» Sat May 28, 2011 3:03 pm "The crusader picks up the weapon and it feels cool to the touch. Somehow the blade “knows” of his past. For a moment the crusader hesitates as though feeling naked and vulnerable. Then he realizes this blade has known his kind before. Just then the crusader is ambushed by a group of bandits. He turns brandishing the new blade. With skill and precision he dispatches them seconds later. Noting the weight and balance of the weapon he readjusts his grip. The crusader wipes the blood from the blade on the tunic of one of the fallen and places it in his scabbard. This weapon is a good find and this has truly been a good day..."
The whole point of the mod is that the weapon gains abilities in the hands of the wielder. The player gets better at using 'that' weapon. This comes from the idea of heroes of the past using the same weapon their whole life and that weapon becomes a legend on its own. Thor's hammer for instance.
What I have working so far:
- The weapon gets 'converted' to a WOL using a spell (not for the associated quests when built). The WOL has a script attached to it for tracking stats. All weapon types are supported at this point.
- As the weapon is used I keep track of statistics: hits, assaults, murders, kills and other stats of interest. All stats are tracked for 'that' instance of that weapon. Not for all silver short swords for example. Stats are also kept for factions, classes, and creature types.
- The ability to define attributes and how they are modded by using a script file in a data directory. I developed a basic parser so things can be tweaked external to the plugin esp file. This was accomplished through the pluggy ini file mechanism.
- Dropping a WOL will lose all attributes gained by usage by the player. It becomes a standard weapon to anyone else. Picking it back up will reapply all the changes, spells, etc. This was really a pain to get working consistently. OBSE 18 really helped with that. I ended up creating a stack system to track this.
- The abilities of the weapons will be extensible by creating a mod that adds to the list of effects and conditions. I purposely made everything be in a list for this purpose.
- Tracks projectiles like spells and arrows for tracking related stats. Hit by electricity or casts drain health type stuff. Tracking actions and things that affect the player.
To do:
- Define the list of effects and abilities the weapon will gain and work on refining the conditions when the weapon increases abilities.
- Determine when a weapon has reached legendary status. This will cause the plugin to store a copy of the weapon in the INI file so later characters may find or run into someone with that weapon. Possibly another incarnation of the character the player played when the weapon became legendary.
- When legendary status is reached on the weapon then when dropped it may retain some of the abilities it gains when in the hands of the player.
- The weapon itself may manifest as conscious and ask for the player to complete quests to grow its abilities. It may even try to convert the player to be more of its alignment. It really depends on the history of the original WOL and what the player does with it.
- Quest mods for this mod will be separate. The whole idea there is that this mod could be used by someone for enhancing their experience, but no official quest mods, except maybe weapon defined ones, would run. That allows someone (another modder) to create their own history or story around a weapon.
- Create effects that apply based upon the weapons usage against factions, races, monsters, etc. This would allow a weapon to become an Ogre killer because the player killed like 1000 ogres or something. The weapon may end up striking harder when used on an ogre or cause them to run like little imps for their mommies.
- Lock in certain effects and don't allow improving in some areas after certain ranks or attributes are gained. This is so a weapon doesn't become the ogre, golden saint, dragon, breton and several hundred other classifications killer. Lock in something and let that rank or effect define the weapon at that point. Even though the weapon may silently give bonuses against other things, but its name does not reflect it.
Anyway, there is more I could probably pull out of my brain, but I think you get the point. A lot of the basic groundwork and hard parts are done. The structure of how the plugin will operate, store data, calc stats, access stats, are all done. It amounts to some function lookup arrays to allow effects to be applied based upon external string data brought in from an INI. It is very extensible and easy to add remove things. I actually had gotten to the fun part in the development of testing the enhancements and tweaking things.
The point of this post is to find out if this is something people would like. I like the idea of playing one weapon the entire game and not just searching for the best +20 weapon that every bandit will carry because of level scaling. I wanted a weapon that was as unique as the guy who carries it and I can get better with 'that' weapon as I used it. On top of that things that occur out of my control could imbue positive and/or negative effects on the weapon too. Imagine fighting a zombie and the weapon gets a magical mishap and now it gives a disease to whoever carries it (cursed). The possibilities are intriguing and it adds a level of play that I do not think has been achieved in any RPG. The next step after this mod would be armor, but that is not going to happen for this mod. This mod is already huge in scope and functionality.
So, who would want to play with such a mod?
