teebird

Hey, just a couple quick questions, and here's some context. I'm attempting to change the Hunter's Instinct Perk for Rangers. Currently it only applies to ranged weapons. While it would be easy to simply remove the melee check in the file to make the bonus also apply to melee, this seems boring to me. What I would like to do is grab how far the unit moved on their last move and modify the damage by something like distance/5. However, I have a few issues with that. It appears to me that X2Ability has a function that's called anytime you use slash that already grabs the movement range of a slash attack. My first problem is here. I'm not entirely sure what order of events these things are called in. As the X2Ability function "TypicalMoveEndAbility_BuildInterruptGameState" appears to deal primarily with animations, I would guess that this doesn't do anything before an attack, but as damage estimates are shown BEFORE the attack, I would guess hunters instinct gets called first. Unfortunately this would mean I would need to catch how far a person is about to move with an attack, I haven't seen anywhere I can do that yet. Even if I CAN get the movement from the function above, I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to get this information to the HuntersInstinct section to calculate the damage of the attack. My first thought was to modify the XComGameState_Unit to add a new variable to hold this information to later be accessed by HuntersInstinct. However, you mentioned that I can't override GameState classes. What is the best way to store new variables relating to a specific unit? I have to imagine that this is something that will come up very frequently in modding efforts. Thanks!

I'm just gonna say something stupid right now. I'm aware this is going to be idiotic, because I clearly don't know what I'm talking about, but I need to say it anyway. Currently all multiplayer attempts seem to want to try and sync every aspect of two games together to create the same experience on two seperate clients. This isn't how most multiplayer games work, not entirely anyway. The most ideal way for a server/client to interact is to have the client tell the server what button is being pressed, to have the server calculate EVERY bit of the gaming side of it, and simply respond to the client with what image should be posted on the screen. With this the client isn't actually keeping track of anything, it's simply displaying an image and reporting the button presses of the user. Without the client tracking anything/doing anything you don't need to worry about someone modding the client, since it doesn't do anything important. This has general downsides however. Any lag will cause the client to completely freeze before finding a new image, there's no clientside prediction. The server is doing ALL the workload, it's not getting any help from the client. To the best of my knowledge there isn't any good way to get the image from the perspective of an NPC. Otherwise you would simply have the NPC be controlled by the input of the "guest" player and show whatever that NPC sees. Obviously the Client would also have to handle menus/dialogue options. Long story short, hooking and syncing EVERY aspect of Skyrim with two games seems harder/more impossible than somehow getting the view from an NPC and creating a program that could recieve that information/send key presses. Of course, as I said, I clearly don't know what I'm talking about, but I wouldn't mind someone explaining to me why this way doesn't work.

They won't sound the same if I'm taking some random person and tacking lines on to lydia. That will break immersion and annoy, the exact opposite of what I want. Though Lydia has so few lines already that it wouldn't be hard to completely redo everything she says.

Ahh, curses, why did I even make that an option? Clearly more difficult than many of the other options. Especially if I really want it done well.

With the companion thing I would likely work on a male companion first, since I can do the voice for that. But with future updates I'd likely add more followers, preferably with different voices, and would need some voice acting help. Anywho, I'm going to bed now. I'll think on character/story/quests tomorrow.

As soon as the CK comes out I plan on doing some work on the game. I have a few ideas in mind, but I'd like people to download them when I'm done... So I'm asking the community what they want first! General Balance Mod There are a number of things in the game that bug me in terms of balance, and a lot of that resides in the perk system. While I feel that my early points are well spent in trees like archery, I feel that making novice lockpicking easier is simply laughable. I don't like investing in silly/worthless things to get to decent options. Skill trees with this issue are mainly smithing, lockpicking and ALL magic perks. Magic in general is iffy. While I can dual cast in destruction for the impact bonus and automatically kill any one opponent, my damage just doesn't scale well with much. This makes many battles won before they've started, but long and completely lacking challenge. In other words, boring. Redoing the perks to increase damage and decrease cost, just in general rather than for a specific skill, would be a start. Adding some new enchantments to the game might be in order as well. Archery's final skill point suffers somewhat from this as well. My biggest pet peeve by far is the synergy between alchemy/enchanting and smithing that quickly spirals out of control. Investment in these three trees quickly outshines anything else you can do. Damage/Armor can be easily doubled from their original values. This is just too much and forces players trying to optimize down this path. (Though you certainly don't need to optimize in a single player game with multiple difficulty settings). I'd likely place diminished effects to upgrade values at higher levels. I'd have to look into exactly how potions/enchantments up smithing. In order to get the best of the best armor/weapons you'd still need all three, but the difference wouldn't be THAT significant. I would also be changing smithing/enchanting level system to match potions, making the experience gained based off of the value of the item created. Companion Mod This would add a follower/marriage option character with some actual personality and background. Ideally the character would have a fair number of dialogue options, often related to current quests, and comment on the world around them in a more specific/intelligent manner. IE not saying "I've never seen anything like it." every time they see a crypt end area and having the exact same response upon reaching blackreach. This is NOT something I'd necessarily be able to do well on my own. Likely I'd need help with animations, perhaps meshes, and perhaps a female voice actor. While I'd LOVE LOVE LOVE to create unique interactions for the existing characters this would require me to do one of three things: 1. Get someone who sounds similar to the original actor. (Difficult if we're really gonna try and keep immersion.) 2. Get someone to completely redo every line the original character had as well as the new lines. (not necessarily a challenge for some with smaller amounts of dialogue) 3. Just say screw it and tack the lines on from whoever. (shoddy, and it wouldn't really serve it's purpose). Werewolf/Vampire Rework Currently it really doesn't feel like being a werewolf is anything but a curse, without being able to root through corpses/pick up items you don't want to stay that way longer than is necessary to clear a room, and with no access to your inventory and no reliable way to recover, you really can't even if you wanted to. Without equipment you deal less damage and are less resilient to boot. In human form the only difference is that you can't gain any sleeping bonuses. A useless transformation and a negative effect outside of it? Can be kind of fun once in a while perhaps, but really? Sadly you can't do much with this as is. On the other hand I imagine a bunch of people will tackle this pretty quickly. Armor Rework The way that armor is currently crafted and working very few people want to use anything other than heavy armor, unless they're speccing into alchemy/enchanting and smithing, and they are going to reach max armor anyway. Light armor confers useful bonuses to melee champs that use stamina, but characters that you would expect to see wearing light armor, archers and mages, have no reason to put aside the plate for the scale. On top of that you take Daedric armor for heavy champs and Dragon scale for light, no reason to ever consider anything else, and you only use daedric weapons. I'd like to make the top three choices more of a choice. Glass would be more effectively enchanted, with a 30% enchanting bonus to any enchantment on it perhaps. Daedric armor would "drink" poisons and perhaps potions applied to the armor/weapon to confer more lasting benefits, allowing you to almost "enchant" weapons with poison (currently it's to cumbersome to apply poisons for every hit...). As a downside they would have a negative factor in enchanting. Some effects may have to be reduced in trade for their extended number of hits (20-30?). I'd have to look into how max poison effects compare to max enchanting effects. This one seems like the least likely to have someone else doing, so certainly an enticing option. Skill Line Master Quests Adding a quest for each skill line that adds something considerable for them. The magic ones already have some, granting them master spell access. Alchemy has a few quests that seemed promising, and admittedly Sendirion's blessing isn't bad, but the white phial was a HUGE disappointment for anyone actually doing alchemy. Smithing might gain a hammer that allows them to increase their smithing capabilities, perhaps craft rare weapons, or access unique properties of certain armors (see the armor rework). Weapon master quests may teach a skill (power) that could be used with that weapon, or perhaps a legendary weapon of that type. Enchanting arguably already has the black star/Azura's star, but I'd likely add something else or cause a person to have to go through a quest for the double enchanting perk. Problematically this would require the most work. I would need help with voice acting for sure, possibly animation/meshes. Again, another thing I can't entirely do myself, at least not well. Let me know and I'll start brainstorming more thoroughly.

C'mon, wouldn't be that hard would it?

You're all crazy. Multiplayer would not at all have to detract from single player. Being able to take control of someone's follower to fight alongside them would totally work. Lockpicking pausing, pickpocketing pausing, entering menus pausing, these will all be issues, but fixable. However this would in no way effect the storyline or anything similar. Honestly, so far, I don't really have any investment in my character, nothing to lose. However, it is impossible to do. Which is unfortunate. Just being able to trade items with friends would be great though.

Turning right and left normally is the preset... Move your mouse to the left/right...

Perhaps I'm unfamiliar with the different accents of Skyrim, but aren't there a fair number of simple Midwestern US neutral accents? Those I can do.

No one else wants to trade?

Any way to allow you to trade items between save game files or (what I actually want) between friends with separate games would be delightful. Of course if you can import items from another save game (perhaps to some chest somewhere, or on to a follower, or even in a pile on the ground, straight into inventory, whatever) you'll be able to trade with friends in a round about way by getting a copy of their save file. It'd be nice if there was an easier and cleaner way to trade than that, but I'll live with whatever of course. It's a bit annoying to have to do potions crafting and enchantment. While I'd love to think that I'll be able to do this myself with the creation kit, I'm being a bit more reasonable and assuming the kit won't actually support anything like this.

I guess I'm not sure. If there's a way to actively change item information mid game this shouldn't be difficult.

I'd like a mod that links a single (or perhaps even all) chests in the world with other games/clients. I understand that it's impossible to sync up the game with with someone elses so that two people can truly play with eachother, but I'd love it if my friends and I could trade items. I know it's possible to take a list of items from a file and import them into the game. This would read from an online database to display the items in the chest from the list. When a friend places an item in it, it appears in the chest in my world. Similarly, if he takes an item, it leaves in my world. Of course I wish the whole game was multiplayer, but I realize that with the system bethseda chose to use, that'd be impossible. Preferably the chest would be easy to get to.

This game was not designed with multiplayer in mind. Which is to say that the client can't communicate properly with a server and as such you can't be in the same world as your friends. It's possible to communicate with eachother's clients somewhat artificially to show an NPC where your friend would be standing, however... However, that alone takes a lot of work. Unfoturnately syncing the ENTIRE WORLD is impossible, syncing one NPC with your friend is stinking hard too. At least that's the way it was in Oblivion.