Nighteye in Oblivion sadly doesn't have magnitude like it did in Morrowind, and custom shaders are something I haven't yet tackled.

However, I think there's a mod which already does this. Stealth Overhaul?

Edit: Oh, and happy birthday to me.

Happy birthday, dude! I guess we are in slightly different time zones, so I hope I have not missed it. If I have, happy belated!

I've been getting some interation between my levelling mod (RL) snd progress and just wanted some things clarified. Basically does progress only read from the 'progress.ini' file and ignores all the others? I ask because my progress to next level bar keeps jumping up to 100% and I get the 'rest and learn' advice i.e. I'm ready to level, but RL doesn't thing so, because I'm not. When RL runs it's scripts again, everything goes back to how it should. I realised this was due to progress ini being set to level me after 10 majors (my mistake) so went through the progress ini putting ';' before ALL the code lines except the skill advancement settings, as everything they related to is covered by the RL ini.
However, the 100% level progress bar still keeps jumping to 100%, then being put back to what RL thinks it should be (my current RL settings mean more like 12-14 majors make 1 level). Hence my question about which ini files are used. I realise the armourer plugin has it's own ini, but there are ALOT of other ones there too. Sorry if its a stupid question, but the readme didn't clarify it fully for my poor frazzled brain (on nights )

PS Many happy returns of the day :celebrate:

You need to set the RL INI to use option #2 or something if you do not what to see the levelup menu. The other possibility is that you have overwritten the levelup menu (which removes the "real" levelup menu) that RL includes. Do you have the latest version of OBSE (v18 stable)? I do not know what you commented out, but it might be better to set Progress' settings to match RL's. Progress, I believe, script enforces its changes, if it is loading later. If commenting out those lines did not change anything, then Progress was not the problem in the first place. Try setting Progress to match the RL settings, and make sure RL's levelup menu has been installed. Do the latter first. Just copy it over manually if you need to...

You need to edit Progress.ini and change iLevelUpSkillCount to a different value. What value it should be depends on your RL configuration, and I don't know enough about it to tell you for sure; however, until you get that info, setting it to 9999 will prevent spurious level-ups.

You may also need to change the value of iTrainingSkills. Again, you'll have to check with someone more familiar with RL.

As for all the other Progress(Whatever).ini files: they're loaded independently by their respective plugins, and can be safely ignored if you're not using any.


Progress applies all of its settings on game load, but doesn't enforce them later. Another more active script can override it. (This is not the case for all of the optional plugins, but none of those affect iLevelUpSkillcount.)

And thanks for the birthday wishes! You caught the right day, though I had myself a nice little mini-vacation and didn't catch it until now.

Actually, with RL in mode 2, 3, or 4 it sets iLevelUpSkillCount to 100 and manipulates the major skill advance count using setPCMajorSkillUps so that the level progress meter works and shows your progress with 1% granularity. It sets this every time it recalculates, which is on loading a savegame or when a skill advances. This means it will override the Progress settings when it does its next recalculation... if Progress happened to execute after RL when the savegame was loaded, this might be some time later.

To avoid the "sudden levelup on loading a savegame" problem when using Progress with RL in mode>=2, you should set iLevelUpSkillCount to 100 or more. I don't think just commenting them out in the progress.ini will work, you need to explicitly set it, otherwise it will just use whatever it was last set to in the savegame.

If you are getting the "levelup" message at times other than loading savegames, something else is probably fiddling with iLevelUpSkillCount and/or setPCMajorSkillUps.

Roughly similar to what I do in nGCD now, cool. So that's official: in Progress.ini, set iLevelUpSkillCount to 100.

ABO, do you recommend uncapping training or have you found a way to to a scripted level advancement which resets the counter?

Thanks for the useful replies chaps. Am I ok commenting out the other setting in progress.ini like fTrainingCostMult because I like how OOO does it?

No, it's pretty much never a good idea to comment out a variable in any mod's .ini file.

Instead, set Progress to the value OOO uses, which is 30. If you're working from my defaults or the OOO version of Progress.ini, that should already be the setting.

RL has a few different leveling modes that do slightly different things, but for the silent leveling mode that just uses "player.SetLevel", it also uses "setPCTraningSessionsUsed 0" to reset the counter when you level up. For "attribute only" and "sleep leveling" it just relies on the vanilla majorskill advance count exceeding iLevelUpSkillCount to handle the leveling for you, which triggers levelup and resets the training count when you sleep. For "verbose leveling", which is the recommended mode, it uses AdvancePCLevel which triggers the vanilla levelup mechanism immediately, incrementing your level and reseting the training count.

So in all modes, the training count is reset when you levelup. I recommend setting the count to 100, which is effectively unlimited, because I find the limitation a bit annoying and unrealistic, but other settings will work just fine.

Ha! I completely missed that command getting added. Side note, I've tried several other tricks to get nGCD to properly reset training count at level-up; I'm pretty sure I found that AdvancePCLevel does not reset training sessions if you've voided levelup_menu.xml (which, of course, I have). No bearing on any of RL's modes from the sound of it, but something to file in the memory banks.

Some progress updates on The Mod Formerly Known as MagLite:

I think I've nailed down my changes to summoned creatures. It's a significantly larger set of changes than I ever intended (especially, I tried very hard to avoid replacing creatures), but... well, conjuration was kinda crazy-bad. I finally caved to the obvious solution, and added Nature summons to the existing Daedra and Undead. I also decided to leave Shivering Isles alone, except for rebalancing costs (though the SI summons were far more consistently priced in the first place). There's one free summon slot but I left it open because I know at least one other mod uses it (Duke Patrick's Double-Nocked Arrows), and I decided to leave spiderlings off the list; that left me with 21 slots, enough to give seven creatures to each "school" of summoning.

None of these creatures scale, even at the low end, and each summon's cost is formulaic to its level. The summons and their levels, plus wielded weapon if appropriate, are as follows:

Daedra
5 - Scamp
7 - Flame Atronach
11 - Clannfear
13 - Frost Atronach
14 - Daedroth
17 - Storm Atronach
25 - Xivilai (battle axe)

Nature
3 - Imp
6 - Troll
7 - Black Bear
9 - Will-o-the-Wisp
11 - Spriggan
15 - Land Dreugh
25 - Minotaur Lord (warhammer)

Undead
4 - Ghost
6 - Skeleton Guardian (mace + shield)
9 - Ancient Ghost
10 - Skeleton Hero (bow)
12 - Faded Wraith (shortsword)
15 - Skeleton Champion (claymore)
25 - Gloom Wraith (longsword)

All of the weapons look daedric (since that's how bound weapons appear) and count as magic weapons for hitting ghosts etc., but they have stats appropriate to the best (MOBS-adjusted, unenchanted) weapon that creature could normally spawn with in-game. The Big 3 are exceptions: they get actual daedric. All of these weapons have a special script which makes them vanish if they're not being held by the appropriate creature. No scamming summons for gear! (Well, the skeleton archer has an infinite supply of steel arrows. But yeah.) Also, of course, no summoned creature will get additional summoning spells.

I've fiddled some more with several game settings, but perhaps most importantly, I've increased the magnitude exponent. This should more strongly encourage increasing duration instead of magnitude. Naturally, many effects are getting re-costed again based on this change. The ones that I disabled from spellmaking and/or enchanting will also be re-evaluated once everything else is in place.

I plan to include a stripped-down version of flyflightflea's Magic Overlap mod, which prevents crazy stacking of certain magic effects. I'll probably also borrow a few bits of TheTalkieToaster's enchantment mod, mentioned above. I'll definitely be rolling in TheNiceOne's Lightweight Potions, using that framework to assign player-made potions a cost based on their actual effects instead of just your alchemy skill, so dumping your "tainted" potions on a merchant won't be as lucrative as selling the good ones.

With thanks to bg2408, I'm slowly working in many of the graphical enhancements from LAME. (Got permission for this quite a while ago, never got around to it...) Slated for inclusion are bg's lightning bolt tweaks, spiffy enchantment shaders (and Tekuromoto's Flaming Arrows mod), J3X's new effects for nature and undead summons, and probably a few icons.

Interesting... so does AdvancePCLevel with levelup_menu.xml voided trigger a normal levelup, including re-leveling the current cell, without a popup dialog? By "voided levelup_menu.xml" do you mean an empty file?

RL currently recommends "verbose leveling" which uses AdvancePCLevel with custom levelup_menu.xml because RL's "silent leveling" just uses "setLevel" which doesn't immediately "levelup the world". If an empty levelup_menu.xml and AdvancePCLevel correctly levels up the character and surrounding world without a popup dialog, then I'll probably change RL to use that too. However, if it doesn't clear training sessions, then I suspect it will also fail to do other things normally done by AdvancePCLevel with a valid levelup_menu.xml...

Just for the record, since changing the progress ini setting to match RL I've not been getting the fake ready to level (100%) pregression but I have just levelled again. I'll keep my eye on it when I get back upto 60-70% again, as thats when it seems to start happenning.

Also, for my latest game I decided to ser RL @ mode 4 - sleep leveling. I did it because I find it slightly more immersive to awake at the next level, not duing a middle of a large battle that was happened on mode 2.

More MagLite updates...

I've doubled the cost of applying an area to a spell. The spell cost used to be multiplied by 1/6 of area, now it's 1/3. There's a stupid engine quirk whereby it starts counting at 0 but has a minimum multiplier of 1; what this boils down to is that your first 3 feet of area are free of charge. (Used to be first 6 feet. Oy.) Because of this, I'm giving every spell a minimum area of 3 feet. This includes touch spells, and I'm 99% certain I'm going to make "touch spell explodes with no target" universal: basically, "touch" will instead mean "burst centered on self," and since the minimum 3' burst is just about touch range anyway it only serves to prevent you missing due to a bad angle. (If anyone can think of a good reason why touch spells should not always explode, please mention it.)

Scripts which keep track of spellmaking will make sure that you always get these benefits for your custom spell; if you forget to click the area up to 3 it will be bumped up for you, and custom touch spells will burst without a target.

I'm experimenting with moving weaknesses/resistance around differently. Right now: Magic belongs to Mysticism, Disease and Poison belong to Restoration, and everything else belongs to Alteration. I've also found that with TES4Edit, I can make the Open spell function at touch-range. Hooray!

I've fiddled with a few ideas for the "identities" of the elemental magic schools. Shock is easy... it's the fast one. Fire and frost are a little tougher because while I can do all sorts of crazy-fun things in the CS, they turn boring again when you use the spellmaker. But using the same framework as above for forcing minimum area and touch explosion, I might be able to correct that... I'm thinking about giving double area to Frost (works well with its "fog" bolt type), and a free secondary burn to Fire (but raising its base cost slightly above the others). Buffing up Fire and Frost would let me give area effects back to Shock, too.

As mentioned previously, I'll be giving all the pre-built spells a bit of an edge over custom ones, for the same cost. I've decided that certain "special" spells (faction- or quest-specific) will be slightly better still, and a few really special ones will be crazy-good. There will no longer be any spells which are notably worse than one you can make yourself.

ALTERATION	Bending the Mundus; mass, external energy, physical forces.Burden/FeatherChameleonOpenResist [Elements][All] Shield[s]TelekinesisWater WalkingWeakness to [Elements]CONJURATION	Transport from/through Oblivion; binding of extraplanar forces.Bound [All]Summon [All]Turn UndeadDESTRUCTION	Barely-filtered Aetherius; raw energy, radiance, entropy.Disintegrate [All][Element] DamageLightILLUSION	Manipulation of thoughts and subjective perception.CalmCharmCommand [All]DemoralizeDrain [All]FrenzyInvisibilityRallySilenceMYSTICISM	Bending the Aurbis; souls, transferrence, metaphysical forces.Absorb [All]DispelDetect LifeReflect DamageReflect SpellResist MagicSpell AbsorptionSoul TrapWeakness to MagicRESTORATION	Manipulating the physical and metaphysical processes of life.Cure [All]Damage [All]Fortify [All]Night-EyeParalyzeResist [Disease, Normal Weapons, Paralysis, Poison]Restore [All]Water BreathingWeakness to [Disease, Normal Weapons, Poison]

Gonna sleep on this.

Won't this mean "touch" spells could affect more than one target if enough were close enough? This might be annoying if you want to heal a companion in combat with a touch spell and end up also healing all the enemies attacking you.

Tejon-

Hi. I'm using Progress+nGCD and my character is level 18 with 90% to next level. I decided to change the number of trainings to 20 from 10 as the collection of other mods I have makes the disparity between by main skills and everything else too great.

In doing so I then go to a trainer in Marksman (a major skill) knowing that taking three training sessions would level me up. I take them (the last 3 available after increasing the training cap) and the character does level to 19. The problem, though, is that no matter what trainer I go to next I always get that I have reached my training cap as if I had not leveled.

any advice?

Hmm... good point. So perhaps there's still call for zero-area spells. Nothing can change the first area increment being free except making it less than 2 feet, which is definitely too small; guess I won't enforce the 3-foot minimum. Most premade spells will still have that area, though.


Was just discussing this fun fact with ABO up-thread. At present, nGCD does not have a mechanism to reset your available training when you level. This was partly because I was unaware of a newer OBSE command which would allow it, but the general design of nGCD is that "level" is a background effect on the game world which should have no immediate bearing on how you play. For that matter, depending on your other mods, nGCD allows your level to decrease, and I have no idea how I'd handle that with regards to training. Personally, it makes no sense that there would be any limit except your own ability to absorb new information, which certainly wouldn't magically reset every few skill-ups.

My own solution to the whole subject is the ProgressGSD module. As you gain more total skills (regardless of major/minor) it makes it harder to skill up, and makes training gradually more expensive. The configuration file allows you to use only the training portion if you wish, leaving normal advancement alone, so that's what I'd recommend for now.

Well I got through 18 levels with new 10 sessions of training available at each level - do you figure that at level 20 I would have the pool of 20 again?

Are you suggesting I set the allowed trainings to some very high number?

Yes I use GSD and here is the GSD ini as I have it set (yes I use elys uncapper):
So it seems odd that with this I was having trainings reset after each level up and only lost that after changing the max allowed to 20 from 10.

Any chance for an update seeing as how OBSE 18 is final?

[edit] OK so I saw the part about setting trainings to 100 ... but that is not unlimited is it that is only 100. If previously I had it set to 10 per level and then my character would have already used 190 sessions. Or am I misunderstanding?

Your training sessions actually were resetting? Ugh. The behavior of the training counter is so inconsistent... I really don't know what to think of it.

Anyway, because of Elys and that 4200 ceiling, you're probably just not seeing a lot of slowdown yet. To get a larger effect sooner you could switch to linear mode, or increase the final multiplier, turn up the base training cost.

My personal recommendation for number of training sessions is 9999. That's effectively unlimited.

nGCD will probably be updated again at some point, but it's pretty much last on my priority list right now... it's stable and working as intended! There's some room for feature expansion, but nothing that urgently needs attention. I want to get some other stuff done first.

Hey!

I like it! Along with the rest of the changes you've done so far. This is looking truly getting more interesting by the day.
I agree with ABO on the radius thing. It might be too risky forcing in on every spell.

With the summons, I'm wondering if they won't turn to be too weak late in the game if they're capped at 25 and don't scale. Also, I would have opted for having several of them move up in level - that would allow you to have a really good Fire Atronach if you were playing a themed character, or a really tough skeleton archer if you were going for that kind of thing. I'm not sure how hard this would be to implement though.

I'm not sure if this falls within ex-MagLite's scope, but are you reducing the "appeal" of the summoned creatures so they won't be like monster magnets? I think generally, they ought to be attacked if they're a higher level than the player, but not if they're lower.

Any idea when we can expect a release? But do take your time, naturally.

Cheers!

cc

They're pretty strong 25's, and armed with Daedric. Admittedly, I'm working from limited personal experience at the top end; but I pvssyd with a couple of people (mostly over at TESAlliance) about summon strategies, which summons stood out in the late game and why, etc. I made sure to get the opinions of people who play past level 30, which is "late game" even by OOO standards. That said, this is definitely the thing I'm least certain of, and deserves scrutiny from brave early-adopters!

Why none of them scale: primarily, because summoned creatures scale with the player, but can be cast by NPCs. So you're running around at level 40, right, and run into a level 18 Breton summoner. Oh crap lvl37 Xivilai... challenging, yes, but not in an intended way! I just don't like PC/NPC disparity when it can be avoided. Aside that, trying to assign magicka costs to open-scaling summons strikes me as a total nightmare which I'd rather avoid.


This does fall within scope, and is already on my list, but is a lower implementation priority than nailing down the core design points. IIRC, Strategy Master was working on this and last I checked he had a pretty-sure but not-yet-tested solution. Hopefully that bore fruit!


Earlier today I came up with a solution for fire/frost/shock "identities" which satisfies me, is mathematically sound, will work the same in the CS as it does in the spellmaker, and isn't sabotaged by some terribly stupid quirk/limitation/bug in the game engine. I've been wrestling with that all weekend, so it definitely feels like a major task completed on my end, but there's a pile of drearily repetitive CS drudgery still left. I can confidently say "less than one week," and I think it'll happen before the weekend but I'm not going to make any promises.

A few updates:

• There will be 3 starting spells, at 15/25/35 skill, instead of 4 at 10/20/30/40.
  
• Maximum magnitude is 500. ("Up To Level" spells function at 1/2 magnitude.)
  Maximum area is 60 feet. At 10' the spell's cost is doubled, and every 5' extra increases the multiplier by 1.
  Maximum duration is 300 seconds (no change from previous versions).
  
• Turn Undead moved to Mysticism and is non-hostile.
  
• No Illusion spells will be hostile. This includes the newly-situated drains.
  
• Tentatively, Absorb Attribute and Absorb Skill will also be non-hostile. (Tip of the hat to TheMagician for this and the previous.)
  
• Shock spells will have dramatically lower magicka cost and travel even faster, but will have neither area nor duration options. You're hurling bolts of lightning, not generating some funky magnetic field. At least one premade spell will violate this (probably just the one), but it will be enforced in the Spellmaker.
  Shock spells are fast, efficient pinpoint damage.
  
• Frost spells will have a minimum radius of 10 feet. (Turns out there's absolutely no way to get rid of the jump from 0 to 10 on the area slider, so I built around that.) Furthermore, frost spells pay half as much for area increases, and can increase twice as far (to 120 feet). You won't see this in the spellmaker; instead, after the spell is created, a script will double whatever area you entered (or add 10 feet to a zero area). Frost spells still have reduced travel speed, but not by as much as previous versions.
  Frost spells are the best area effects.
  
• Fire spells will have higher base magicka cost, on par with Damage Health. However, their duration is doubled just as area is for frost spells. Create a 1-second fire spell, it becomes 2 seconds for free!
  Fire spells are versatile and give the best damage for your magicka, but you have to wait for the full effect.

I know this is random at this point, but my gripe with the resetting issues is that it does not happen when not using the immediate chargen mod. It must have something to do with how ti affects the chargen during tutorial process. I still will not be able to test anything for three weeks though...

Tomlong - actually, I remember what my idea was for hopefully resolving that. Just have to make the time to put it together. Remind me when you're closer to a test-capable situation.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?showtopic=1090851