bow is just a hack modification of the Grummite bow I got after watching avatar which made me think a bit harder about bow combat, namely my character's got the arrows tucked in the binding around the grip not on their back, and secondly I have a false swap version of the bow which counts as a weak blunt weapon (Mostly for triggering fatigue-inducing melee attacks through adrenaline fuelled combat rather than killing)

Well, the tail is quite well made, none the less. I might even suggest releasing it as a resource if you're not planning on releasing the whole race.
But very cool on the bow. Very cool. I might need to get one. I normally use blades, but I'm sure adding a bow blade would make more sense in this case, or just add rough antlers from a buck.

Sweet. I meant to ask earlier about potions: will they intelligently use poisions on their weapons? One thing that bugs me about my current CM Partner is that she doesn't take advantage of poisons I give her... or potions at all for that matter. I guess its all in the AI packages she's got, eh?


Now this... this is... I'm speechless!

I wonder why the CM partners don't use them, Radiant AI actually uses it by default so you'd think they'd behave the same way. Far from not using poisons and potions I actually find the minions to be a bit on the trigger happy side, like blowing 2 or 3 defence and healling potions, poison-of-god-slaying and a combat scroll to fight a fruit bat xD (due to the fact they have an effect over time so they stack the potions to have the desired effect, stock potions work a bit better since they have an immediate effect). Still, if you make a keg full of trash poison out of common materials like nightshade and sacred lotus, and have 5 minions armed with bows, that's a lot of trigger happy in a good way ;)

Progress report!
Currently in the process of tidying up the last few loose ends, got a tiny list of bits to spit and polish but nothing major or functional - and then it'll be ready to download. So while you wait

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucqxYfANe94
And no it's not meant to be a dig at toaster's sharing mod - his mod has wider range of functions, I just needed an example of a dialogue driven companion

Excellent!

Edit: Apocalyptica. Even better. I can't wait Sounds like the ranger gamemode is perfect for me.

Looks amazing! What mod were you using to get multiple summons of the same creature btw?

Supreme Magicka or Mighty Magicka both allow multiple summons.


Anyways, can a mod lock this topic now? - moving up from WiP thread to Relz ^^

OK. *click*