Well, that's better than nothing. Thanks for the reply

Oh, um I think I figured it out. It's a mismatch between two rounding conventions to determine the cell which only gets checked once on a cell transition. Slight error turns into off-by-one whole cell error. I have to audit all the other cell checks in the game now... great. All I needed was a good test case and coffee.

Uh ok Hrnchamd I didnt get half of that, but I guess you found out something important, hope you figured it out

Thank you for the reply, Hrnchamd. I tried recreating the texture as you said, and it still didn't work. Both as a DXT3 and uncompressed. So I copied the one I used in my previous post into the Splash folder to see if that would have an effect, and it did. http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/145/snapshot20100525200059.png, it looks exactly as it should. (The low contrast is from my media player.) So then I also tried hooking the main menu with another copy of my texture with MGE's texture hooking function, http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/5701/mgescreenshot437.png.

It works as a splash and when hooked through MGE. I guess the main menu is handled differently than splash screens, then. Which makes no sense to me. :confused:

P.S. Aren't rounding errors fun? My calculus classes often threw out entire hours worth of work because of them. I hope you find your solution.

You're... welcome?

I think >.>

I don't know if any of this previous troubleshooting will help, but in case it saves you a step or two, I'll point out a post I made several threads ago on the subject.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1032219-repairing-the-cogs-of-morrowind-15/page__p__14952162&#entry14952162

Third person camera issues

I'm not sure if this is caused by the beta animation or the Beta disable camera clipping but when in 3rd person and standing near a wall I find myself being noticeably moved away from it - I'll just be standing there posing for a screenshot in 3rd person and then the camera will have a little jerk and then I can see my position has changed - at one stage it would of been about a game equivalent of a metre

When in a fighting pose I also noticed one of the Seyda Neen NPC's (Erene) got in some kind of funny animation walking loop where they started walking did about 3 paces and then the animation looped again and again but I have been unable to replicate it - I suspect that was the Beta animation patch - I was just testing to see if clothing looked the same with this enabled and in the different cast magic or hand-to-hand poses

Is it possible to make "reflect" take priority over "spell absorption"? As it is, spell absorption takes priority, rendering the second benefit of the Ring of Equity useless (Ring of Equity: 100% spell absorption for 30 sec., 70% reflect for 30 sec.). I can't imagine it was intended to add a useless effect to the ring.

Please test http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=26348.

Changes:

• Fog of war fix. Best guess fix. Turn on cell borders with TB and test walking across them at a shallow angle into the next cell.
  
• Area effect multiplier. Zero radius multiplier is fixed. Check it anyway.
  
• Test everything else no-one tested from beta 3, or all your golden saint soulgems will be worth 5 septims next patch.

I tested a gradient with the main menu and it looked like it should. Not sure what the problem is either. Could you make a full screen black-white gradient then show me what happens to it? Full resolution screenshot please.


It's probably the animation thing, which beta were you using? If you tap left or right does it do strange things? I don't see anything like this so it could be an animation replacer interacting badly with the patch.


I have to say there are plenty of items with useless effects in the game. Absorb willpower for 5 seconds anyone? I'll try and fix it, but there's a lot of things that still require testing. Adding features has to wait a bit.

So what was the problem with the fog of war exactly? I can't say I've noticed anything.

The fog of war would randomly be off by a large margin, revealing the map about fifty feet away from you instead of where you're actually at.

Okay.



A few observations from the soulgem price tweak:

Piratelord's Trading Enhancements also alter the prices of soulgems, so I used that to compare. For example with PTE a grand soul gem filled with a Winged Twilight soul is priced 12,000.

With MPC it is priced 4500.

PTE's soulgem price changes do not seem to have any effect when MPC's soulgem tweak is active. With or without PTE, with the MPC active the Winged Twilight soul is always worth 4500. Which is good I suppose, because if MPC would reduce the price after taking PTE's changes in account the prices would get way too low.

It's nice that the price of a filled soulgem is no longer based on the empty soulgem's price. On the other hand it leads to strange things like grand soulgems first being worth 200 gold (or just 40 with PTE), then filling it with a rat soul, resulting in it being worth only 5. But I suppose it makes sense: If you sell it you're still selling a rat soul, whoever buys it doesn't care that it's in one of those shiny grand soul gems. It'll disappear when it's used anyway.


Edit: Wait, PTE doesn't change any price multiplier for the soulgems or anything, it just reduces the price of the soulgems themselves to end up with a lower price when a soul is added. So the only reason the soulgem prices for PTE+MPC and just MPC are the same is because MPC takes the soulgem value multiplier out of the formula. :facepalm:

Either way it seems fine to me. Unless there actually are mods that mess with the price multiplier, if that's even an accessible variable in the CS. I don't know.

It's not possible to alter the price multiplier outside of the game's hard code. But HotFusion and I both did the next best thing in our own mods. We reduced the price of soul gems, and then edited the GMST which determines the soul amount that a gem can hold based on its value.

For the most part, my mod manages to reel the values back in far enough that a MCP patch may not be necessary if you're using it. A grand soul gem is worth only 10 septims on its own, and can only be worth as much as 3000 with the highest-capacity soul you can stick in it. Azura's Star still ends up being the most expensive thing in the game, but only if you fill it with Vivec or Almexia.

But hey, at that point, you deserve the 75 grand that the gem is worth.

The point of the patch is that souls in oversize soulgems shouldn't be worth more, and that mid size souls were too easy a source of money. I am looking for serious discussion about proper price levels across the range. And more testing.

Sure. I assume you're asking for a "full resolution" screenshot because the picture's small. I play at 640x480. So I took one at a higher res, too. Both are the same menu texture, 1024x512 pixels, saved exactly how the previous menu texture was saved.
http://img30.imageshack.us/img30/174/mgescreenshot454.png
http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/7260/mgescreenshot455.png

And now that you mentioned it, I do notice a thin line on the left side of the screen. Is that the offset-by-one-pixel you were talking about?

That's good, the gradient is smooth so it's displaying at 32bpp like it should. If you could send me the original and problem textures I can check them.

Well, I'm on shift this week, so I really can't help you much with the testing part.

Regarding discussion about proper pricing of soul gems, you have the right idea. The vanilla system is exponential, and is easy to exploit at the exact point it curves upward. The obvious fix is to make the pricing linear.

It appears that your fear is that simply adding the value of the soul to the value of the gem would cause the filled gem to become undervalued. I don't know how the coding works, but perhaps it would be possible to add, for example, twice the value of the soul to the value instead of just 1x? The real problem of the vanilla system came when you were adding something along the lines of 500x the value of the soul to the value of the gem, so a fixed multiplier would be much more fair, as well as much easier to control (so that even if mods alter the price of soul gems, they don't become ludicrously overvalued by filling them).

Another thing to consider - and again, I know not if this is within the limitations of the system - is to have the value of the soul (or 2x the value of the soul, or whatever) REPLACE the value of the gem rather than add to it. This would make it so that putting [censored] souls into valuable gems would actually cause them to DECREASE in value, which I believe you seemed to express interest in doing.

This is just my two cents, of course, but it's submitted per your request

Filling a grand soul gem with a rat soul is like filling a Fabergé egg with guar droppings. It's entirely plausible that this would reduce its value. heh.

...or apparently, I seem to have misread the original post, and the system already does what I was suggesting >.>

Could you be more specific, say with examples, about correct extra bones names? Can this be a correct name "Wing R Bone 1 (Bip01 Spine2)" (without quotation marks in Max/NifScope)? The bone assumed to be linked to “Bip01 Neck” bone.

Another question. As far as understand you are “digging” a lot in MW secondary partial animations, could you shortly educate us how this is implemented in MW game engine?
I have no access to my modding tools and the game at the moment but I have a possibility to read e.g. how certain animation features are realized in other game engines. For instance hair animation in CryEngine 1 or Source: hair is animated with bones but not via laborious and “fixed” animation key frames but with the engine procedural “physics” (axis and damping values). A dream: in case bones’ values (position, rotation, scale) could be accessible via TESCS scripts it might be possible to simulate something similar.

The problem with your idea is that a soul gem has two values. Value #1 is based upon its capacity to have a soul placed into it, so that a gem which is capable of holding a larger soul has more value than a gem which is capable of holding a smaller one. Value #2 is based upon the size of the soul the gem contains.

With the exception of Azura's Star, before a soul gem is used, value #2 is 0. After it's used, Value #1 is 0. At no time (again, except for Azura's Star) does a soul gem both hold a soul and have the capacity to have another placed into it. It doesn't really make much sense that value #1 and value #2 should ever be added together, since they are mutually exclusive.

And that brings up Azura's star, which is the exception to the rule. Its value should actually be the sum of the two, because in that artifact, the two values are NOT mutually exclusive.

As to the calculation of the soul value, I really don't think it should be linear. To put it in perspective, consider the cost of a 1 carat diamond compared to the cost of a 10 carat diamond. 1 carat round = $3,000, 10 carat round = over $320,000! The larger diamond is significantly more rare, and its price reflects that. Although the default calculation is obviously unbalanced, a soul which is 10x larger should not simply be 10x more valuable for several reasons.

1) A larger soul is a bit more rare than a smaller one. Compare how many dremoras there are to the number of rats and mudcrabs, and this becomes obvious.
2) The previous owner is going to be much less willing to part with it. Just ask the aforementioned Dremora.
3) There are things which can be done with larger soul gems that cannot be done with a smaller one. (like CE effects)
4) And finally, the construction of an enchanted item can only be accomplished with ONE soul gem. An enchanted item which requires a 100 point soul cannot be constructed with 10 soul gems containing 10 point souls, making a single 100 point soul more useful (and therefore more valuable) than 10 gems whose soul values total 100.

I'd recommend something which uses a calculation similar to the one associated with spell ranges, but toned down a bit to account for the wide range of soul values. For example:

Mudcrab: Soul value = http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1090176-repairing-the-cogs-of-morrowind-no-18/10; rarity modifier = ( 1 + 10*10/32000) = 1.003125
Dreugh: Soul value = http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1090176-repairing-the-cogs-of-morrowind-no-18/75; rarity modifier = ( 1 + 75*75/32000) = 1.17578
Frost Atronach: Soul value = http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1090176-repairing-the-cogs-of-morrowind-no-18/138; rarity modifier = ( 1+ 138*138/32000) = 1.595125
Hunger: Soul value = http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1090176-repairing-the-cogs-of-morrowind-no-18/250; rarity modifier = ( 1 + 250*250/32000) = 2.953125
Golden Saint: Soul Value = http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1090176-repairing-the-cogs-of-morrowind-no-18/400; rarity modifier = ( 1 + 400*400/32000) = 6.0

Using a system like that, a golden saint soul would have an overall value 239.25 times greater than that of a mudcrab ( because it's 40x as large and 5.981x as rare)

That's one approach to keeping a non-linear value system without being overly complex or overly generous. The actual value of a filled soul gem would then be the original soul value multiplied by the rarity modifier multiplied by some constant. If we used 3 Gold as a constant, a mudcrab soul, regardless of which soul gem contains it, would be worth 30, while a Golden saint soul would be worth 7200.

If an exception is written in specifically for Azura's star, then a golden saint soul in a grand soul gem would be worth 7200, while a golden saint soul in Azura's star would be worth 12,200.

Of course, it also means that Vivec's modifier would be 32.25 and Almalexia's would be 71.31, so maybe the modifier should be capped at some point. Or maybe not. It won't break the system to have a couple of odd-ball values, and since Vivec and Almalexia's souls are both unique, it's not like the player can get rich by repeatedly summoning and slaying gods. Since these two souls can only be held in Azura's star, the default values would be 5,000,000 for Vivec's soul and 7,500,000 for Almalexia's. Using the above calculation, the new values would be 101,750 for Vivec's soul and 325,895 for Almalexia's (again, assuming an exception for Azura's Star - 96,750 and 320,895 otherwise). Quite large, but significantly smaller than before. And even so, it would require selling Azura's star to accomplish. It would still make Almalexia's soul the most valuable object in the game, but considering what must be done to acquire it (and the dangers associated with it), that's not unreasonable.

So, I installed MCP beta 4 and saw that it changes the filled soulgem value to 0.05*(soul value)^2. Seems to work fine in-game with Galbedir's filled soulgems. Some example values:

Rat 5
Ancestor ghost 500
Golden saint 8000
Vivec 50000
Almalexia 112500

I think these values are more reasonable than the original ones, and similar to the rebalanced values by PirateLord, Taddeus and BTB.

A check for reusable soulgems (vanilla: only Azura's Star) that adds the value of the empty soulgem to the filled soulgem's value would indeed be nice.

Yeah I also think the soulgem prices are now more balanced, though if it was possible I'd like to see the prices a little higher on the lower end instead of having it be completely linear. It's a bit weird how filling a petty soulgem with a rat soul cuts the thing's price in half.

Or maybe it could add the soulgem's price to the equation without a multiplier. LIke 0.05*(soul value)^2 + (Gem Price). Maybe that would be better to avoid this problem?

One data point for balancing soul gem prices is going to probably be which filled soul gem is closest to the 5000 gold price of a single barter pass with Creeper. That's what people are going to do.

Re: Stable Enchantment Sort - Much better, thank you.

Re: Bound Weapon Expiry Fix - better, though I wonder if spell selection could be retained (it blanks out after bound weapon expires). Two reasons:

a.) elimination of having to re-open menu to select spell
b.) scenario: You're fighting uber meanie, you've used up everything, down to 2 hit points, have one chance to cast Intervention to save your hide, get spell ready to cast, and... up pops a weapon! (or you spell goes blank) - precious second lost. Poof. Death.

Thank you if you can help.

(N.B. all patches are selected except Toggle Sneak and Polish Keyboard)