Need Scripting advice/Help with a Mod

[jimuno]

Thank you for at least reading this!

 

First a little background, I have played through several characters and am not playing using companions and trying different mods. The theory behind companions is group combat. A group has two essential needs, A meat shield, i.e. Tank, and a healer. There are lots of meat shields and supporter mods out there, but I have yet found a good Healer. I have tried I don't know how many mods looking for one and none really fit the role. They fall in traps and get hurt and don't heal themselves back to full health so the fist mob knocks them unconscious again and bang, no healer. They are not to be found once combat begins, aka Widmas, sometimes for several rounds of combat. They do not heal after combat or don't heal companions. etc, etc, etc....So I want to build a healer that does not have to follow, does not get hurt, automates what I have to spend time doing anyways and can always be found.

 

Basic Mod

 

I am currently developing(or at least trying to) a mod to add a ring to the game. The ring will be a ancestors spirit in the physical form of a ring (Thanks to David Drake, Lord and Prince of the Isles series for the ancestral spirit in a ring concept). The spirit will be a helper companion that heals the player, without having to be summoned. So basically, the ring will monitor the players heath and cast healing spells as necessary in and out of combat. What I have envisioned is that the ring will use the players magica if he/she has some and raise the players restoration skill as if the player was doing the casting. If the Player is out of magica, then the ring will revert to using it's own pool of magic and no restoration points will be gained. The casting of the spells would not interfere with combat.

 

Advanced Mod

 

The ring will spawn a copy of itself into the inventory of companions when companion share (or equivalent) is used. This will keep companions healed.

 

I am new to modding and am not an expert at scripting. My only programing exp was too many years ago to mention and was in BASIC and FORTRAN. Any Help that is give would be greatly appreciated and you will of course receive due credit for any work performed. If you decide to build this on your own, please give me a Honorable mention for the concept.

 

Thank You

[rdamstrom]

I,m working on a companion mod that addresses those problems and more.I too became disappointed at there ability to heal them self's let alone me. I liked having female companions but hated having to dress them all the time so I automated that too. now they dress them self's and have many wardrobes. they heal them self's first so less change of going unconscious, then you,then they work on charging their weapons. Of course their healing ability's will vary depending on class an level.They can find things for you really find things. sell stuff,soon to ride horses.While It still a work in progress I hope to release a functional mod very soon if your interested in playing around with it. but I must warn you that when I say that they dress them self's I mean that literally.

[jimuno]

I have been working on this for a bit now, but have run into a wall or something. I was able to create the ring, get it into the player inventory but I cannot get it to heal. :wallbash: I have tried a direct Object script in GameMode comparing current health to base health, if <= .075 * base health, cast a healing spell. This did not work. I tried several variations of the Object script without any luck. I tried a Magic effects Script added to an enchantment, this not only did not work, but I put message statements to see progress through the script, no messages ever appeared. I have spent hours reading tutorials, sample scripts, scripts from other mods, all attempting to learn how, but so far nothing has worked. I considered a token activator, but alas, none can be put into inventory. I have not done a Token actor either, since having them stored elsewhere and waiting for them to be summoned every time you need healed is not an attractive option, however, it may be the only workable one. I have OBSE enabled for CS. So, First, A Question, is it possible to have an object cast a Spell? Or, is this reserved for actors and activators only? Second, does anyone have any advice or suggestions on how to get this bloody ring to cast a spell?

[BadPrenup]

You were doing base health*.075? because thats saying 7.5% of the base health. so on a person with 100 base health it would only cast the healing spell when the character has 7.5 (rounded up to 8) hp or less. I think you might have meant .75*Base Health, or 75%. If not then my bad, but the odds of getting hit and having between 1% and 7.5% left is really slim. Once again if you meant .075 then no big deal but that was just an anomaly I noticed.

[Khet]

I'd have to do a bit of testing myself to be able to think of a way to cast a restoration spell FROM the player without making the player actually use the cast animation (thus gaining restoration) but something like this should work for the second choice (IE, the ring using it's own 'mana')

 

short BaseHealth

Begin GameMode

Set BaseHealth to Player.GetBaseActorValue Health

If BaseHealth <= .5
cast RingHealSpellName player
EndIf

End

 

Could probably use tweaking as I'm admittedly not very good at scripting unless I test things myself. But it should be a start. Basically it's detecting whether or not the player is at 50% or less health, and then casting a heal spell on them. The BaseHealth short is ran every time the script is processed to whenever there is a change in health (from spell or leveling) the script will adjust accordingly.

 

Edit: And I just noticed an error in it. Like I said, no good at writing unless I test it, on top of that my brain is kind of fizzled already from my own scripts. Just change to the If BaseHealth line to detect a percentage.

[David Brasher]

It is odd that your companion will not heal herself. That is one of the most reliable functions of my glitchy companion. She heals herself with wild abandon (unless she gets Astral Vapors from a zombie.) There have been a few times the game glitched and she wouldn't heal herself when I believed she was not sick, but not often. Her restoration is 100, she has hundreds of points of magicka, and has both strong and weak self-healing spells. I bet you could get your companion to heal herself like mine does. You might even create some custom healing spells that are very cheap in magicka expenditure, are very powerful, and that only she possesses.

[rdamstrom]

If you post your code perhaps I can help.

[jimuno]

Rdamstrom,

 

Thank you for the offer, but my WinXP drive has crashed, hard. Trying to recover it, but, if I do not, all code and mods are lost and I will have to start over. Of course, my WinXP disk is nowhere to be found and MS does not let you download chkdsk or even run it from a dos disk. I am currently working to get TES Oblivion working under Fedora with OBSE enabled. If I get this up, I can begin again. Will let you know when the situation changes as I would really like to learn why the Magic Enchantment Script didn't even start.

[rdamstrom]

Sorry you crashed. I'll check back so keep me posted and we'll see if we can get your ring working. and let me know how that Fedora thing works out.