Just a heads up, I will be uploading a new rev for the alpha tonight. It has a few small bug fix, a few tweaks, better way to find scale of the actors so the OS should be placed a little better. This is only a visual thing but I did not like how the OS seem to be "too low" on some of the tall actors. Also I tightened up the window where you could start moving/attacking/blocking again at the end of the ghost dodge. There was a short moment that you could attack and block while you were still in the ghost state. That has been eliminated.

This may go into BETA very soon, but I will still work on the quest while it is beta.
While in beta this will be the last chance for you guys to speak up about anything that is not working well for you.

Then when the Quest is finished the final release will be uploaded with the quest in it. The testers that I get reports from ("good so far" type reports or the bug reports) during the beta will then have the option to skip the quest in the final release but you will need to get a secret "key" from me to do that.

I'll most likely want to do the quest anyway.

Hammerblade was fun, so why not. I've not played Old man of the Mountain yet.

Could you say more about the Ghost state - I just looked in the readme and first post and don't see that referenced.

Yes the Read me file in the Alpha zip is very sparse, I am procrastinating on editing and filling that out...

A magic "dodge" was suggested by a player here (got to get their name, they posted here so I will find it to include them in my thanks)
But I did not want to do the kind they were suggesting. I wanted to try something other than the "bullet time" dodge or the cliché transporter (pop suddenly from here to there) type of dodge, I wanted something very different that is not seen in games often and would offer a slightly different kind of result (a magical one) then normal dodging but still keeping the fundamental timing and limitations (strategy) found in normal dodging.

See a video of the Ghost Dodge here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LLGoyUMX2I&playnext=1&videos=k4gvlFT_TkU&feature=mfu_in_order


This Magic Dodge is as "visually" close to the matrix ghost effect as I could get. It will give you almost complete immunity to attacks but it will cost a lot! The magic drains fast as you trigger the ghost state. so you must learn to only enact it when absolutely needed and for a as short a burst as you can (to just avoid the attack). Also you cannot attack block nor move around during your ghost state in the "magic dodge".

I had to add this to the ghost dodge for technical reasons:

Significant pain will prevent you and the NPC from triggering the ghost dodge. The pain duration is determined by the Willpower stat.

The the more will power you have the shorter the time the pain will distract you. For will power stats from 1 to 100 the pain duration can range from 1 ( plus 0.1 second to 10 seconds more or less). The more damage done the longer the pain may effect you, but this is countered by the Will power:

Pain-Time = ( 1 + ( ( 10 * ( ( HealthMeterOld - player.GetAV health ) / player.getbaseav health ) ) * ( player.getav willpower / 100 ) ) )

If pain-timer > 0 then you will not be able to ghost dodge. So if you are burning "painful" from a 5 second fire spell you will not be able to ghost dodge in the middle of that event unless the amount of damage being done to you during that time is very very low (about 2% or less of your health) . As said this also effect the NPC in the same way.

You must have the Combat Magic Kit equipped and then you press (or rather TAP) the Left and Right and Back Move buttons (I use the arrow keys) all at the same time. My other mod that does the bullet time dodge will detect this and not rigger at the same time unless you are out of magicka.

Full package with the beta and all support files ready to download. I will be removing it soon so grab it fast if you would like to beta test it.
Do a clean install if you have been using the Alphas.

As I said this will not have the quest in it. I will be working on the quest in a separate esp. I will fix bugs as you find them and then merge the two together for the final release when it is done.

The zip is called Beta for testers only

get it here:

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=23541

OK that looks cool to so stealthier types can get in on the action too.

After the quest is implemented - will we find NPCs who are also using the kit? That I like. It makes for more of a "whoa that guy knows magic" when fighting them.

Next question-

Is there any scripts running in your mods that would result in spam in the console that says 'cleaning activators'?

Eventually all higher level NPC that are designated in the CS as in the class called "magic specialization" will have the combat magic kit that they CAN use if they choose to and have the destruction skill level to pull it off.

I am trying to work out how I will do this per the quest story, my IDEAL concept is that you see only a few NPC use the Combat Magic at first but you do not have it yourself. After fighting a few NPC that use this then you get a few Combat magic tools at a time, maybe the ghost dodge at first then the plasma attacks then the H2H attacks and finally the Omni shield as the quest progresses on.

My mod dose not purposely do any console messaging 'cleaning activators', but it is possible that OBSE does this per the new array commands I am using? For example a small script that TheNiceOne wrote for me using Arrays has a command in it called DUMP that I think is for debugging reasons but that was in my Archery mod not this one. So No, I do not make the mod do this (intentionally anyway).

I'm pretty sure that conversation is just one of the random, dynamically generated conversions that can occur between the generic, unnamed respawning npcs http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Mage_Scholar and http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Mage_Apprentice that aimlessly wander around the Arcane University. To the best of my knowledge, no important npcs ever reference such a discovery and it's just background ambiance, to give the illusion that these people actually do anything when you aren't around. Spend half an hour walking around the University and you'll overhear a dozen variations of this conversation.

Post limit.