Midicow

Sorry. I can get pretty wordy. Vanillia Stalker ai is pretty boring too, but various people have figured out how to tweak it to do the sort of things I described. You're probably right though, and even after the creation kit comes out, the most I could hope for is maybe some behaviour changes, which kinda sucks. Maybe when the script extender matures a bit for skyrim, someone will find a way to modify ai packages on the fly and in the background, and tie them into scripted world tasks.

The people over at nifscope are partially through the process of decoding, but a number of changes have them doing some head scratching. They'll have it settled eventually. RIght now there are tentative patches to load skyrim nifs already, but its crashy and buggy and missing features.

Self serving bamp, I'd like to know what other people think.

I'll say it right off, coming from the various stalker games, the ai in skyrim seems incredibly dumb and static. It's to the point where I wonder how they can even call it a dynamic ai with a straight face. I wanted to make a long monologue, so if you want to skip all the jibber jabber and go directly to the request, ctrl+f or whatever and search for [request]. I'll give you an example from a modded shadow of Chernobyl. Using Oblivion lost ultimate pack, which includes the faction warfare mod among other things. This only is a speculation on what happened, from what I could piece together afterward, because it took me by complete surprise. Let me set up the scene, you can skip this if you've already played the game. ----- You're a stalker and unnamed at the time because of storyline reasons, you're simply called the marked one because of your tattoo. There's a Rookie Village, a little camp consisting of a few mostly broken down houses along a lane, with about two mini bunkers where people sometimes take cover, and a large bunker down the ways where a fat trader resides. The village is surrounded on one side by a hill or two, and the other side by dangerous anomalies and mutant animals. Pretty basic but 'defensible', as far as stalker locations go. They reside in a large zone of alienation, created by the Chernobyl explosion in an alternate universe to our own. To protect the world from the dangers of the zone, the military has set up as many outposts around the edges as they can, considering the dangers involved, and generally spend their time shooting at people who try to break their way in. The few that manage to get past the military make their way inward, in the case of various crime cartels and misc interests you have mercenaries and bandits. In the case of self-interest or no affiliation you have loners and splinter militaristic factions like duty and freedom. Just down the road from this Rookie camp, where you see rookie loners hanging out or playing music, generally being Russian.. you have a small outpost of military folks, who regularly send patrols most of the way up the road but rarely ever close to the rookie camp, seeing as they get shot at. You'd figure they'd raid it every so often but they generally don't. I'd guess that the fat trader bribes them or that they don't really want to screw with the anomalies. In the other direction from the Rookie camp, lays an abandoned farm stead and an abandoned small factory. Usually home to bandits who use the farm as a stopover before amassing and trying their luck with the bridge further down, and monsters, as well as anomalies. A little bit further down and you encounter a bridge, of which the only 'easy' way to get under is to go through a detachment of military. You can bribe them, or shoot them, but they don't shoot the main character on sight unless you screw around with them or try to barge past. --- That said, one day I happened to be heading towards the bridge for the first time when I happened across a traveling mercenary squad. Their leader was named Doc Ravage and was afit with a nice shooter and a fancy exosuit, and they were in progress of clearing out said bandit farm. I helped out, watched them use cover tactically and use cover/elevation/group tactics to overwhelm the bandits. The bandits were kinda derpy, like untrained militia, and fell rather easily. I got some loot out of it and noticed the leader moving towards the bridge, so I followed. The entire squad went toe to toe with a trained military force of equal size, and I had some trouble staying out of the crossfire due to being a bit tactically inept myself. Eventually, possibly part luck and part because the mercs were better armed and armoured, the mercs won out with moderate casualties. I did my best to beat them to looting but sometimes they were quick on the draw, grabbing valuable bandages and ammo when they needed it. Being the greedy stalker I was, I spent the time amassing loot and filling a single body with it, using them as a meat duffel bag to very very very very slowly (but faster than if I carried it all myself) drag the loot back to the trader. I did this, was in the process of selling things and sorting it all out when I heard shooting above ground. My thoughts? "Huh. Thats rare, must be a mutant that got too close". After that, I realize that the shooting was definitely heavy, and poked my head out of the trader bunker to see wtf was going on. Turns out as I was toting my meat duffel bag, that the mercenary detachment happened upon a few chimeras (mutated bears), and in the process of dispatching them, ran into a small military patrol. Confusion ensued, and some of the merc folk even went as far as chasing the wounded fleeing remains of the patrol back and taking out some of the military outpost there. I'm guessing the merc leader decided that was enough, and lead the remains of his squad back to the rookie village for supplies. One of the squad mates deposited a few goodies in the camp chest, and the leader sad down and started playing music on his guitar around the camp fire. This is about when I arrived at the rookie camp, to which I then slowly ambled underground. While I was busy, it seems the military outpost wasn't pleased with the affair, and sent a large detachment of troops to attack the rookie village. They definitely didn't just run at the village though, no. They moved in two groups, one snuck up the backside of the hill for a critical position while the other approached from the front side, using bushes to hide in. When everything was set, they all opened fire in tandem and took a few loners by surprise. The mercs, however, were much more skilled and took cover in buildings. An epic firefight ensued, which the military again lost for whatever reason, but not before inflicting massive casualties. -- I very literally had no say in this series of events, and I'm no expert but it seemed mostly unscripted. I never expected this, and only knew what happened after doing some investigation myself. And this is the ai of the first stalker, just modded a bit. They do this sort of thing in every map too, running about and finding anomalies, artifacts, fighting eachother, shooting at mutants, drinking vodka, etc. The third installment of the series vanilla (let alone modded) has even more advanced tasks that ai does, and more often then not you'll stumble across a group of stalkers or bandits that will be in the middle of doing a varied number of tasks.. from mutant elimination to artifact hunting, even to ambushes, or just to go to a safe spot. You can also ask if you could come with and help them to a degree. ---------------- So, To the [request] part of this rather lengthy post. 1. Make npcs want to go outside. Form groups with leaders, loot unowned objects and bodies outside of own, split loot and raid dungeons. Gather alchemical ingredients, hunt (and actually pick up the pelts and meat instead of leaving their kill there to rot), fish, trade. Take items they find back to trade for cash and essential items. Obviously not every npcs going to want to do these things themselves, so have those ones hire other npcs to do it. Form merchant caravans to bring supplies about. Apparently the dragonborne is the only person who ever considered actually doing things! 2. Bandit factions would need to move about, follow the money and traders. It struck me as odd that one day I happened across a bandit camp, and the journal of the leader mentioned that they "had just arrived a few days back" and they were "going to get what loot they could and leave", but they never did, and they never will. As long as you avoid triggering certain scripts, the player could literally sit in a chair and wait for 500 ingame years, and those bandits would still be there for the most part. Guilds and the various necromantic or otherwise 'illegal' factions would probably endevour to further their research or activities while remaining within their abilities.. You probably wouldn't see a few necromancers raiding a major town when they'll probably get smashed.. unless they come explicitly prepared for it. You could probably also join said groups, and help them out. For a bit of flavour. Remember that mercenary you found traveling along the road, going to check out a disturbance? Why couldn't you ever offer your help there? 3. On the note of journals, we need at least the 'leaders' of these groups to keep journals. Nothing fancy, really, but at least some logbook of things they did. Things like "Adinhal, that jerk didn't want to split cash, so we split his neck and took his share for ourselves.", or "We encountered a number of wolves along our way to <fort>, dispatched them but took a few losses." Resource wise in the engine, I'd expect most of the processing for this to be tracked and probably based on probabilities in a simplistic fashion some how, while npcs in cells loaded by the player would function more actively script-wise. 4. It's been said a bunch before so I'll keep it brief, but yielding npcs need to actually yield, and heavily wounded npcs should end up in a state of "not-dead-but-bleeding-out-on-the-ground", where if the player chooses to help them, they might earn a few kudos, or a stab in the back. 5. Alright so, say I'm some strapping warrior, dressed in full daedric armour, toting around the scales from the two dragons that I just took out with little effort not far away, and I pass a camp of bandits. What do they do? They don't even bother accosting me for toll money or eyeing my valuables; They charge at me like crazed beasts and expect to win somehow. Alrighty. It's like when you're retrieving those three books for the mage library, and you make your way to the boss chamber. The boss there complains that you busted your way in and interrupted experiments, killing their underlings. Well did they even give you a choice? Jeez. Npcs shouldn't have 'enemy radar' which instantly identifies your affiliations even through walls and floors, and Npcs should have to at least visually identify you before leaping to the conclusion of "kill them", unless its the sort of npc that will kill just about anything for no reason! This would give speechcraft a major buff, as you could use diplomacy and money to win your way through, the proverbial pacifist route. Especially if you could show your faction based on clothes. You could disguise yourself as a bandit or a trader and they'd have to inspect you closely before realizing that you're not what you seem. So, some form of 'clothes make the man/woman', if you're wearing mage robes then they treat you like a mage. If you're wearing fancy nobles clothes then they treat you like you're a noble. etc 6. On that note, besides guards nobody ever tries to capture you, or imprison you, or just beat you into submission till you pass out and steal your valuables, or capture your werewolfian body for research. Everyone wants to kill kill kill, and while it makes sense in some situations, it doesn't in others. 7. Group tactics. Formations. Where are they? All I see are a bunch of crazy headless chickens. So much for imperial might. 8. Animals. They hunt, to some degree. I guess they eat to some degree too but I never really get the chance to observe them. There's a number of improvements that could be made in this department too, but the main thing I'd like to see is them dragging kills to dens or at least chowing down. I'll never forget the time I happened across a pack of pseudodogs near the bar. They had recently killed a lone stalker, and were in the progress of jerking the corpse around by the teeth and dragging them off to a lair for probably not nice activities. So what do people think? Am I just being a blathering fanboy of stalker?

Well, technicaly the enchanting line has a perk that lets you gain a tiny fraction of power back for every deathblow you deal with an enchanted weapon. Sadly it isn't a passive regen over time, which would be nice, but I've found that as long as I carry around a bunch of empty gems and have one of the enchantments on the weapon be a soul stealer, that I usually make more than enough gems to recharge it from slaying random wildlife.

Out of curiosity, have you ever tried the "Werewolf the Awakening" for Oblivion? It's not too similar to your ideas, but they share a few things in common. The thing I least liked about it was that combat in wolf form was very clunky. Also while it made sense (no thumbs), you couldn't activate anything at all. Or interact much beyond combat. But I suspect these were more because oblivion limitations than anything. http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=35360

Damn fat invisible dragons *fistshake*

Oblivion lost for stalker shadow of Chernobyl had an included aspect where shopkeepers sold items called 'gps beacons'. You could also find these on dead stalkers and in stashes and the like. Dropping them added a waypoint on your map, and was very handy as having a light pack in that game during combat is the very difference between life and death sometimes. It vastly improved locating past-visited stashes and important locations, and I think that a map note/menu note system for Skyrim would also be a major improvement.

Some of the guards are also un-necessarily sarcastic or mean. Every time my character gets called a kitty or a lizard, or I get accused of having my sweetroll taken, I want to turn around and deck them one but them damn bounties.

On the topic of spell tomes, could someone mod in eating the tomes? Like, you want to learn spark so you open the book up, read a bit and then rip out pages and start chowing down? That's what it feels like you're doing in-game anyways.

Shoot magic infused arrows from bow?

Would also be nice to script them to only say it aloud once to you, and only ever say it again if directly activated.

That said, npcs have a really really bad habit of repeating things to you ad-infinim. I'd like to see a mod that makes it so that npcs will generally only say things once unless prompted.. Example spoiler: Bandit guy wants down from the webs, you've slain the offending thing that needs to be slain, but have decided to go around looting urns. I really just wanted to tell him to stfu because I heard him the first time, I'm busy looting and pillaging ancient nordic linear ruins, can't you see? At the vary, least, have them go through their various lines then shut up.

This probably won't help much but you can make a shortcut to the skyrim launcher, and go into properties of the shortcut. add +fullproc to the right of skyrimlauncher.exe so it'd be <disk>:\<Pathtoskyrim>\SkyrimLauncher.exe +fullproc right in the target box. It apparently makes skyrim increase its processor priority, as if you alt tabbed out and increased it manually in the task manager. Won't help you use multiple cores though.

I've got the memory patch and I'm running a 64 bit os. Generally, Skyrim will play well, but will CTD for no apparent reason. This doesn't happen too often, but it's not a major issue for me because I use the Skyrim incremental saver and press f5 a lot.

There needs to be a movement to just mod back features from daggerfall into skyrim. Take the climbing, the finding random nude people around houses and inns, the creepy dungeon sfx that made it sound like there was stuff going on that you really didn't want to take part in, the branching non-linear paths you had to spelunk through to find magical floating skulls that teleported you and mystical skybridges you had to create with levers. Not to mention that most of daggerfall's dungeons were randomly generated. And remember when you could go into your character's page and click on history, and it'd give you a randomly generated backstory based on your character's build? It really felt like they weren't some random person who got caught at a border. Daggerfall may have been clunky but there's nothing quite like exploring a crazy maze like dungeon... Only to get pounced on by a sabertooth tiger, then fall into a pit with two giants that you have to fend off. Then climbing back up through a secret passage way, climbing through a pit and traveling over a bridge that you try traveling over but run into an orc, which you then fisticuff and uppercut off to his or her splatting grave. Then get bit by a rat and contract a mortal disease, that you must then endevor through the dungeon for days to find your exit. Once found, lying on your horse's back and making your way over vast tracts of empty cardboard cutout tree land, you find a temple full of nude dancing ladies and a stout nord in robes who informs you that you're lucky, because 'today is a holiday' and you get free curing and healing.

Idunno. Might try getting a default ini by going to <drive>:\Users\<name>\Documents\My Games\Skyrim backing up the three ini files in there and then deleting them. Running skyrim launcher and the game, shoould make it like when you first installed. If not then uh. No idea.

It'll happen at some point, but you'll be limited to ken dolls for a bit. You'll be staring at vague crotch until either the creation kit is released or the fine folks over at nifscope manage to properly decode the new nif format, which includes havok physics in place of what used to be .kf skeletons, among other things. Then you'll be able to fully enjoy your floppy bits underneath all those pantsless armours.

My theories about why it happens vary, and are probably wrong, but.. It could be that the engine doesn't load in collision physics until you get closer than certain points, how far depending on performance. Could be that once arrows get past a certain point, the game defers flight calculations to another function which isn't as precise. Could be something to do with the 'autoaim assist' feature I keep running into where missed arrows hit an invisible bounding box of the target and teleport into their model and cause a hit. Could be that it doesn't work very well at range. Could be that the arrow just travels too fast and a 'hit' isn't registered, like the precision error above but in a different means, as if the probability of a hit is calculated only at intervals along the arrow's path and not constantly. Could be that the arrow item stops being treated as an arrow and gets treated as something else at range. I dunno. Could be fat invisible dragons getting in the way.

yeah I got that problem too but removing that dll usually fixed it.. The first time you opened the launcher after removing said file from the root directory of skyrim, it redetected video cards, right? if not you might want to go into options and make sure it doesn't have enb series or gforce 8800 set as the card, or you might not have removed the d3d9 dll properly or from the right place. Might also try clicking one of the detail settings to pick a default.

I've got my distances maxed, item/whatnot is all the way it'll go in the launcher. Yet there seems to be a certain point I just cannot shoot past reliably when it comes to hitting other actors or mobs. I've seen it mentioned before in these forums, the 'ghost arrow' effect. I've even got the bow zooming perk and everything.. What the heck is going on anyways? I thought maybe it had something to do with item fade so I maxed it out and... the first thing I did was sit at what must have been 100 yards from a deer who decided to stand still. Took about 60 arrows before I gave up, approached it and the deer ran off, found a portion of the arrows either stuck in angles that should have hit the deer or pooled on the ground, the other half vanished into thin air. Another time I was sitting on a fort taking potshots at some bandit on a hill, and you could seem them herky jerky looking about and teleporting in their effort to investigate every arrow hit, which mostly happened to be just where they were standing when it 'hit'. I serious found something that arrows would stick in, put a reference to aim near and stood at range pounding it with arrows and retrieving them to make sure my aim wasn't off. It really seems there's a point where Skyrim just completely gives up on calculating arrow hits on mobs, but it doesn't seem very measurable or set. The worst thing is that this might not be fixable even when the creation kit gets released. Conversely, I've noticed that arrows that should have missed when you're moderately close to what you're shooting at, will sometimes teleport INTO the mob, like some sort of aim assist. Anyone else noticing these issues, or am I just unfortunate?

Maybe reduce max mana a bit while they're conjured to represent spell upkeep?

If Bethesda released the .fla and .as files as part of the Construction Set, that would be amazing. Maybe they would be open to that, since people modded the interface so much in Oblivion? http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=216 They're actually not that hard to decompile, and it's already been done to some degree.

Man. Dragons are bad enough. Fighting against Naraku's lackeys all the time would suck. :<

I'd hope for realistic bloodpressure and clotting involved in this. Much unlike in the intro execution. The guy's head got sliced clean off with a mighty chop of a serrated axe. The major artery was severed for sure, and save for some magical cauterizing enchantment on that axe, an angry nord should be at least massively leaking blood from said severed stump. I guess it was to keep the rating low. That all said, limb severing is pretty much hollywood. It can happen, but if you're talking the swipe of a battleaxe, it'll still take quite a mighty slam to take a leg off, and even then you might have to try a few times to chop through the bone.