Adding new Skills

[serenityinfire]

Hi, I've had quite a bit of experience modding other games (Warcraft III, Diablo II) but I'm pretty new to modding Oblivion.

 

Anyways, so for mod I want to revamp Armor and Weapons by adding new classes. For Armor there would be Plate, Chain, Cloth and Robe (for spell casters) and for weapons there would be Blade, Blunt, Axe, Polearm and Staff. This would necessitate adding new skills to accommodate for the new item types. The problem is that there's no way to add new skills in the construction set. I was wondering if there's any other way to do so. If not, I have an idea for a work around:

 

So, if I'm unable to create new skills would it be possible to have sub-skills? Like say, there's a class that specializes in blade, but fights best with daggers or a class that specializes in heavy armor but is best protected by chain over plate. Any help is much appreciated. Thanks!

 

NOTE: Work on the actual mod has not begun yet. The main focus would be adding new weapons and armor to allow for more customization. My skills are based mostly in the arts (Photoshop, Maya) and I thought this would be a good way to not only improve my art skills but also familiarize myself with video game art so that I can hopefully find my way into the industry. Again, any help is much appreciated!

[Vagrant0]

The only way to add anything similar to new skills would be to use OBSE and a rather excessive amount of scripting to detect and track things to apply to existing skills. For the most part, it's just not worth the effort though since you're still forced to use the same light armor, heavy armor, blade, blunt classifications for items, but adjusting the skills related to those classifications based on scripts and what is used. For example, tracking script variables for long blades and short blades separately in a script, and using that script to change the character's blade skill to that value based on what blade type they're using.

 

The other part is that such a system would just outright not work with the vanilla leveling system, nor would it work with any other leveling system. In a sense, you would also need to develop your own leveling system to work with those new skills.

 

Some things, like cloth/robes would also not be possible since those items don't impart any protection and re-creating a formula to work with mixed armor types would make a difficult project even more so.

[serenityinfire]

While digging around in the construction set, I noticed that scripts can be assigned to weapons and armor. So, would it be possible to have sub-skills that would affect damage directly using scripts? I've also been looking at the construction set wiki and using that to figure out how I could use scripts to add new skills.

 

Example:

 

A player chooses the 'Axeguy' class. Axeguy has the blunt skill. Axeguy has a subskill that adds extra weapon damage if he's wielding an axe.

 

Would it be possible to do something like that?

 

 

EDIT: I'd also like to add that if doing the above process or any other manner of adding new skills to the mod would be too complex to be worth doing I could just drop the idea.

 

As far as robes being armor is concerned, I could always add new light armor that just uses the robe graphics.

[Vagrant0]

While digging around in the construction set, I noticed that scripts can be assigned to weapons and armor. So, would it be possible to have sub-skills that would affect damage directly using scripts? I've also been looking at the construction set wiki and using that to figure out how I could use scripts to add new skills.

 

Example:

 

A player chooses the 'Axeguy' class. Axeguy has the blunt skill. Axeguy has a subskill that adds extra weapon damage if he's wielding an axe.

 

Would it be possible to do something like that?

Possible, but not particularly practical.

 

Adding scripts to all game items is a bad idea. Not only would this create an excessive amount of bloat, but it would likely cause conflicts with many mods. Additionally, new items added by other mods wouldn't have those scripts attached, so wouldn't work with such a system. As most people playing the game and using mods tend to regularly use weapon and armor mods (if only by proxy through some overhaul, eg. OOO) they wouldn't get any bonus and use of the weapon wouldn't count toward that skill.

 

Although it's possible to use OBSE with global (quest) scripting to detect what kind of weapon the player is using, differentiating between axes and maces is still not possible without using a list of known (vanilla) weapons. Such a list would have the same limitations in regards to mod content. Although you can get around this with using other OBSE functions, nameincludes, not every modded axe has the characters "axe" in it, and other weapons with that combination of letters in the name would also be detected as being an axe. Simple things, like enchanting, could even break weapons that worked previously due to the changed name.

 

If a practical method exists, it would likely require, as mentioned, rather extensive scripting knowledge and a combination of many systems. Unfortunately, there are no constants for weapon weight, speed, health, and range is based entirely on the length of the mesh, so figuring out what is equipped beyond the standard types would be rather involved.

 

 

Your best bet is to just do what you enjoy doing, and leave all that complicated internal stuff to those who enjoy doing that. You don't need a new system to make an armor or weapon mod good, you just need a new weapon or armor mesh that offers something different than the typical "thong armor" or "generic sword of awesomeness" kind of stuff. For most people, the actual stats and game impact of the equipment is entirely secondary to how it looks and moves.

[serenityinfire]

Alright then. I'll be able to add other perks to each weapon then to differentiate between axes/maces and the like. Thanks for the help!