You know, something I've always wanted to mod was making the player's alpha shade change according to detection threshold levels or maybe dependant on if the sneak eye is lit up.

While youre sneaking around, the alpha shader would come down some on your character, but not like vanilla invisibilty/camo shader. If the threshold lowers to where a NPC has detected you, but not found you yet, the shader brightens up more and your transparency lowers with it. And of course if youre completely detected, your shader disappears altogether.

The simpliest way might be to just make the shader dependent on if your sneak eye is lit up or not.

I dunno, just an idea for a mod I thought of but never got around to making it.

Well, I see your point. The problem that folks were having was that when combined with archery and facing low level opponents, the stealth skill was rising too fast for them. However, it would not be too difficult to make it user setable, so it can be a flat amount, and you can set the amount, or it can be scaled to level as it currently is. I'll look into it. I may also look into seeing if I can separate a melee assassination from a missile assassination, and provide a different point value, because a close quarter assassination is much harder. Maybe long range is .75 and close quarters is 2.0. (user settable). Or instead of attack type, I can just set the close quarter range to be the same as the close quarter bump range to be detected in the sdr game settings.

Hmm, it's an interesting idea. The simplest approach would be to use the isDetected function on the player. Anything beyond that would require anolyzing every NPC within range, determining their detection level of the PC, and capture the highest number. Although it seems a wee bit on the "cheating" side in that it would totally give away whether or not you were spotted, even more so than the golden eye (which some folks do away with for immersion purposes). But you could certainly call it a "spidey-sense" sort of thing.

Hmm, yeah that's true for the cheating part, especially when trying to pickpocket. In a combat stealth situation, it wouldn't really matter since if you were close enough anyways, you'd be charged at.

You'd definately would want to use the isDetected way then if it were to be implemented. No need to anolyze every NPC then.

My issue has actually always been that sneak raised rather slow on an archer, because you often kill them from a distance out of the sneak skill up range and I wanted to use the assassination feature to offset this. I didn't pay attention that you applied it to melee as well, which somehow defeats the purpose. My prefered solution would be if I could turn it off for melee completely and only have a flat bonus for archery(which could be setable). I havn't tested yet if this will be too fast when facing many low level opponents, but to make this less of an issue my suggestion is to add/cut of a fixed percentage for each level difference to the opponent rather than a multiplier, maybe 5%. So if I assassinate a rat at level 14 I would only get 35% of the experience and a Xiviai at the same level would net me 130%. I think this is more balanced overall.

I've used the latest version in my last FCOM game and it worked quite nice with the default settings. I had quite a few assassinations with my bow. My sneak and marksman skills did not level any faster than before but then I can' assassinate anyone much higher level than me. At level 8 the best I can get on a 3x sneak shot is about 100 damage. Mostly assassinate rats, imps, and bandits. Takes me about 5 hours to advance a level using Fundament and Bundlement (OOO leveling). So I hope if you change anything in this regard you have an option for the way it is now.

The performance is really good compared to older versions. Only had one oddity during sneaking as I was able to sneak toward a guard in the IC who was walking toward me and I remained hidden. Figure I was very lucky.

Anyway, very nice mod, thanks for making it.

Does SDR have a way to hide after a sneak attack? Every time I attack, the enemy automatically knows where I am, even if I turn invisible immediately after I shoot my arrow (before it hits them and realized an enemy is in their midst). If it does, maybe it's a mod conflict that keeps it from working for me. If it doesn't, I'd love if this mod implemented that. I prefer attacking, then hiding and attacking from a different angle (keeping the enemy confused ) over one sneak attack then face-to-face combat (where I'm guaranteed to lose because I'm horrible at fighting).

It's an AI thing. The moment you strike someone, you are detected for one frame, enough for them to orient on the direction you are in. After you attack, you should immediately move and use whatever advantages you have so that you are far from your original spot. If you are too close, you may end up in range. It's not impossible, but it is difficult. You can tweak some of the settings yourself, or use another mod that targets that area. The SDR website has a mod compatibility section with some recommendations, one of which might fit your needs.

Iv been struggling with this for most of the night but i cant seem to whip it, i have SDR installed with the current 4.04 esp patch, i have the current OBSE running and the newest AddActorValues as well and elys uncapper / OSR/Universal silent voice / Nifse and Menu Que DLL's all in the plugin folder yet it still tells me it cannot find AddActorValues.dll when i load a game, new or old . What am i doing wrong ?

Can you post the exact quote? Does it have "SDR: " at the beginning? (I'm assuming it does)

There is a chance (unconfirmed) that Elys uncapper might be a conflict (AAV was created by JRoush, who also created AV Uncapper, which conflicts with Elys uncapper.)

It says

"SDR 04 : Sneak Detection Recalibrated Disabled, AddActorValues.dll OBSE plug-in is required but has not been detected."


I took all obse plug-ins out except for the ones required by SDR and had the same result, i also tried it this morning with AV uncapper instead of elys and still same message.

Okay, I haven't installed the newest Add Actor Values, so maybe that has something to do with it. I'll look into it later this evening when I get off work,

Thank you for the reply but it came down to user error, im sorry to have bothered you, specially at work =0 haha but Its under controll now , bit embarrased , but i had the Obse/plugins folder in the wrong directory heh was up way too late messing with mods i guess.

I have now tested a bit more and thought I'd share some thoughts on how things turned out.

First thing I noticed is that it is not necessary to increase the light penalties with darker dungeon mods as much as originally recommended. The sweet spot for the exponential lighting curve is more anywhere from 12-14 rather than 15-20. Otherwise it becomes hard not to get detected even in complete darkness. Increasing the normal light level offset seems unnecessary either.

On the other hand, avoiding notice based on sound was quite easy with the default settings. Before reaching expert level in any of the relevant skills(though sneak was very close) I could already sneak run in full heavy armor and only those with a skill higher than me were still able to detect me. I have now increased the effect of sound on detection, but what bothers me a bit is that you allow for pretty high offsets in this category, so the multipliers I set in the ini become rather unimportant at some point. I think it should not possible to move soundless, even with 100 in all skills wearing only clothes. I wonder wether the offsets are neccessary at all, doesn't the sneak skill already cover that you are getting better at avoiding noise well enough? Anyways I would reduce all offsets at least in half, so sound doesn't get meaningless too soon, and I would increase the basic sound penalty for moving as well.

Jumping never caused me to be detected with the default settings, could be increased as well, and maybe add the boot weight to the penalty? Think that would make sense. Or better, if that's not already the case, have the whole sound penalty apply additionally, even when you are not moving in any other direction at the same time.

The moving lights with no LOS multiplier can at least be doubled from default in order to be meaningful.

The penalty for drawing weapons works great, now if I want a higher penalty for merely holding one, I assume I can increase the multipliers for that and divide the multipliers for drawing by the same amount to keep the penalties the same as previously, is that correct?

Detect life seems pretty potent now. I have not experimented with the settings yet, but I wonder wether the distance it works on is actually the same as for the player and wether it requires them to look in my direction to kick in? I was not sure about that when testing. At least they always got me very easily, regardless of my sight and sound penalties. But I don't mean to say you got it wrong, it's what detect life does, so I'll have to live with it .

About the detect life settings, I've had a look at the sdrDetectionFormula script before trying to implement a little idea I had.

The script checks for the presence of the detect life effect, and then multiplies its magnitude by what is accepted as the unit-to-foot conversion ratio. However, detect life is conveniently tied to the DetectLifeRange actor value, which means the script could check for that value alone and it would also acknowledge scripted alterations to it, which is what I had in mind for my idea. Next, for magic, the unit-to-foot equivalence is not neccessarily 21.3 or similar, it is controlled by the game setting fMagicUnitsPerFoot, which is 22 by default, but that's just being nitpicky

The main issue is, regardless of how it works, vitually no NPC will benefit from the new detect life detection mechanics, because they never cast detect life spells unless instructed through script, and for that reason there are no detect life spells in the leveled spells lists that NPCs use. Not even vampires, their detect life is activated through a lesser power, and while all NPC vampires have it, they never cast it. Only in the rare occasion a NPC had an equipped item with a detect life enchantment would this feature be useful.

If the change from using the effect magnitude to using the actor value were implemented, my idea would be to distribute tokens among eligible NPCs (mainly vampires and spellcasters with a high enough mysticism skill, and possibly magical enough creatures) that would alter the DetectLifeRange max modifier (which AFAIK doesn't persist once the actor is unloaded from the game or reloaded if there is no enchantment supporting it, so it would be the safest modifier to use), so that this feature can play with a much broader and intended effect in the game.

And the same things can be said about night eye, which is also tied to its own actor value, NightEyeBonus. In Morrowind this was percentage-like, the more NightEyeBonus on the player, the more illuminated the screen became. In Oblivion they changed Night Eye to act in a boolean fashion, the night eye shader can be on or off and its actor value is just a flag representing it.
Your mod also takes night eye on NPCs into consideration for detection, but again no actor can cast it nor has spells or abilities with it and night eye enchantments are even rarer. Given that a NightEyeBonus > 1 doesn't do anything special, and nothing for NPCs, maybe your mod could, again with tokens, modify the value of NightEyeBonus on an eligible actor in a scale from 0 to 100 in accordance to how well the actor should be able to see in the dark (khajiits and mountain lions would have 100 I guess, NPCs with a high enough illusion skill would tend to use night eye when in the dark, other than that I know a wild animal will usually have better night vision than a human, but little more) and use that magnitude in the detection formula.

In any case, thank you for the best Sneaking Overhaul ever. Even the sprinting feature is a godsend.

In the default game yes, but OOO for example adds detect life and/or infravision to quite a number of its bosses and in my game I already expanded it to a few more where I deemed it appropriate so for me it's all well. I don't feel the need to make every vampire in the game unable to sneak up to.

In general, because there are so many mods that tweak the AI behavior, whether it is how they react to events, or use their abilities, I decided a long time ago to not incorporate AI behavior into any of the SDR features. SDR is all about functionality and overhauling the formulas for sneaking and detecting. It won't force anyone to use their abilities, but if they do, at least the abilities will actually work.

There has been some really good feedback and comments, and although I was hoping to delve into a new release, I just haven't had any time to look at it. RL has been a bit rocky. But I am taking notes, and will address some of the issues in a new version at some point.

I suppose there are some mods which add detect life and night eye abilities to actors, TIE comes to mind. But it still leaves many actors out which could fare better with them.

In case I wanted to make such an AI mod to complement SDR, is there some value or variable to look for when scanning NPCs to determine if they are 'spooked' (i.e. they suspect there is something or someone around which they don't like)? If a token could check for that, and the actor has enough spellcasting abilities, the token would try to make him cast a detect life spell drawn from the game, which doesn't even need to be added directly to him. Same for night eye spells if the actor is under a certain light threshold, and possibly even light spells for actors which can't use better.

Well, there is the whole "What's that? Must have been the wind." sort of thing that happens when an NPC is spooked.

It's an AI scripted package, and I'm pretty sure it's called Alert.

There is an OBSE script function that allows you to check for the currently running AI package. If the package is "Alert" you can run through a series of if statements:
If has night eye and night eye not active and average light level in cell is below x, activate night eye. (not sure if you can get average light level of cell, you may have to use light level on actor or light level on PC, your call)

Use if/else if statements for other options such as Light Spells, torches, detect life, or even chucking a fireball randomly to light up the dark.

I think what you are suggesting is doable, and a very good idea. Let me know if you need help in design or testing.

This brought me to a similar idea. In the thief series the protagonist had a magical stone that showed you how visible you were. I currently have the sneak eye disabled, I don't need the game telling me whether I am detected, but if you could change it in a way that it gets brighter based on how much light is shining on the player that would be useful. Especially with infravision it is often hard to judge how visible you actually are. I would like this more than seeing directly how close to being detected I am.

I believe HUD Status Bars has a feature that allows you to set up a bar that reflects the amount of light hitting the character, but I haven't tried it yet.

I've always sort of thought that was about right. I've added the following to the .ini file for recommended settings:
; If you have mods that reduce the overall amount of light in caves and
; other interior settings, you may want to increase the amount exponential
; amount. The general feedback from folks who use it puts that number
; around 12 to 14, although some have gone as high as 20. You will have
; to experiment to determine which is best for you and your load order.

This part does seem odd to me: "Before reaching expert level in any of the relevant skills(though sneak was very close) I could already sneak run in full heavy armor and only those with a skill higher than me were still able to detect me." Even with a max of 100 in all associated skills, your full heavy armor should still be a base of 40% of the base sound penalty for the armor. Light armor cannot fall below 20%, and only cloth can be 0% at full 100s. And in my opinion, you can be 100% soundless with cloth when you get that sneaky, unless you are wearing tafeta. Audio waves fall off exponentially over distance, and cloth on cloth makes very little noise in the first place if you are just walking. If you are taking effort, unless someone is right next to you, even someone who has little skill in sneaking can move around almost unheard. In all honesty, if I could, I'd redesign the system around the actual material being worn. But I've looked into it, and there is no good way to do that. It might be possible in Skyrim, but SDR for Skyrim is a long way off. (A lot of tools and engineering need to be created and in place by others first before I can port it over).

Jumping only matters on impact, and the bonus only lasts for a few seconds (reflecting any possible echo or ripple effect if you splash down into water). Otherwise it's treated as if you were basically turning in place. The jumping multiplier is the same as the running multiplier.

I've personally always felt that this feature was supposed to be a very subtle bonus that really only helps out the most observant, so I don't plan on changing the default. However, the .ini setting is modifiable, and I can put in a recommendation for double the amount if they want a more noticeable effect.

You are correct. As for my reasoning for the defaults, I had weapons training as part of my career as an actor, and have handled many weapons of the medeival kind. The sound you hear in the movies is more amplified, and the reality is that most weapons just don't make a whole lot of noise once they have been drawn, unless they have moving parts. Any noise made will be caused by how you change the grip on the weapon, or because you bang or scraqe it against any armor or nearby items or walls. That's why the length of the item is a big factor when it comes to calculating the base "noise" factor.

You have to be in "line of sight", meaning that you are within their angle of view, regardless if there are walls in the way or not. At which point, intelligence kicks in, and there is a bigger bonus if they have actual line of sight (not blocked) - if I recall correctly.
________________

I am somewhat concerned about the sneaking in armor issue that you had, and was wondering if other folks were experiencing something similar. Adjusting penalties and multipliers would definitely have a greater effect, but what you described doesn't sound right to me at all.

I didn't mean to say that armor did not make a significant difference, it does, the offsets seemed a bit high to me by merely looking at the numbers. Ingame it didn't turn out that bad, for heavy armor at least. However, they still might be a bit too high for the rest, only not as much as I originally thought. I am going to test a bit more before I give you some new suggestions. I think the main issue was that the impact of sound was too low by default to begin with. I increased it now to 2.4(but decreased the weapon drawing penalties). With walking in heavy armor as master in everything a lich now can detect me. I need to almost stand on his feet before he does, but he can. I only wonder why his sneak skill returns as 112 despite I capped at 100. Is that normal and does the cap still apply?
With my original skills I tested with debug text on and looked at the numbers. it seemed that an actor needed to reach about 50 in the sound category in order to detect me. Now with sneak running in clothes/light armor it basically didn't go above 10-20, very far from being detected and in full heavy armor I reached 34-48 max with a multiplier of 1.6-2.2 for the sound category, still not enough to make anyone turn around.
Some examples how my ideal setup for sound detection looks like.:
-as novice it is almost impossible to get up to melee range to anyone
-an apprentice-journeyman can sneak walk past most things in clothes
-an expert can sneak run past everyone in clothes
-a journeyman can sneak run in light armor against the dumber creatures (skill < 25)
-A master can sneak run in light armor past everyone
-Running in Heavy Armor is always detected, unless you are master and the detector is a moron in sneaking
-Walking in heavy armor is detected either, if the detector has a high enough skill
-Sneaking in heavy armor with a skill less than 50 is detected by anyone.

I am already pretty close to that now, just a bit of finetuning needed.

I wouldn't say that moving soundless is possible, at least not at the speed you are sneaking in Oblivion. You might move quiet enough for a human to not notice, but some sound is always there. And it depends on the ground, too. In Oblivion this doesn't factor in, but I wouldn't go with the assumption that you are on the most forgiving one. Especially in most outdoor areas you have to move very slow and ?be good to not get heard, even without armor.
Regarding the weapon noise, you are probably right that they don't make much, however I think the sneaking itself is going to be more difficult with a weapon drawn and the penalty should reflect that.

@ kobal, well it will be great to see what you come up with. When I moved to version 3 and 4, I had to redo the formula, although the principles were still in place. I had trouble recreating the exact "effect" that worked well with versions 1 and 2.

I've been experimenting with the assassination feature, and I managed to provide three options: off, flat and scaled. I've also set it up so that you can set the actual bonus yourself, with different xp values for melee and bow/staff. I considered going with the % per level difference, but it doesn't have that much of an impact because the amount awarded is so low in the first place. For example, using your 14th level character scenario, if the base amount is .75 with a bow, a rat would net you .26 points towards sneak, while the Xivilai would gain you .975. Considering how difficult it is to assassination creatures that are higher in level than you, that's not much of a reward. And considering how easy it is to assasinate creatures that are significantly lower level than you, I don't think a reward is justified. It's just too easy. So I think I'm going to keep it as it is. But at least the next version will allow you to do a flat amount, and customize the amount. So in your case, you can set the melee amount to 0, and the bow/staff amount to whatever you want.

Something is strange with this mod. When clearing dungeons, i can simply fire arrows and sneak attack enemies to death with impunity. They can never find me. This is even with sneak 40. When i hit them with the first arrow, the combat music starts playing but they just stand there, allowing me to sneak attack them infinite times till they are dead.

Also if i am detected, i can just run around a corner and sneak. The enemy will instantly lose track of me and will stop in its tracks, allowing me to sneak attack them till dead. They will never run to my last known location. They just stop.

Ive also noticed something really strange while trying to break into people's houses and feed on them in Leyawin. I have near 100 sneak now and the occupants keep waking up once i approach their room....even if i take off my armor and unequip weapons. Im not sure if this is something unique to leyawin NPCs though.

Ive never touched any of the .ini settings. Heres my load order :

Oblivion.esm
Beautiful People 2ch-Ed.esm
x117race.esm
HrmnsOblivionScriptOptimizationv1.0.esp
xeosp++.esp
Unofficial Oblivion Patch.esp
DLCShiveringIsles.esp
Unofficial Shivering Isles Patch.esp
Streamline 2.1.esp
Map Marker Overhaul.esp
Map Marker Overhaul - SI additions.esp
MoreMapMarkers.esp
StoneMarkers.esp
DLCHorseArmor.esp
DLCHorseArmor - Unofficial Patch.esp
DLCOrrery.esp
DLCOrrery - Unofficial Patch.esp
DLCVileLair.esp
DLCVileLair - Unofficial Patch.esp
DLCMehrunesRazor.esp
DLCMehrunesRazor - Unofficial Patch.esp
DLCSpellTomes.esp
DLCSpellTomes - Unofficial Patch.esp
Weapon Expansion Pack for Oblivion Nthusiasts.esp
DLCThievesDen.esp
DLCThievesDen - Unofficial Patch.esp
DLCBattlehornCastle.esp
DLCBattlehornCastle - Unofficial Patch.esp
DLCFrostcrag.esp
DLCFrostcrag - Unofficial Patch.esp
Knights.esp
Knights - Unofficial Patch.esp
HideHelms.esp
Toggleable Quantity Prompt.esp
RenGuardOverhaul.esp
Sneaking Detection Recalibrated.esp
Oblivion XP.esp
SDR Perks And Patches - Nehrim.esp
SDR Perks And Patches - Oblivion.esp
Beautiful People 2ch-Ed Disable BandBlindMask.esp
Beautiful People 2ch-Ed Sheogorath Eye.esp
Beautiful People 2ch-Ed Vanilla Race.esp
Beautiful People 2ch-Ed Merged Hair Modules.esp
Beautiful People 2ch-Ed Merged Eye Modules.esp
x117 Merged SKSRENs Hair Modules.esp
Beautiful People 2ch-Ed MS Elves - NoSc.esp
Beautiful People 2ch-Ed ENG Dialog.esp
Beautiful People 2ch-Ed ENG Race.esp
x117Race ENG Race.esp
EyelashesVannilaRaces.esp
Bashed Patch, 0.esp
lop eared mini.esp
Travel Anywhere.esp
Max_Encumbrance-3026.esp