Newbie's custom faction questions

[terrisius]

Hey guys,

 

I'm new to modding and was looking into possibly making a new faction. Thing is, before I do it I want to make sure that what I want to do is even possible, and that brings me to my questions.

 

• The faction I want to create, which the PC would be able to join, would tattoo their members on their initiation. Is is possible to give custom texture overlays to factions as opposed to races?
• Is it possible to give custom powers to factions, and if so, how?
• I know that I could give do the above with a new race, but the problems with that are 1) the player would not be able to join the faction unless he was a member of the race and 2) the members would lose their racial abilities in favor of the new race... I would like to allow the members to keep their racial abilities in addition to gaining the benefits of joining the faction.

 

Any help and/or insight that any of you could offer would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[Jokerine]

As far as I know, I don't think it would be possible to give tattoos to factions only, nope. In a certain way, it's also not possible to give them to races - for maximum compatibility, you'd need to make a series of new unique races (standalone, with their own textures), based on the existing races, for each NPC so they can have the tattoos. There are tutorials on the Nexus to make standalone followers. You could just make them standalone but based on the vanilla races, but there's always a chance of conflicts in this case, so it would be best to make new races from scratch. It would just have to be a bunch of them.

 

You could just make the new faction like all of the others in the game (where race does not matter), and if you MUST have something unique to identify the people of the faction, why not some apparel that's easy to see, like a circlet, or a weapon, instead? Would be a lot less work :wink:

 

And about the abilities, you'd need to give them manually to your NPCs, and through some script to the player. These abilities would need to be unique as well, like all other spells or magic abilities in the game like fire or frost or whatever, so they don't overwrite the default racial powers.

 

Hope I made sense. I haven't slept in over 24 hours, haha! Good luck with your project :smile:

Edited August 20, 2014 by Jokerine

[terrisius]

Thanks for the tips, Jokerine.

 

The more I think about it, the more I think I might try to emulate vampirism for the faction - it would allow members to keep their racial abilities, give them the new abilities, and give them a new texture. I would just need to set it to take effect when the player joins the new faction.

 

The question is, how would I do that? Would it just be like making a new race & then (somehow) have the effect applied of changing the race to factionrace?

[Jokerine]

I guess that would work, yah. I'm not sure of how you'd make it, though... I've heard that changing races midway through a game can mess with stats, but I'm not sure of how the game makes it work properly with vampires or werewolves. Sorry I can't help anymore. Good luck! :smile:

Edited August 20, 2014 by Jokerine

[terrisius]

Bumpity bump bump.

 

Seriously, though, anyone have any ideas on how to do this? Create a custom faction that gets special abilities and a new appearance without losing their initial race in the process?

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[lofgren]

The overlays and such that are available to a race are determined by formlists, if I am not mistaken. Well what would happen if you added the player's race to the formlist by script and then opened the limited character design menu? The player would still have to choose the tattoo or other feature, but that's probably safer anyway since some players might not want to change their character just to join a faction.