External Transitions. How are they handled?

[andysykes659]

I want to mod alternative terrains based on the players choice and want to know if it's possible. I'm planning on altering Fort Irony into a player-controlled fortress, complete with functional town, curtain wall, merchants and guard force and enemy attackers. Not a major drama - all I do is alter the external cell for Fort Irony, mod the pathgrids, blob a few NPc's around, job done.

 

But it's not that easy. I want the player to 'grow' the fort from a small camp into a mighty fortress, chosing sides (smugglers or guards, which will affect the style of the fort), choosing what to build (and these choices affecting what appears and when) and choosing what to spend their money on (like small wood walls = cheap, whacking great stone fortifications = six figures) etc etc. The easiest way I can think of would be to mod alternative external cells and port these into position dependant on the players choice for major changes. Otherwise I'm going to be messing with scripts similar to the one used to 'appear' oblivion gates to make things appear and disappear again. I don't know if this is possible, though. Any thoughts?

[XJDHDR]

The only way to get what you want is to place every version of Fort Irony that will ever exist in the same place, disable the ones you don't want and use scripts to enable and disable the various versions of Fort Irony depending on the conditions the player fufills.

[andysykes659]

I assume by this that you mean that all the alternative terrain gets placed in the same external cell and scripts control which particular item of terrain is visible at any one time? Hmm... It's gonna be messy...

 

:wallbash:

[XJDHDR]

That is exactly what I mean. If you find an alternative method of doing this, please do tell me. The method I suggested is the only method I know of to make this work.

 

Note that this is for static objects in the game. If you are talking about actual terrain textures, I don't think there is a method of changing the ground texture used in a particular area. In this case, I think you would have to create seperate worldspaces (this will only affect the ground inside Fort Irony though, not the area outside it's walls in Tamriel) and use scripts to teleport the player to a different worldspace, depending on conditions.

[andysykes659]

Thanks for the help XJDHDR. I've worked out how to change the internal areas through alternative teleport destinations and scripted locking/unlocking of doors. I was hoping that there might be a similar way of doing the same in the Tamriel worldspace. Yes, I did mean static objects; I'm trying to mod it so the existing terrain textures/contours/pathmaps will fit when the Fort appears... Hopefully it'll work in the game, though it looks like a mess in TES CS!

[andysykes659]

Thanks for the help XJDHDR. I've worked out how to change the internal areas through alternative teleport destinations and scripted locking/unlocking of doors. I was hoping that there might be a similar way of doing the same in the Tamriel worldspace. Yes, I did mean static objects; I'm trying to mod it so the existing terrain textures/contours/pathmaps will fit when the Fort appears... Hopefully it'll work in the game, though it looks like a mess in TES CS!

[XJDHDR]

I can imagine!