[WIP] Cerwiden -SMART Healer- Dev Opinion Poll 4

[bedlambob]

Can I also add my vote for a horse for Ceri. I have had Vilja for a few days now and her summoned horse is massively useful. I have Woburn the wonder horse for myself and do not use any horse mods etc as I only want them for travel [ I do not have fast travel enabled ].

Poor Ceri gets left behind as me and Vilja ride off into the sunset.

 

Removing Ceri from the followers framework would be fine to achieve this if it worked for you, as I have no idea on the work involved in this.

 

Cheers as always.

Bob.

[llDeimos]

Voted. As for whether or not Ceri should be in the vanilla follower system, I say no due to the fact that she's becoming increasingly complex and you'll only end up with more trouble than it's worth. As long as you can include all the essential features of a follower framework, I say give a standalone system a shot.

[Starsickle]

Is it possible that you could include an item to give the PC the Call Cerwiden spell after meeting her? Strange how you always know her enough to cast a summon spell for her.

 

Anyways - I'm glad to see hard work put into NPC behavior. If only all the followers on the nexus were more than "some Apache hair and a sword LOL"

[Mujuro]

Hi everyone,

 

Thanks for the thoughts, ideas and feedback! I've been thinking a lot about the pros and cons of removing Ceri from the vanilla follower system lately, and I *MAY* have a method that would allow for the best of both worlds, but it is still conceptual right now, and I still have to build the prototype and test against performance on less-than-uber rigs. If this crazy idea I have works, I'll be able to remove most of the limitations (not all) of having Ceri in the vanilla system for purposes of wardrobe, sandboxing, sneak and combat, but still be able to leverage improvements from other mods (e.g., Convenient Horses, Wearable Lanterns, etc.). This is still very early in my concept design and I'll update here as I get farther down the path.

 

To answer some of the questions you all have asked:

 

Ceri and her own horse

I've been dodging this simply because Convenient Horses already exists, and many Ceri users also use this mod. Note that in Ceri's v1.7x quest, Ceri does have her own (summonable) horse because I had to override the CH horse, so the core functionality for a personalized horse is already in the mod. I'll think more on whether to make that available outside Ceri's backstory quest. If I do end up making Ceri's own horse available outside the quest, Reaper9111 graciously has offered to do custom textures. :)

 

Interaction with other custom followers

This is something that I've wanted to do now for a while, and have been speaking with Emma and her team, JanusForbeare and DreamKingMods about it. We're still working out the mechanics (I've got a generic framework built for this already, and gave the code to them, but that's the easy part), as the difficult part of this is to write the interaction scenes and then find a way to ensure the mods do so only at appropriate times (e.g., Ceri shouldn't interfere with Vilja while she's demonstrating Solstheim traditions, and Vilja shouldn't interfere when Ceri's talking with Sonal, etc.). My guess is that this functionality won't be in our respective mods before sometime in early 2013, as a practical matter.

 

On some specific comments:

 

@Wasbunny AFT does 'conflict' a bit more with Ceri versus UFO and EFF, simply because certain AFT functions override Ceri's more often than the commands from the other frameworks. This is one of the definite drawbacks of being in the vanilla system.

 

@blast0r You shouldn't be getting that spell until after you meet her if you're using one of the more recent versions of Ceri; when I'd originally implemented that in v1.2 (or v1.1, I can't quite remember) it was given to the player automatically, but I changed that a while back so that you shouldn't be getting it until after you meet. I'll double check that though.

[Exsanguinatio]

On the topic of Ceri having her own horse independent from Convenient Horses, the mod can still be used even if Ceri and her horse are not affected by it. There's an option in CH that let's the player disable horses for followers and still use it to edit the player horse's speed, health, stamina, armor and so on. And since Ceri's horse, if you chose to go down that path, will have it's own armor, which is one of the main features of CH, I don't think people will be unhappy with it.

 

It'd be a good idea to make Ceri's horse speed dynamic though, which is the other main feature of CH. The farther away from the player the follower is, the faster is it's horse. That way she won't fall too far behind the players if they decide to run with their horses. Especially if their horses have moddified speeds, like most using CH do.

[Triaxx2]

I don't, mostly because it becomes too hard to judge the hits with my weapons.

 

I'll be honest. I've noticed that Vilja is outside the main companion system, yet seems to have several features of UFO. I mean, I can ask her what she's good at, and she'll tell me, but she didn't have the 'You Know...' option.

 

I wonder what was done that lets her do that? And if she's controllable with the UFO shouts. If that same functionality can be kept with Ceri, while moving her out of the follower framework, that would be fantastic.

Edited November 8, 2012 by Triaxx2

[Mujuro]

@Exsanguinatio With all else equal, I'm going to try and avoid having a completely new horse for Ceri, but if I need to, at least the base of it is there for summoning, mounting, etc. Alek did such an amazing job with CH, so I'd like to keep full compatibility with that if possible. The only catch is that I'd have to go the "exception" route again if any of Ceri's future quest installments involve her taking the player to plot destinations while on horseback/riding.

 

@Triaxx2 Yes, Vilja is outside the vanilla system. I've not had the chance to do much playing lately, much less digging around in the CK, but if I remember accurately, UFO's dialogue conditions aren't consistent. E.g., some of them aren't targeted to the CurrentFollowerFaction, PotentialFollowerFaction, etc., but rather, to ancillary factions (e.g., WIFollowerCommentFaction). So if those dialogue options are showing up for followers outside the vanilla system (e.g., Vilja), I'd bet that either the base actor form *OR* a quest alias has the follower in one of those ancillary factions. Anyways, that'd be my guess as to why "You know ..." doesn't show, but other commands from UFO do show.

[lexx005]

@Mujuro, Hello, I don't think it would be necessary to reduce the initial friendship time-frame for Ceri as you do have a debug option to skip it anyways. I personally make a quest out of going out and fishing for clams myself :)

[Exsanguinatio]

@Mujuro

My point is that it'd would be better, IMHO, for Ceri to have her own unique, named horse with unique armor. It'd avoid conflicts with CH and it'd be a lot easier on you while CH will still be viable and very useful to the player. For example, I'll be using Ceri, Vilja and Atvir Dres (or Rackhir or even Elrich if you decide to make them permanent companions). If Ceri gets her own horse, I'll be able to disable CH's scripts for horses for followers and hopefully give my processor some more breathing room while keeping armor for my own horse and the ability to edit it's speed, health, stamina, etc. And like I said, if Ceri's horse gets it's own armor and have dynamic speed, I don't think people will be unhappy it's not affected by CH.

 

Regarding the requirements for Ceri's Relationship Quest, I'll move my initial take here. Don't know why I didn't think of it before.

@Mujuro

Regarding the requirements for her relationship quest,

I think it'd be a good idea to reduce the friend points to something between 15 and 10. Speaking from my experience, my character is a ranger/dual-wielder in light armor that never used followers/companions before Cerwiden. I play on master difficulty, so my character is pretty frail and relied a lot on sneak to deliver that first crippling shot. And since I always played alone, I had a lot of health, health regen and health absorb on my gear for survivability. With that playstyle, it can take an awfully long time to get enough favor points by thanking her for the heals as you're almost never taking damage. It was only after reading the spoiler guide that I found out I had to change my playstyle a bit and the enchants on my gear in order to get enough friend points. But not everyone read the spoiler guide. Sometimes just by the name "Spoiler Guide", people are afraid of reading it because they don't want to ruin the experience. Of course, it won't actually spoil anything if they read just the Relationship Quest chapter, but I can see why they would be afraid to read it judging by the name of the file.

 

So, requiring something between 10 and 15 friend points instead of 20 would be my suggestion.

 

But now that I thought it over again, reducing the requirements will not really solve the problem. In fact, it may create an even bigger one with some people still complaining about Cerwiden's quest taking too long and other complaining that it's too easy.

 

I thought of a few suggestions that may help with that problem without reducing the required friend points.

 

 

 

1. Making available a "Thanks for your help back there. Couldn't have done without you" dialogue option that is guaranteed to add friend points after a big event or a particularly hard dungeon. These big events should be associated with a quest, like that one where you kill your first dragon and find about being a dragonborn, sucessfully defending/attacking Whiterun in the civil war questline and so on. I'm sure thre's a lot of quests that would fit here.
   
2. Maybe adding some other more mundane quests that would reward the player with more friend points. For example, giving her dialogue options while she's on sandbox mode where she can tell more about herself. Maybe even mentioning clam chowder, and the ingredients required by it later. Then making hunting for ingredients an "official" quest. After all, if the guy travels all Skyrim and dive into a sea full of slaughtfishes looking for clams to make her favorite dish, he should earn a few points with her.
   Maybe also making her taste your clam chowder and making her say the first one is horrible, the second is edible, and so on. I can't think of anything else right now, but I'm sure there are other kind of interesting quests that could be added.
   

 

 

 

For now, that's all. If I think of something else, I'll be sure to post it.

Edited November 9, 2012 by Exsanguinatio

[Triaxx2]

Yes, I like being able to use that function, so as long as it's still usable, I'll be happy. It's helpful to know what kind of armor you can put on the follower for best survivability.