SPAWN
Simple Place-Centric Augmentative respaWNs
version 0.2

Requires http://obse.silverlock.org/ | http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=18160


Download : http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=25536 | http://www.moddb.com/mods/spawn | http://www.invision.tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=287


Description

One fine day, you decide you've had enough of women, crappy face textures and annoying fans, and make plans to do some honest dungeon crawling. A couple of days later, you find yourself at the entrance of Hame. On entering, you spot a battered journal on a step in the stairwell. You take a look at its entries – One particularly intrigues you.
You read on …
You flip through the following pages, for they have similar entries (with the swearing increasing progressively). Then you end up with the following entries:
Enough ! , you say. You swiftly exit Oblivion, start Wrye Bash and activate SPAWN.esp …


Fine Print

I sincerely hope you haven't experienced such pain and suffering in your game.

In any case, Simple Place-centric Augmentative respaWNs ( or SPAWN ) aims to improve Oblivion's respawn mechanism. As the name suggests, it allows place-centric respawn times for cells of different types. So, aylied ruins and forts can have different respawn times. And the best part is that the mod is completely independent of the global respawn time. SPAWN, therefore, ensures compatibility with mods that change it ( like Less Predictable Respawn ).

SPAWN tracks the cells the player visits and their corresponding "Last Visit Time". After leaving a particular cell, SPAWN records the time and tags it with a respawn timestamp. The list of visited cells is evaluated in intervals; when time passed since the player's last visit is calculated for each cell and compared with the cell's respawn timestamp. If time passed exceeds the timestamp, the cell is reset. Respawn timestamps are calculated randomly when the PC leaves a cell. The range of the timestamp can be defined in the SPAWN INI file. The different cell types that are supported:

• Caves

• Mines
  
• Forts
  
• Aylied Ruins
  
• Sewers
  
• Castles
  
• Oblivion Citadels
  
• Houses
  
• Cellars / Basemants
  
• Player Owned Cells

SPAWN optionally allows one time visits to cells, meaning revisiting cells will not reset their last visit/respawn timestamps. This feature is particularly useful when it comes to player-owned houses. Without this feature, gardens do not respawn unless the player stays away from the house for the whole duration of the global respawn time - This may be a nuisance if you frequent your place for supplies.

Cells can have custom respawn times as well ! If you are a mod maker and wish to use a particular respawn time range for one of your cells, all you need to do is place a persistent activator in it. The activator's script should then have the following variables defined and initialized in it:

• sSPAWNRespawnTimeMin
  
• sSPAWNRespawnTimeMax

Values should be similar to those declared in the INI file. If set up properly, SPAWN will automatically use the custom values and generate a respawn time within its range. A custom respawn time overrides any locally defined ones. The priority would therefore be:

Remotely defined (Custom) Respawn Time > Player Owned Cell Respawn Time ( if cell is owned by the player ) > Locally defined Respawn Time
The mod only works with interior cells. Handling for exterior cells is technically not possible.


Compatibility

This mod is, and should be, compatible with all other mods. That includes mods that modify the global respawn time, dynamically or otherwise. Incompatibilities can arise only when using another place-centric respawn mod (though I know of none other than this).


Credits

Special thanks to :

• Ian Patterson and Stephen Abel and Paul Connelly (The OBSE Team) – For keeping up the Oblivion Modding spirit and providing the modding community with TES4 Oblivion's Elixir of Immortality
  
• LHammonds – For his Readme generator
  
• Tekuromoto – For his Less Predictable Respawns mod that had inspired this one
  
• crimson.cosmos – Who got me to release this, directly or indirectly
  
• PacificMorrowind – For his custom respawn time idea

The Entire Community around the TES Construction Set Wiki – For making such an exhaustive resource catering to ES Modding.
The Folks at the Construction Set Forums – For all their help, rum and fish.
The Rest of the Modding Community – For the inspiration I needed to start modding and all the wonderful mods which I use.
Bethesda – For providing a great game, with enough flaws to keep us busy.

Change Log



Lastly, I'm looking for ideas to improve the mod. Any help from that quarter would be much appreciated.

http://docs.google.com/View?id=dhrj396r_1gkqt57c9 :grad:

Oooh sounds cool. May be my first respawn mod. Thankyou!

the link to the file itself doesn't work (exist as far as I can see), fine for me since I search on nexus but some might not be sensible. edit appears to have been changed while I was writing this
Sounds great.
only suggestions might be on cell load of the interior check for types of enemies, and if predominantly npc set respawn to X, if predominantly mythic enemies set to X, if predominantly small vermin set to X, if goblins set X etc. However suspect that would be hard to get to work becuase of different creatures added by the different overhauls.
Pacific Morrowind

Strange ! I tried it before I posted it. Well, tried it out again - It works ( the link and the file download ).


Yeah ... that's on the list for the next release. But the overview would be more holistic; as in I won't be look at a per-actor basis but rather as a group.

yes that was what I was meaning by predominantly. also http://www.tesnexus.com/news/index.php?id=712, don't want a wristslap
edit: another suggestion: support for modders to place an xmarker (or something) with a specific name that tells this what respawn setting to use?
Pacific Morrowind

Yay! It's out!

Thank you for making/releasing this!

I have several questions for you
Having Less Predictable Respawn active, as well as your mod, will ensure that the cells SPAWN doesn't track get resets in the random intervals as well. Is there another added benefit of having both mods loaded?
Secondly, I wanted to ask if visiting a cell resets the "visited" interval, thus resetting the timer? If that is the case, would you consider adding an option so that player visits don't influence that? Ideally, for each cell type.

That's all I have for you for now. I'll install it first thing before I play!

Cheers!

cc

Custom cell respawns ? Nice idea Will add to the list.


. Unfortunately, no. Global respawn does take place and it's short of impossible to prevent it from happening ( at the minimum, it'd need a ugly hack ). To actually see the effect, your cell respawn ranges must be less than that of LPR's ( or the iHoursToRespawn GMST's ).

. Yes. When a tracked cell is reset, it's removed from the array ( to keep the size down ). The player will need to revisit it once again to restart it's tracking. Visiting a tracked cell before it's respawn time will overwrite the Last Visit time; and a new respawn time will be assigned as well.
You mean disallow overwrites ? Feasible. Will add to the list.

EDIT : Update readMe( Google Docs ) with detailed mechanics.

Another awesome idea shadeMe, thanks! gonna check it out now.

Any possibility of attaching spawn rates to item types? For instance, I like the idea of creatures spawning fairly quickly in the wilderness but plants need a fairly long growing season, they don't just reappear overnight. So it would be nice to attach a seperate spawn rate to flora to make them take longer than the rest.

Well, Mister Shademe, the mod's premise sounds very intriguing indeed, but surely you could have elaborated upon its innovation and wonder without resorting to such foul language? Quite scandalous, really. :nono: ....


Actually, I'll just say here that even if your mods weren't the interesting and imaginative things that they are, I would still read your mod's descriptions for the joy of doing so. Very amusing!

And so off I go to download another mod...

Thank you! ^_^

Thanks, mate ^_^

Not much, I'm afraid. I reset the cell as a whole (there isn't another way). But I've been thinking of making respawns dependent on the objects in(side) the cell. So, a cell with flora and creatures will respawn slower than a cell with creatures only.

I blame society

Flattery - I love it

Downloaded and I'll take a look at it later on. Nice idea.

In the meanwhile, as I understand it it doesn't address the major annoyance I have with the respawn system, which is that the respawn counter gets reset every time you go through the cell prior to respawn. The obvious effect of this is that cells in player homes that the player visits on a regular basis rarely reset because the player enters the cell so frequently. I think this is the same thing that crimson.cosmos is talking about.

Vac

I never thought of it as an annoyance :hehe: Will add an optional override in the next version.

Thanks for sharing and the linky, will add this to the list ! ! ! !

So, anyone have their own INI changes to share? I'm kinda lost on what to put for my own values.

It is if you have Frostcrag Spire as your home. There's a lovely garden there that never respawns. At least not if you visit on a regular basis.

Update : PES mirror added. Mod's yet to be evaluated though.

Exactomundo!
Or if you've got a custom-made Arch-mages tower as your home and then the plants in the Arcane University grounds never respawn because you walk in and out of the tower too often.

Vac

Heh ! So you folks play the game - I keep to the CS

Only occasionally. It's been known to happen, but normally I can't play for more than two days before something bugs me enough that I have to spend weeks fixing/changing it.

Vac

I've had this game since shortly after it came out and I don't think I've ever made it past 10th level or so, for the very same reason. I have yet to complete the main quest. I think my highest level so far, in just 1 game, was 15.

I've been playing TESCS since Morrowind, yeah... :violin:

Well this is a great idea for a mod but I crash to desktop as soon as I enable it. It's acting just like something that's missing a master file.

Did you install You Are Here ? The link's in the the 1st post ( and it's pretty big too )