Automatic Random Enchantment System — ARES
The Automatic Random Enchantment System (ARES) populates the game world with dynamically enchanted items, capable of creating literally millions of potential combinations. And it does so in a manner that should be automatically balanced for your game.

For example, my test run produced the http://tesnexus.com/downloads/images/41244-1-1323745392.png. Notice how the Drain Health 3 pt (that is, the wearer loses 3 HP) offsets some of the other enchantments, allowing the rest of the item to be more powerful to compensate.

Get it from these fine websites!

• http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=41244
  
• TES Alliance (pending)
  
• http://code.google.com/p/oblivion-ares/downloads/detail?name=ARES v1.0.1F rv10 beta.7z

Longer Introduction (from the readme)
The Automatic Random Enchantment System does exactly what it says: it provides a system where items found in the gameworld can be randomly enchanted. ARES gives modders a very powerful set of tools to control exactly how, when, and why a particular item is enchanted the way it is.

ARES then takes this information, describing possible enchantments, and randomly applies them to items sitting in containers or worn by NPCs throughout Oblivion. Each enchantment is created dynamically based on the parameters set by the modder.

Names are associated with these enchantments through an "affix" system, similar to the one used in games such as the Diablo series. For example, a modder might decide that a "Flaming" weapon has a moderate amount of fire damage — associating it with a Common soul. ARES may then choose the "Flaming" affix, and apply it to an item, giving it a Fire Damage enchantment comparable to what one could make with a Lesser Soul Gem. He may also associate a weapon "of Frost" with some Frost Damage, and ARES could combine the two into a "Flaming Sword of Frost" that does both Fire Damage and Frost Damage.

All of the values for the enchantments, such as magnitude or duration, are normalized to match values found in any particular game, based on the mods installed. For example, if a mod decides to make the Chameleon effect more expensive, ARES will generate smaller amounts of that effect as a result. If a mod makes Grand Soulgems very rare and only appearing late in the game, then similarly-powerful enchantments will only be found in high-level areas and worn by high-level enemies.

ARES is also distributed with my own mod created using the tool, which is simply DW_ARES.esp. DW_ARES.esp implements hundreds of affixes for literally millions of possible combinations. However, it also does not use all of the features that ARES makes possible; it is a large but simplistic implementation of an ARES plugin.


Anyway, I hope it's everything you've been waiting for; you've certainly been waiting long enough! Thank you all for your patience.

Congratulations! It's been a long one.
Although I don't expect this to be in a beta, how are stats for MMM OOO or FCOM handled?

They are handled automatically, along with everything else. ARES does everything based on game and effect settings. Any mod that changes those (as an overhaul would) will be reflected by ARES. The enchantments generated are equivalent to those possible at the enchanting altar.

Now I have to figure out what to pull from my fully loaded game in order to find room for ARES. :confused:

I've got a list going for mods I want to add for next play-through, but damn it, I want to use this one NOW. :biggrin:

Thanx mucho for all the months (years?) of labor on this one, DragoonWraith.

This sounds awesome. It's going in my game.

Edit:

I'm reading the readme and I'm trying to completely wrap my head around it. From a player perspective assume I'm using your version of ARES that you included and using some random assortment of mods. If I had opened a chest without your mod and there was an unenchanted dagger in it and a leveled list sword that has a flame enchant on it put there by some mod. Does ARES have a chance to modify that modded flame sword or is there just a chance that the unenchanted dagger has a random assortment of enchants? In other words does this touch enchanted items in my leveled lists from other mods or does it take my game settings and randomly generate it's own items in addition to what my mods might have?

Edit 2:

Does the Log keep filling up forever will I end up with a huge file? Anything errors or warnings I should be looking out for?

Edit 3:

Can't get this to work with ScreenEffects. I wonder if ScreenEffects uses CSE or Oblivion Magic Extender. Damn I can't use Fearsome Magic with this.

Edit 4:

ScreenEffects only doesn't work if I start a new game it causes the whole screen to go gray. If I start a game without ARES save and then add ARES I do not get the gray screen bug. Still need to test out a Fearsome Magic spell and see if it works.

@Vharlak

A little off-topic, but when you use ScreenEffects normally, do you get a long pause before it runs?

Well, ARES is very simple in that respect: the only load order requirement it has is that Oblivion.esm is also loaded. And I'm going to work on removing that requirement...

And yes, I've been working on this for about five years. Since OBSE v0013 or v0014 or something. Off and on, you know, with a lot of breaks, especially for about three years there with school where it only saw work during winter and summer.


\o/ Glad you think so.


ARES skips quest items, items with enchantments, and items with scripts, for compatibility's sake. It does affect items from leveled lists, but only unenchanted ones, so that dagger might be enchanted (even if from a leveled list), but the sword would not be.


It starts fresh each game. It does get very large, but that's because if anything goes wrong, I want to find out where it did.


Could you give me a link to this ScreenEffects? I can't imagine why there'd be any conflict (the issues with CSE/OBME should only affect the Construction Set, not the game), but I'll look into it.

Your mod definitely sounds very nice indeed. I was just looking at the one screenie on Tesnexus. This is obviously just one example. But I think a Detect Life of 6 ft. is really not useful at all, even for a very low level character. That is like arm's length. Or is the idea that one can also find "crappy" magic items? (that robe is not all crappy though)

Please understand this is not about your mod being "bad" or anything. In fact I believe it is great! But maybe the randomness of an enchantment should be with certain minimum and maximum boundaries. Say for example, a DL like above should be minimum 15 ft (or whatever; I think the smallest spell for DL is 30 ft in vanilla?) and maximum 100 ft. (just throwing a number here) in order not to render the item totally useless, other than for selling. Or too overpowered.

I have some other mods I'm currently looking to add and get working, but ARES definitely looks like a very lovely idea and it is on my list to download soon. I hope you find my post not offensive. It really is not intended this way! :foodndrink:

Downloading as we speak!

Really looking forward to testing this. Just one question: Where should I put ARES in my load order?

Yeah, considering that I found that robe on the assassin who killed the Emperor halfway through the tutorial dungeon... I'm quite OK with it being somewhat "crappy" (note: I jacked up the enchantment rate for that test, though that did not affect power levels, just gave more opportunities for something particularly good to drop; most of the assassins had at least one enchanted item). This is more-or-less intended. There can be issues with truly meaningless enchantments, but it's difficult for me to have a specific-yet-general scheme for handling such situations. Instead...

The modder can have fairly specific control over these things. The DW_ARES.esp included with the download is a very basic (albeit thorough, in terms of covering all sorts of items and using all the magic effects) implementation of the system. It doesn't actually use about 90% of the filtration features that you could use. You could easily jack up the lower levels of the Detect Life enchantment to improve them at the lowest levels. Or simply not allow them to spawn on too-low level gems.

Part of the issue, though, is that it's predicated on the base cost and enchantment factor of the effect itself. I can calculate what values to give Detect Life so that its magnitude falls within certain ranges when created using my game, but if another person's game makes Detect Life enchantments more or less expensive, that will affect how the magnitudes work out.

Ultimately, it's just simpler to allow the enchantments to occasionally risk being uselessly weak. Everything that ARES adds is "free", in the sense the enchantment was added on top of an unenchanted item.

Though... I did intend to include a method of unenchanting things... I forgot to include that. That's actually a compatibility thing; if ARES enchants an item that a script looks for by ID, ARES can prevent it from recognizing the item. I'd intended to include a spell that would return the original for you, but forgot to do that. Well, you know what the first patch will include. I have to think about the best way to handle that...


It is absolutely unoffensive; I always appreciate thoughtful feedback. Would love to get more of it, in fact. Thank you very much.

In reality, though, the point of ARES is that it is absolutely hassle-free. If you're not using OBME (or, rather, if you're not editing mods while using OBME), ARES is literally just a matter of installing OBSE, COEF, and ARES, and then it will simply work. It's designed to fit itself into any load order (that includes Oblivion.esm) without tinkering or tweaking. You don't need to do anything to it in Wrye Bash (in fact... don't do that. ARES adds new record types that Wrye Bash can't handle, so try to avoid having Bash look at DW_ARES.esp too closely).


Anywhere you like! It really doesn't matter in the slightest; nothing in ARES can conflict with anything else, seeing as the only records in the .esp are custom-defined records that no other plugin in existence uses. Oblivion.esm has to be in the load order for ARES.dll to work, but that's it. Since Oblivion always loads Oblivion.esm first no matter what, there's really nothing special to do with it. It'll handle everything automatically. Which was, of course, the point.

What's the deal with OBME here?

This is so cool.

I downloaded ARES now, and COEF. I dumped COEF in my OBSE subfolder already, seems to work just fine (that is, it does nothing at the moment but sit there quietly as there is no other mod of mine using it). Ares install will follow soon. DLL (which I already love) and yours I consider among the very most creative mods to make the gameplay and leveled lists less predictive and thus more interesting. I've been on and off Oblivion for 4 years now, and the best time ever to play it is really right now!!

I've been reading the readme of Ares more closely, and you mention the potential issue of savegame bloating. How serious is it with your own implementation of it? And is there anything that can be done against it? Maybe with Wrye Bash? If so, it's not a big deal to clean the last savegame of any bloat every once in a while...

I didn't find any percentages for the chance to find a random-enchanted item. But overall I would agree that it should definitely be a rare event. Now... I don't understand much about leveled lists. But I was wondering if Ares could (in future versions?) replace any magic item that a leveled list puts into loot? So instead of receiving the 5th "Dagger of Storms", let there be a chance (settable in an .ini) that Ares will "intercept" the enchanted item the LL came up with and replace it with some Ares-randomly-created-effect item of similar strength foreseen at the current level. It would add even more randomness to loot while keeping the total number of enchanted items in the game the same.

I know that at the moment Ares is touching only un-enchanted items. My idea is going beyond this. I just throw up the idea from a playing the game point of view. I of course have no idea if it would be at all technically possible to implement it.

As I said, I currently wait for one other mod to kick in in my game soon (next few days), and thereafter Ares will definitely be next on my list! Thanks so much!!

Doesn't OBME v1.0 use the older version of something to do with hooking the CS and it's not compatible or some thing? I don't really know; I had a crash at one point in testing, you suggested removing OBME, and I did. I haven't really looked at it since.


:) I think so. Glad you do too.


Heh, yeah, DLL is a similar idea, though ultimately it can't replicate what ARES can. The tools that it provides are very intricate. Probably far more so than anyone will ever need.


The "protection" available against save game bloat is simply that, well, there shouldn't be much of it, since enchantment rates are quite low. Ultimately, it's exactly the same as if you'd taken all of those items to the Enchantment Altar yourself, in terms of how it affects the game. Because Bethesda didn't expect the player to be enchanting enormous numbers of items, there is no clean-up for those items: they'll persist in the savegame indefinitely, even if the only existing copy of them is lost (left in a cell that resets, for example). The same is true of ARES items.

Even more unfortunately, I'm not sure that Wrye Bash's tools for removing save game bloat will recognize these. They may, but I'm not sure. Eventually, something more robust will hopefully go in. The mechanics of cell resets are problematic here, though.


By default, the chance ranges from 0% (for 0 Luck) to 1.5% (for 100 Luck), plus any modifications to this from Fortify Magic Find. Under default settings, I think MF items cap out at about 30% each, which means if you had 9 pieces of equipment enchanted with the maximum amount of it, you could get 270%, so with 100 Luck you'd have a 5.55% chance per item. Which is pretty high, but would take a ridiculous dedication to it.

And that's assuming that the game will allow MF to stack past 100%. I never tested to see if it would... I certainly haven't implemented anything that prevents it, but who knows?


Currently, ARES sees the container after all leveled lists are evaluated. If the result of a leveled list is viable (i.e. not already enchanted), ARES can add an enchantment to it. But if it is, ARES won't. Technically, there's nothing stopping me from doing so, since it'd be trivial to strip out the old enchantment or even add on to it, but the problem is that it's almost impossible to know if I should. It's really important that ARES does not enchant anything that's quest or script related, because the process replaces the item with a copy that has a different Form ID. Not to mention the possibility that the item being replaced was supposed to be unique with a certain, specific, and important enchantment! So you can see, this is a difficult problem.

That said, I do want to do something along these lines, if for no other reason than to apply ARES to staves, which are currently unaffected since all of them are always enchanted.


Not a problem, glad you like it!

Okay, I was unsure if reinstall the game or not, then I saw this relase on the Nexus. I immediatley came here to say: Congratulations for the relase! I was waiting for this. Thank you very much :celebration:

You're thinking of AddActorValues, and that has since been updated to be compatible with future versions of OBSE.

So long as your new magic effects and Enchantments are being created using CreateForm(), there shouldn't be any serious conflicts. I don't remember what the issue was, but it might be worth another test?

I can't believe it, its finally out! :celebration: Now if only I could actually use it...

You say the mod draws the levels at which enchantment tiers appear from a leveled list of soulgems in Oblivion.esm , but couldn't this be personalized in an .ini instead, with default values the same as that leveled list in vanilla? That might allow this to be independent of Oblivion.esm, but given that you have been working on this so many years, I suppose there are other issues I haven't noticed with that.

Also, I see some issue with OBME at present, is it possible to add new OBME effects to the system right now?

Well, this is certainly something.

One thing I'm not clear on, with the version you provide, does it add to or replace the existing system for finding random enchanted items? I've never read up on how Vanilla Oblivion does it.

Using Nehrim?


The main one is that I'm relying on the leveled list to know when your game should see which soulgems. An INI wouldn't be automatically updated to reflect your game. Unfortunately, the leveled list is the only way (that I'm aware of) to maintain compatibility with all overhauls (that modify that leveled list). Nehrim doesn't have that leveled list, so I need to add some way of specifying that you're using Nehrim and a different leveled list should be used. That should be added soon.


According to JRoush, there shouldn't be an issue. Provided the effect is properly defined (has a Base Cost and Constant Effect Enchantment Factor), it should work perfectly. Do test it, though, since I have not yet.


Vanilla Oblivion doesn't really have a system. All enchantments were manually created in the CS and manually applied to items. Those items are then added to leveled lists, which are randomized, but there was no dynamic randomized enchantment creation during the game, just randomized selection of premade items.

ARES adds to this, by enchanting some of the items that are not currently enchanted.

Ok, that makes sense. Though it seems like a silly way for them to have gone about it.

I might give this a shot, more magic items is always a good thing!

Bethesda does a lot of stupid things. Some because that's simply how they have always done it and others to match some strange vision of what they believe TES should become. Bethesda always seems to remove features that I like and keep or add features that I don't or aren't that big of a deal. They finally have random items in Skyrim. A random item system, in addition to handcrafted and place items, was definitely something I wanted so they did good there.

True, assuming Bethesda did something the smart way is a great way to look like an idiot yourself.

It just never really occurred to me that every magical item was uniquely created! Its not like random enchantments are new or anything, they were a core part of Diablo II more than half a decade before this game even came out.

In this case, I think it was largely because it was easier this way for them. Yes, ARES is easier to use now, but they would have had to code up the whole backbone system first. Presumably, they would have also included a more advanced clean-up scheme, which is a difficult thing to do.


I keep hearing claims of this; is there any actual evidence for this? Without the CK, I don't see how this could be confirmed.

Well they have prefixes and suffices on items. I suppose they could have just created a bunch of items using that naming convention to achieve something that appeared to be random. I didn't get that feeling while I was playing though. I can't say for sure one way or the other.