A couple of days ago, I started work on an ambitious project. The aim of the mod is to add visual wear & tear to the vanilla armour sets, where the more people you fight, the more scratches will appear on your equipped armour items.

This will be accomplished by keeping a running count of the number of enemies you kill while wearing armour. Each "type" of armour will have a separate set of tracked counts, so you're free to either wear full sets or mix and match.

Every time a kill count reaches a certain amount of enemies (15 by default, fully configurable), that armour type's Scratch Level will go up a stage. There will be 6 scratch levels in total, with the first being the vanilla clean state, then the rest containing progressively severe amounts of scratches and blemishes.

Finally, whenever you temper one of the pieces of armour, this will set the counts for that armour-type back to zero, restoring it to the vanilla textures.

To do the texture swaps at runtime, I'll be making use of the amazing NetImmerse Override SKSE plugin (the thing that is at the heart of the popular RaceMenu mod). So this means that SKSE will be a requirement, along with either RaceMenu or the NetImmerse Override plugin.

I have already got a prototype of the system working, so I know that this project is achievable, there will just be a lot of work making five new sets of textures for every vanilla armour type.

I have spent the last couple of nights putting together all the background mechanics. Just need to tweak a couple of things then it'll be full steam ahead in the texturing department.

I'll put up a video demo of the mod in action once I finish off the first set of armour textures, so watch this space

Thoughts?

- Hypno

Sounds cool. Looking forward to it.

Oh, this is nice. Very nice indeed.

I'm sure you considered this, but why not use the PC being hit as the trigger to increment the wear & tear count, rather than the number of foes the PC kills? An archer character can accumulate many kills without ever being touched, so for those characters kill count would be a somewhat inaccurate mechanic. Whereas by counting times the PC is hit, you could do things like have power attacks cause double the wear, blocked attacks cause half, etc.

Compatibility with the emerging mods that actually add health and repair systems to gear would be amazing, too--what you're doing here is one of the core things those mods usually lack.

I haven't looked at this stuff at all, but I wonder if it would be possible to do anything like this using decals--like the game's blood--rather than whole new armor textures? That might let you be automatically compatible with things like all modded armors, and vanilla armor textures redone for the different body mods.

But I can understand if these sorts of things make the project more complex/differently focused than you want it to be. As it is, just the texture work sounds very cool in itself as a visual gameplay addition.

Sounds great, but I have the same question as DreamKing regarding the textures. Are the textures going to act as an additional layer on top of the "actual" texture or is it a matter of swapping the "actual" textures? The latter sounds like it would result in a huge workload.

It's an intersting idea. I second the statement that this might be more effective to accomplish via decals or something, and if that works it could possibly be made compatible with non-vanilla armors too.

Cool, this was a planned feature of a weapons and armor degradation mod I wanted to make. I think the next version of SKSE will have functions that operate on worn forms so I would suggest that you get this working then integrate it with any weapons and armor degradation mods that come out (I might try making one myself).

Thank you very much for the quick responses everybody. Its nice to know that there will be a potential market for the finished product before I get fully committed


I did consider this while I was designing the background mechanics. But my thoughts were that the OnHit event gets fired quite a lot in a short space of time, I don't want to bog down the scripting engine. Whereas, the OnKill event would fire less. This is what swayed me to go the OnKill route as a way of tracking the player getting in fights.

To be honest, I didn't think of archers. What I can do is condition the event not to add to the kill count if the player was wielding a bow when they made the kill. This'll mean that those killed at distance won't add to the kill count. Or...while writing that I just thought of a better condition...have it only add to the count if the player and the victim are within a short distance from each other when the kill occurred. This will cover ranged spells as well as bows

But I do agree that the OnHit event would make this even more realistic. I will look into switching over to that event. You never know, maybe my apprehensions explained above will turn out to be unjustified



I totally agree. My approach does not really touch any vanilla systems so, in theory, it should work with those mods out of the box. But I won't really know for sure until I start testing it with the other mods.



I believe the blood splatter mechanics are hardcoded, at least I have never come across the mechanics within the CK. I did consider going down the EffectShader path, but ultimately I went with NiOverride, as it allows me to tailor the scratches to the material of the armour, making a more realistic end result. I know this means far more work for myself, but my OCD won't let me be happy with just a generic overlay of scratches showing on top of the player's armour, with all the small visual problems this will result in.



No problems with having ideas thrown about. That's pretty much the point of why I made this thread so early in development. I'm a quite open modder, i will always give my honest opinion on any ideas put forward



It will be the second one, swapping TextureSets at runtime. When you say it will result in a huge workload, do you mean for the game or for me?

If you meant for the game, then there's no need to worry there. The NetImmerse Override plugin allows me to alter the textures of equipped armour pieces on a PER REFERENCE basis. This will mean only the player's armours will get scratched up, while the rest of the armour refs in game using the same base object will remain vanilla textured.

But if you meant for me, trust me, I've already weighed up exactly how much work this will entail. You are correct, it will be a huge undertaking, but I'm up for it.

So far, I'm half way through the textures for the iron armour and that has taken me just under an hour to get to this point. In theory, that should translate to about 1 - 2 hours work per armour type.

It won't be finished in a week, but by Talos, I'll get there

- Hypno