103 replies to this topic

[MarkInMKUK]

A few thoughts on "Difficulty"

I've been tinkering around with assorted mods which alter the balance of the game. The problem seems to be that they apply a global change, which doesn't really make sense. So most of this applies just to vanilla Oblivion.

For example - the tutorial dungeon (which everyone has done). Enemies - several rats, 1 Zombie, 8 goblins, possibly Mythic Dawn assassins if you are fast and aggressive enough. On easy, rats are a simple kill, and the zombie falls to three or four arrows or a couple of fireballs. On medium, rats suddenly take at least TWO arrows to kill them? Now come on, an arrow is designed to kill an unarmoured man, ideally with a single shot. Is it REALLY reasonable to take TWO to kill EVERY rat you meet? Maybe the occasional rat you'd miss hitting it cleanly, but it should at LEAST slow the damn thing down because it's pretty badly injured. But no - they comme galloping up to you at full speed trailing an iron arrow that should weigh in at half as much as they do. As for the zombie - that's getting tough by this stage. I try very hard to let the rats take it down for me first.

So - is there a better way of scaling? Maybe give rats high agility so they can dodge stuff, but still be killed easily with a direct hit. The zombie should be tough to beat, I agree, but it should STILL slow down if half-cooked and turned into a pincushion. What does the game engine allow us to do to make these more reasonably balanced enemies.

Then there's the goblins. The first two are pretty easy no matter what settings you use. However things become a little ... odd ... in the main cavern. With no mods, I can sneak and snipe any or all of them on easy or medium, and generally take only two, or maybe three, arrows on hard. But ... why the heck don't they ALL respond when the first one sees you and screeches a warning? If the legion guards can know you have committed a crime in another city, surely a goblin should at least wonder why another one is either screaming "Look, there's a human/elf/orc/whatever", or dropping on top of him full of holes and leaking blood.

Open for discussion and ideas.

Edited by MarkInMKUK, 15 April 2011 - 11:25 AM.

[Telyn]

The tutorial isn't really a good example because it is meant to handhold new players. That's why sneaking is so easy. The tutorial assumes you have no experience in sneaking at all, in any game. I am not sure if the scaling is the same in the tutorial as it is in, say Vilverin. I should try to test that. Remember, the new player is still learning the keys in the tutorial.

Forgetting the tutorial for a moment, you have a point that the way difficulty settings are handled is pretty simplistic. I am a dungeon crawler, though, and quite often the NPCs yell, and receive help. Usually it won't come from other levels unless you're in an open multilevel part of the dungeon. NPCs with distance attacks will sometimes fire on me from above. I'm running entirely vanilla combat. Humans and elves especially call for reinforcement. Something is a bit weird about goblins. You'd prefer the ones in the tutorial to act more like scamps maybe?

Some combat mods that make NPCs smarter:

Smarter Bandits by David Brasher http://www.tesnexus....le.php?id=23296 Bandits ambush road travellers in packs.
Duke Patrick's Fresh Kills Now Alert the NPCs: http://www.tesnexus....le.php?id=18065
NPCs Yield http://www.tesnexus....le.php?id=22392 This is basically a fight or flight mod with some pretty complex functions, but it does seem to have some issues and conflicts still.
http://www.tesnexus....ile.php?id=8774 Enemy Actors AutoHeal.
http://www.tesnexus....le.php?id=29485 Enemy Actors Use Powers, gives them birthsigns that function.


Pertaining to other topics mentioned in this thread:
Here is a mod that adjusts time scale in a way that does not break those two quests you mentioned before: Smarter Timescale http://www.tesnexus....ile.php?id=5859
And one that has animals that eat, drink, and hunt each other: Creatures Alive http://www.tesnexus....ile.php?id=5251
This one apparently needs editing but it makes imps loot chests in dungeons and even pick locks, according to the comments: NPCs Alive Release 1: http://www.thenexusf...al/page__st__10

[MarkInMKUK]

Hi Telyn,

Good set of mods - I foresee a happy hour or two downloading and installing tonight. Hopefully with some work we can overcome the game's inherent bias towards making AI stand for "Absolute Idiocy".

[Striker879]

I'm not convinced the goblins don't alert one another once outside the tutorial dungeon. My experience with the buggers is if you get one's attention you've got all the nearby one's attention. Perhaps there is a distance threshold at play here, because there are times, if you're very careful you can get a one on one fight. It's just got to be a quick kill or his buddies will wander into the fray (these are the outdoor lookouts I'm talking about). The interior goblins sometimes have wander/travel AI packages that take them from one cell to the next. I don't often have much luck getting a one on one fight there either. If I don't use a paralyze potion or element in the spell I'm casting their buddies come a runnin'. They do add a whole new meaning to melee.

[Zapata935]

I think what everyone seems to forget that this games AI was developed maybe circa 2003, or 18 months before the game was released. 2005 I believe. The fact that we are spending time this very day debating the issues of it's highs and lows, stands testament to it's attraction as one of the greats of it's genre. Best Wishes Zapata935

Edited by Zapata935, 15 April 2011 - 07:12 PM.

[Telyn]

Thanks for the comment, Zapata! Yes, the game is still in many ways cutting edge after all these years. I don't think the limits of the AI come so much from the date, though. I think it's a development schedule issue they had, because when I look around in the CS there are all sorts of sophisticated things they just never had the time to complete or expand. One example is beggars seeking shelter during rain. It's in there, and sometimes it even works. The conditions available even without anything like OBSE added, the vanilla game has a lot of capability they just never had the chance to use fully. It's our good fortune, because as modders, we do have the time to play with what is there.

Striker, I can confirm that goblins will summon each other outdoors. I think there are some issues like line of sight that sometimes prevent this for all NPCs in dungeons. Sometimes I can escape archers by going into a corridor and getting a wall between me and them. sometimes they don't pursue in that case. You might be right about goblin radius, I will look when I get a chance later today. I was wondering if it had something to do with their racial behaviors.

One interesting thing. I have a level 1 character I am running around on some lately that I am avoiding levelling, because that character mostly does crafting and alchemy and I am testing some things. I noticed a big difference in how many enemies will attack her at once as soon as she got alchemy to journeyman level. Highest skill level may possibly change difficulty levels. When she does get dragged into combat, it seems harder now. Got ganged up on by 5 npcs, which were 2 fighters, one archer, and 2 conjurers yesterday. That was a pretty dire situation for her, even though I play that one on easy difficulty because she's not intended to be a "heroic" character in any conventional sense.

[Zapata935]

Thanks for the comment, Zapata! Yes, the game is still in many ways cutting edge after all these years. I don't think the limits of the AI come so much from the date, though. I think it's a development schedule issue they had, because when I look around in the CS there are all sorts of sophisticated things they just never had the time to complete or expand. One example is beggars seeking shelter during rain. It's in there, and sometimes it even works. The conditions available even without anything like OBSE added, the vanilla game has a lot of capability they just never had the chance to usefully. It's our good fortune, because as modders, we do have the time to play with what is there.

The Bethesda team are a group of highly paid and highly talented individuals who pour their all into making games for individuals like you and me to enjoy. I am sure down to my finest bone that if they could have the time to produce their finished product, without marketing time, then we would all see a different plate of fish all together! My answer to you is bro, make the best of what is available, take it from there! Best Wishes Zapata935

Edited by Zapata935, 15 April 2011 - 09:34 PM.

[Striker879]

Using conditions definitely increases realism. I use IsRaining to determine whether my girls sit on the bench outdoors to execute their Use Item book package (reading outdoors in the rain just doesn't look right.). I tried IsPleasant to control when my White Stallion girls would go for a swim, but the results were less dependable than IsRaining so they swim if it's not raining, sunny or partly cloudy or downright overcast (not as real as I'd like but better than almost never seeing them swim ... I'll need to remember to try IsPleasant with my Anvil crew, sun is a bit more reliable in Anvil).

I got a bit of info from Astymma that's interesting. It's around how conditions are processed. Let's see if I can get this right ... what my question to him was, how special idles are assigned (I'd created custom classes to assign some special idles and then had seen some regular NPCs doing the idles). The summary of his answer (providing I'm getting my head around it right) is that if the conditions are inclusive (his term, meaning you ascribe a single state to satisfy your condition) then only your defined NPC will get the idle. If your condition is exclusive (again his term, meaning a range of states can satisfy your condition) then if another NPC meets the condition and the idle is available for selection they may get your idle even though your intention was otherwise. Perhaps a quote of his answer will help you either confirm or disprove my take:

Well it works on a tree... if your animations are enclosed in a folder and that folder has conditionals the other npc meets AND the folder typically has must choose a file, they will get stuck in your folder before choosing a more appropriate animation. Get what I mean?

A good practice to follow is use only inclusionary conditionals for animations and never exclusionary ones unless your intent is to make a sweeping change. If it's meant to, for example, only work on a specific set of NPC's, your best bet is to give them a token object and check for the token count. By inclusionary vs exclusionary let me provide some examples.

You want 2 to be the answer:
inclusionary- if (x=2) i.e. do only if x IS a value, explicitly setting a range
exclusionary- if ((x<3)&&(x>1)) i.e. do only if x ISN'T in a range of values, implicitly setting a range

The inclusionary is extremely specific while the exclusionary approach actually produces an extremely wide range of floating point results in addition to 2.0 which likely weren't intended. So basically you want to check your logic and see if it is using explicit inclusionary selection and not an unintentional exclusionary condition that produces unexpected results. For animations, the conditionals can be a pyramid of conditions based on the folders containing the animations. The top-most folder, imo, should have the MOST inclusionary conditional, for example the presence of a token object in their inventory. You want anyone that shouldn't be animated to skip over that tree completely. Once inside that tree they're stuck there and if they find no animation to play, won't play any at all.

Astymma also forwarded the following two links from the CS Wiki: Idle Animations and Forcing Idle Animations
Whether I got my head around his answer properly or not, my take away is that there are subtleties in implementation of the game mechanics that need to be understood and used to effect where possible.

Getting the beggars under shelter is one thing ... getting the shelter to stop the rain coming through is another.

[Telyn]

They have terrific programmers at Bethesda. I think some of the things on my wish list will probably be in Skyrim. It sounds like they are having to give up some of what they wanted to do because the deadline is starting to loom again. It's a very difficult balance, getting a game out before it's out of date already or money starts to get low, but trying to pack in as much as you can in the time you have. Then you have to dodge a buggy release which could kill your game. People who don't know when to just get it out the door sometimes create vaporware. Years ago I played a demo of an Eastern European game that was never finished. In the beginning as you were walking through a farm to try to find a farmer, the animals behaved so realistically it was almost disturbing. The dog came running over and sniffed me. The baby chickens followed the mother but they all scattered when I threw some grain to them, and then came back to eat only when I backed up. I know why it never got finished. It was incredibly detailed. and I am betting they ran out of money before they ever had anything more than a demo.

Wow, Striker, I am still trying to get my head around that, but if I manage, it's going to be really useful.

[MarkInMKUK]

Getting the beggars under shelter is one thing ... getting the shelter to stop the rain coming through is another.

Now THAT would be one of the best realism improvers out there. I know there's one mod that tried to do it, but failed. Workable umbrellas maybe?