Timelord race

[kruddpm]

I'm sorry for the long post. I am, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.

 

I have no idea what doctor who is nor what a time lord is suposed to be, so I rely solely on your descriptions to make the spell and the regeneration effect as it's suposed to be.

Your efforts are greatly appreciated. :) Doctor Who is a British sci-fi show about a Time Lord called the Doctor who travels in a time machine, usually accomplishing remarkable and good works in the process. Time Lords are aliens from a planet called Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous. (By the way, I vote for an inclusion of a Kasterborous birthsign.) They live for an extremely long time, mostly because when they're on the brink of death, they can use energy to rebuild their bodies, which is why they change faces and personalities. That's what a regeneration is.

What a regeneration actually looks like varies greatly, since the show has been around since the days of black-and-white. The modern versions have a CGI glowing effect, accompanied by some CGI to morph the face into the shape of the new actor. For Oblivion, the glow will be good enough. You could probably build the animation out of Bethesda's existing spell animations.

Ignore all references to Daleks, the Time Vortex, and the strange scenery--that's the Doctor's ship.

 

Face / race change

When Time Lords go to high school, they're taught all kinds of things about regeneration, and one of these things is the ability to pick some of what you'll look like and what your traits will be. The Doctor sucks at it, and tends to just go with the flow. However, the Master (the Doctor's arch-nemesis) was able to choose to be "young and strong," and Romana actually chose her appearance to exactly match the look of a chick she met once. I vote for the "showracemenu" option.

 

Activated / Triggered: That's very important because it changes the whole script. So does the player cast the spell and when he's killed he revives or has it to be cast before dying to heal him completely?

Time Lords can't regenerate if they die without any warning, or under some other alien-y conditions I doubt we'll run into in Oblivion. :P

In the show, the regenerations always take between thirty seconds to a minute and a half to complete, depending on the mood of the director at the time. Of course, it's not really feasible to be all glow-y and just sort of stand there while a Xivilai, a Spider Daedra, and a Dremora Kynval hack, beat, and zap you to bits again. I like the idea of the spell, which could last maybe 90 seconds or so, that the player casts if he's having trouble with something and anticipates dying.

Time Lords regenerate only when they have to, so I'd recommend the option where he's resurrected. If it's too hard to script, we could do it the other way, but starting the regeneration only if the player is actually killed would avoid wasted regenerations.

well summed up

[crysthala]

Thanks. :D

[kruddpm]

hows the progress coming along grmblf?

[grmblf]

Well, my first attempt failed miserably... it seems that spells scripts only run while in game mode (ie no console, menu, etc) so I can't call the race screen from there neither I can disable the player inputs like if it was a short cutscene. I have to investigate the possibility of making a fake quest that would be activated by that spell and that finishes after the regeneration. Another thing I've found is that for low level characters is possible to be killed in one hit, and there's no life check that could handle this. I tried making the life treeshold at 10 pts but that's very weak, because if you're at 11 health pts and you recieve a 12 hit pts attack you're dead, no matter if the next frame you recover all your health, the game engine detects you're dead and that's what prevail. I checked that necro guild mod and I saw they were using there a treeshold of 1/4 of your total life, wich is safe most of the times but as I say it's not safe for low level characters that maybe can loose half of their health in a shot. Anyway, I'll leave this with that 25% limit, and if it ever fails you could say that you recieved a "total death" that no regeneration effect can revert :P

 

I'm still making my attempts at moments, it's simply that it got more complicated than what I expected :(

[kruddpm]

Well, my first attempt failed miserably... it seems that spells scripts only run while in game mode (ie no console, menu, etc) so I can't call the race screen from there neither I can disable the player inputs like if it was a short cutscene. I have to investigate the possibility of making a fake quest that would be activated by that spell and that finishes after the regeneration. Another thing I've found is that for low level characters is possible to be killed in one hit, and there's no life check that could handle this. I tried making the life treeshold at 10 pts but that's very weak, because if you're at 11 health pts and you recieve a 12 hit pts attack you're dead, no matter if the next frame you recover all your health, the game engine detects you're dead and that's what prevail. I checked that necro guild mod and I saw they were using there a treeshold of 1/4 of your total life, wich is safe most of the times but as I say it's not safe for low level characters that maybe can loose half of their health in a shot. Anyway, I'll leave this with that 25% limit, and if it ever fails you could say that you recieved a "total death" that no regeneration effect can revert :P

 

I'm still making my attempts at moments, it's simply that it got more complicated than what I expected :(

ok thanks mate. keep up the good work.

[crysthala]

Is there a way to have a script run another script? Say, the spell is cast, and the script does nothing except to check if the player dies (or hits the health threshold or whatever). Then, if that statement returns true, it saves the stats and runs a separate script for the rest of the regeneration. (showracemenu, etc.)

 

OOH! Never mind, instead of a script, how about a batch file? Batch files can run anything that doesn't need to have a reference other than the player, so it should be able to open the race menu and reset the player's stats.

I don't speak much of the Oblivion scripting language, but roughly, the spell script might look something like this:

 

if GetPlayerHealth < 1

(something to save the stats, I'm afraid I don't know how that might work. You might be able to do this in the text file, though I'm not sure.)

bat "regeneration.txt"

endif

 

Batch files are a lot like regular Oblivion scripts, except they're just text files that live in the Oblivion directory. In this case, they might look a lot like this:

 

showracemenu

player.setav health XXX

player.setav magicka XXX... (etc. Basically you have to have one of these for every stat.)

 

Hope this helps. :D

 

EDIT for major bizarreosity in formatting. Sorry about that.

Edited November 14, 2009 by crysthala

[grmblf]

Hey thanks for the tip but please cut your code in lines because this is streching the thread :S Now OBSE supports user-defined functions so I didn't pay much attention to batch scripts, I think they only run once too. And you can't wait until player is at 1 life because most probably will die from a higher health, taking 5, 10, 23, ... damage pts at once.

Be patient please, I hope next week I'll have something to test out :)

[kruddpm]

Hey thanks for the tip but please cut your code in lines because this is streching the thread :S Now OBSE supports user-defined functions so I didn't pay much attention to batch scripts, I think they only run once too. And you can't wait until player is at 1 life because most probably will die from a higher health, taking 5, 10, 23, ... damage pts at once.

Be patient please, I hope next week I'll have something to test out :)

ok cool thanx i look forward to it

[crysthala]

*is excited too* Even if it's not exactly like the show, it will still be wicked awesome if it works. :)

[kruddpm]

hey hows the progress been comming along?