Maybe. Still, I'm a fan of the World of Darkness' unforgiving approach, where no matter what you try there are obstacles which just cannot be overcome.

I agree, experience once per victim is a great idea. Playing ParasiteX's I had enough blood to advance to the last level before my age allowed me even for the fourth. Later, feeding just lost sense (except the occasional sip once a few days to avoid starving).

I also like the concept of neonates' want for advancement, but what about other elders? For example, I'm sure Count Hassildor wouldn't be terribly happy with another elder building their empire's capital in the middle of his city, and even less contented if said vampire drew more and more young leeches with their very presence. But in this case I suppose it's a material for a whole quest chain, if not a quest web, rather than for random vampire encounters.

Edit: I just watched one of your previous videos and noticed a funny sound when falling (a bit like dropping a heavy stone block on a wooden floor) - is this some sound replacer or just an audio artefact come from Fraps?

The last thrall video looks great and the addition of good voice acting is very nice. It really adds to the immersion. I was thinking if you do go with a xp for vamp leveling is it possible to scale it so low level people give you less and high level more? This might be an incentive to shop around when you looking to feed instead of just grabbing the first bum off the street. Indeed you might start hunting the high level npcs, or seeking them out to befriend them and draw them into your influence. Also it might give a reason to do more incombat force feeding as alot of mobs ,in vanilla at least, are not always ones you can sneak up on while they sleep.

I'm sure you dont have time for this being so close to your first release, and it may not be the way you see vampires, but just throwing out an idea. It would be intersesting if there were different ways to be a vampire. If you drain sleeping people dry and force feed often for example you might gain power, advancing in vamp xp quickly, but the evilness of your chosen path would have repercussions in that you would be more vulnerable to the sun and fire damage, perhaps having difficulty rising and acting while during the day, or in concealing your vampire nature.

Another path such as one that avoids drinking sleeping people dry, and where you more often seduce into willingly giving you their blood might give you a different set of abilites and let you more easily act during the day and stand the power of the sun longer.

There was a great vampire book by Robin McKinley called "Sunshine" that explore ideas like this.

What you have put out for view so far looks awesome, Thank you for the great effort.

That video was pretty funny to me. You gave her permission to feed...so she did right away and thanked you for it

Tehehehe

oo: dude, that video was awesome! :clap:

Just a few ideas (since I've been exploring the various vampire mods out there and not liking the crashes from some of the betas, but that's expected):

1.) Vampire age comes into factor for blood usage, draining skills will drain blood a LOT faster than a younger vampire, meaning your skills are powerful but at a great cost (limited duration). As the body ages, it's use of blood should be less efficient.
2.) Towns keep count of "vampire related attacks", the higher the vampire's age, the higher the "attack per real attack ratio" is, so if a young vampire attacks 1 time, it's counted as 1, if an ancient does it, it's 10 per 1 attack. Once the count reaches a certain amount (say every 25 attacks), one or more vampire hunters are hired to search the city and plant traps. The amount of attacks will drop down to 0 by a rate of 1 per week. Once that happens, the town lets the hunters go (another week should pass for them to clean up all the traps).
3.) Vampire hunters will have bows and wooden stakes for arrows, possibly poisoned with garlic (yes, they SHOULD hurt like hell). One arrow should kill a young vampire (who isn't wearing really good armor).
4.) There should be roaming Vampire hunters that wander the roads (travel packages from town to town).
5.) Vampire hunters should be either wearing an amulet of garlic or some magical garlic item, to make fighting them harder, and also keeping the human appearance difficult around them (if possible at all).
6.) Occasionally, you may see Vampire hunters with "normal" looking clothing (playing possum), meaning they're wandering around with a magical cloak of clothing on, so when you get close and attack them, they cast the reverse spell and there you are, face to face with a fully armored Vampire hunter! (And if you're a young one, if you don't get the H out of there and pray he's a lousy aim otherwise you're dead.)
*7.) Vampire hunters shouldn't actually be named "Vampire hunter" (kind of gives away who they are), but rather name them commonly to the original game's names, so they sound familiar but are not (downside is you have to create a large amount of them).

Just some thoughts, as right now, I'm finding vampires with the "Hunter" class, are next to uber at level 1 vampire (level 3 player).

GuruSR.

P.S. * Just a thought, kind of makes the immersion better if you don't know who you're fighting, perhaps just call them "Guard", but perhaps make sure their bow or something about their armor will tell you who they are instead.

ass kickin is what you do!
but now that messagebox got my attention
It popped up, cause you turned an immortal character into a vampire right?
Do mortals need to get burried then?

I like most of Guru's ideas. Xrd80, with his obsession of WoD ( ) made me think about a detail in VtM. Vampires who kill innocent humans are penalized with a loss of humanity, and a greater risk of going into a frenzy. Now, without going the "frenzy" way, nor penalizing you for killing (as there's a lot of killing...), maybe killing humans via bloodsvcking could affect your character in some way? Just throwing ideas around, for another release later.

I understand your desire for a brutal vampire world, but I've let the few with a loud voice influence me before to where the masses were unhappy, so I have to go with my gut on this one and respectfully decline. Play the mod first. You might find that it is already TOO brutal. I am a bit of a masochist so you might be pleasantly surprised. There is garlic damage, weakness to fire, holy damage, sun damage, three stages of vampire hunters who can flee and come back with hoards, you take damage if you drink dead blood, blood potions cannot make you advance, you need a coffin, and probably some other stuff I forgot. This mod has more downsides to being a vampire than any other mod in existence. (please correct me if I'm wrong)

I removed the age requirements for advancement in feeding in ParasiteX's code so there is never waiting for age to catch up.
I will set up quests in the second release concerning covens, Count Hassidor, etc.
I probably have 20 videos now. Not sure what you were talking about. Name the video and how many seconds into it the sound occurs and I can try to tell you what it was.


I don't think adding in the victim's level is a good idea due to mods, and even vanilla leveling will make everyone high level as you age, making it even easier to advance instead of harder. I can use my blood quality system but I don't want more than 1 point per victim no matter what, and I don't know what would happen if I started using floating point integers. Meaning, I don't know what .25 would do. Probably nothing if I changed all my shorts to floats.. but I would just rather not do it. I think once I make it so only one xp point per victim it might become harder to progress. Are there even 250 npc's in the game? I'm sure there are counting dungeon people which will respawn. WHat I'm worried about is save game bloat adding tokens to everyone, and introducing bugs at this point by changing things. I didn't write the feed system so I'm reluctant to toy with it because that code is creepy to me, to say the least.

That sounds like what I have planned for rogue vampires. They need more blood but gain power fast. I don't want to mess with my current vampire script but if I allow the player to get the rogue infection then they will have different abilities and progression.


Well we can't run around with our buffy face and ugly fangs hanging out can we? Really I just don't have the time or resources to make it any other way. I can't account for who the player will turn so they are pretty much all going to be happy puppies that follow you.

Glad you liked it.



1. already implemented, to some degree. Baseline time cravings are reduced. Powers still drain the same amount but with the baseline time craving reduced it seems like the other powers last much longer before cravings kick in.
2. I don't know of any way to keep track of incidents within towns, so I just have one global area vampire bounty and vampire rumors records which I use. But I have a system that is similar to that, but not localized. Vampire hunters, once hired will track you anywhere you go. Setting up localized patrols in the cities is a bad idea because everyone will have 20,000 city mods they want me to support. So far I haven't touched one outside cell and I intend to keep it that way, except for exterior vampire buildings I put in for the quests.
3. Already have one hunter with a bow and she has special vampire killing arrows. I'd like to make the guards upgrade their stuff if they see you and you get away, that might be possible but I doubt I'll get to it.
4. Bad idea again. Too many conflicts with other mods. The basic rule is never modify an exterior cell and make everything new. I don't want 10,000 emails about how one quest doesn't work because of x mod conflict. I have vampire hunters follow you around and great distances at first. They are so far away you might not even see them. They could be just hanging out it seems. Or are they following you? I think its sufficient. They will destroy your coffins later probably, and drop garlic at your feet and other nasty stuff.
5. I might be able to add my garlic script to a vampire hunters amulet. That could be cool.
6. Sounds good... I do want to improve the hunters some yet.
7. The only way that is going to change is if you write me a single quest script that is started and stopped on spawn of the vampire hunters. We shall call this script with startquest VampireHunterNamingQuest and then in it you will write code which randomly picks a first name, and randomly a last name, then applies that code to the hunters name. You can probably use an array and setnamex to get the job done. Then put a stopquest VampireHunterNamingQuest command in there, then I can merge that one script into my mod, and it won't take any cpu other than once in a blue mood when the vampire hunter respawns. You can get the names if you google oblivion name generator.

If you really want to get involved... research if its possible to change hair color, style and other attributes on the fly which would make them feel a bit more random.

Yes. However, I kind of like how the essential characters just die and turn right away, like in interview with a vampire. I know how to fix the face stuff... so I might change them all to this way instead of burying them.


Now that force feed is done, I could make a random chance if you are really hungry and if you force feed a lot, or have a lot of murders the code already scans for refs when you are outside, I could make it so the wind catches the scent of a victim and you just fooosh over to the victim and start feeding without the player being able to stop that. It would only happen if you are starving. I'm pretty sure I could do it easily though, and it would be a really cool effect, and throw the player into a potentially bad situation if they didn't manage their blood cravings

EDIT: Wow I think they took out that stupid time limit to reply crap. This reply took over an hour to make and I didn't get the dumb box saying it timed out or whatever. NICE.

Just wanted to say that I've been following this mod since last summer and I am incredibly excited for its release. Anywho...




This made me think of baby snakes and spiders. Both have the inexperience to control the amount of venom they release into the prey's blood stream; I was thinking the same could be implemented with the vampire. If you're a younger vampire, you have less control over how much blood you take from your victim, possibly causing accidental death of your blood bag in the process.

Just a random thought.

Loving what I see so far.

The link to that video was DEAD.

Well, I don't remember now, but I think it's in every video in which you jump - when you reach the ground, there's that weird, heavy sound. But it's nothing important, I'm just being curious and extraordinarily prone to going off-topic.

And hmm... maschism you say? Sounds good.
A side thought - does it mean that you actually enjoy constantly creating and fixing bugs? Ah, that should explain why you're so willing to implement all these crazy ideas ;>
Well, wish you pain, then, I guess ;p

It sounds there might be too many drawbacks rather than not enough! Im all for that at first, but Id like old age to bring more security, not less.

I hope there are ways to protect one's coffins from hunters as well. And that the powers Vampirism brings in your mod will be worth the trouble

Ah, now i know why GORE was so terrible. It was meant to be that bad to entertain the masochist gamer. :whistling:

j/k - But I used to hate that game with a passion.

Anyhow, this project keeps getting better and better everytime i visit this thread. Keep up the great work. :thumbsup:

I'd LIKE to..but the mod isn't quite set up that way. I would like craving levels to affect how much blood is consumed, and then the fatigue drain/health drain be similar on the victim, resulting in death. I could do that fairly easily, but what I can't do is give the player a way to back off or control the amount of blood taken, unless I completely redid all feeding and at this point its probably not worth it.


I just checked and it works fine. Maybe your DNS is having trouble. Didn't you report a false dead link one other time? Time to get a new isp friend


I love a challenge and fixing things. I'm all for a good product. If a crazy idea is good and I think it will add value without being some major project I should be willing to put it in.

Its a custom sound for vampires jumping incredible distances but it plays all the time. I think I have the expertise to now make it only play when your super jump stuff is active.

No there's countless great benefits to being a vampire in Unholy Darkness. To name a few: force feeding, super strength, super jumps, super speed, other stat bonuses, glamor powers like seduction, convincing merchants to sell at night, cool vampire graphics and shaders, death fx, low level creatures and horses flee from you if you show fangs, you can turn anyone into a vampire and be your minion or thrall and command them around, there are nice player home vampire additions, your fists are like swords and you can gut someone with your bare hands, and in general you will FEEL like a vampire with all the little things I've done to enhance the whole experience. I'm probably forgetting a million features too.


Aw you hate my first baby! Oh well, I pretty much hate it now too. FPS was my first love, but after sandbox action RPG games I can't go back to it.

An hour wow, thanks for the quick replies MM don't let us svck up too much of your time

I believe it was in LTD's vampire mod where you held B (I think it that key) and it would make your character feed on an NPC. It was sort of like your force feed, but no animation (boo! :meh: ). However, they fed until you let go of the key. Would it be possible to just add that into the default feed animation when you're feeding on a sleeping person?


EDIT - it actually might have fed until you pressed B once more. I have forgotten.

Maybe it has to do with I live only one state away from Area 51.

No, I have way too many ways to feed... force feed, traditional feed, feed through dialogue, feed through seduction, feed on blood potions... there is no way to modify all of them to have some sort of dynamic blood drain without wasting about a months of time re writing every feed system and then the engine isn't exactly set up to support things like this with multiple animations and such.

In fact I attempted doing the whole experience points from someone only once thing and it didn't work right. The reason is in Oblivion stock sleep feeding all it does is play an animation on the bed, and set the global hasvampirefed to 1 for an instant. It doesn't identify the target. I had to use OBSE advanced code to do all of that, and the way everything is coded you get fed and your experience points before the engine even knows who it was you fed on.

I could call another script and feed it info... but honestly its way too much work for such a trivial result.

I haven't given up on it yet, but I'm going to shelf the idea until a better approach dawns on me.

Well try again. All my screenshots and everything come from my web site so if one link works they should all work.

Woa
That sounds like some pretty heavy scripting to me. But yeah, that sounds like some "drawback" that's actually not that much of a hassle for the player. I really like the idea!

Well from scratch yes it would be a lot of code, but since I already have systems in place for force feed, others to scan the area for references, it wouldn't be hard at all. I tried to make everything semi modular so I can tap into it as needed, which is why the blood system is a pain to work with, I didn't write it, but when I started on this my scripting abilities were not nearly what they are now. I'm still a noob IMO... but I've worked next to some near John Carmack level programmers so that makes you humble.

Anyhow, tonight was a royal pain the can, but the results I hope will be well worth it. I took some inspiration from Wynne who talked about the fine balance of humanity and becoming a monster. Ah I can't even begin to describe what she said, but I saved it a long time ago... Here is a bit of it:



Sorry notepad destroyed her formatting.

So I really liked that stuff and I implemented a semi complex method of how evil your vampire is, and once you go down the dark path of murder, force feeding and other things... your bite will do more and more damage to your victims. It takes into consideration your murder count, your vampire's age, and the number of necks you have bitten the ol' fashioned way, and then multiplies it all together divides it a couple of times and BAM we've got the amount of damage your vampire inflicts on his victims after a feed, per second and the effect lasts 10 seconds.

The end result is my evil [censored] vampire character who has murdered a lot of people and fed on many... has one wicked bite now. So you may have to heal your victims in order to stay a good vampire, and drink blood potions when in the town, and only force feed on bad guys which will increase your xp but not make you evil... I think anyway. I have to look at the code some more and do a lot.. but the hard part is done. The rest are just some easy checks and balances to make it kick in when we want.

I might even make it reversible too. If you go a week or two without drink murdering anyone perhaps your dark power will begin to diminish. It will be like muscle memory though, it will come back really fast once you use it again.

Wow, that is some great writing! oo:

Then if you go a long time without beening an evil vampire then it could take more bounty to get the hunters to chase you. And mabye if your REALLY good, and done something great (i don't know what that could be) then guards may not attack on sight, being allowed into chapels by the gods and sun being less dangerious.

Hmm. Will there be an option to disable the weakness to Garlic effect? I'm not afraid of the difficulty - I modified my current vampire so that the sun damage was at all times 3x its original value - but the whole idea of a dried plant harming undead monsters that prey on mankind has always seemed a bit silly to me...

Eh, if no I'll just modify it myself anyways, so no big deal I suppose.

Heh, imagine that in some tales even crossroads and rice can be anathema to vampires ;>
People would imagine the silliest things just to believe that they had some advantage against their striges, hobgoblins and other embodiments of nightmares (or... blame for failed crop).

A5ATAR: All you have to do is destroy the garlic. Its more of a minor annoyance than anything else. I think it is part of an essential immersion game play mechanic where NPCs will strengthen their defense against vampires. It lets you know as a player that they are on to you and it is a precursor to vampire hunters being hired, and is also part of the vampire hunters tactics.

New thread here:

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1082609-unholy-darkness-complete-vampire-overhaul/