Major Immersion Mod

[Cooly792000]

Hey, I have to do something for a major work in My Software Design Class for My HSC and I was thinking about doing an Immersion mod. Now I have a few Great ideas for example :

 

• Every NPC act's more like a person (Hunger, Family issues, working, shopping etc)
  
• Revamp the economy. Everything will depend on available Resources in the city. this would mean certain cities have different resources to trade with each other, Allowing NPC's to trade with other cities
  

• More job's available to NPC's, blacksmiths, bakers, hunters etc
  

 

If anyone has any ideas on how to do any of these points, it would be greatly appreciated and your help will be mentioned in my project and hopefully with the mods release into the community.

Also if any of you have more ideas of what I could include in the mod, please feel free to include it in this post.

 

Anyway thanks for any help you can offer

 

Cooly792000

[TodaY]

•Every NPC act's more like a person (Hunger, Family issues, working, shopping etc)

I have no idea on how to do this, but I believe there already is a mod that does this for the player, search on victor (I'm not sure about the name) - it only works for hunger and so on

 

•Revamp the economy. Everything will depend on available Resources in the city. this would mean certain cities have different resources to trade with each other, Allowing NPC's to trade with other cities

This would be easy, you'd have to make a merchant container for every merchant and add the items he should sell to it

 

 

•More job's available to NPC's, blacksmiths, bakers, hunters etc

You'd simply have to add NPC's with AI's that tell them to do what they're supposed to, but all of these jobs are already in vanilla Oblivion

[Khet]

NPCs: Family Issues might be harder to pull. Hunger, Jobs, Shopping, could all be done through the use of AI packages.

 

Economy Revamp: Not too hard to do depending on how far you're taking this. For randomness sake, are we talking that Bruma would have a lot of Iron and Steel laying around (hence more iron and steel weapons) and say... Leyawiin would have a ton of trees, resulting in more arrows? What are we talking here?

 

More jobs: Easy and Hard at the same time. Easy to create a ton of new NPCs that look like blacksmiths, bakers, hunters, farmers, etc... bit harder to find locations for all of them, set up their AI packages, etc. It's not impossible, but it would take quite a bit of time.

 

 

Overall though, we also have the general... restrictions... of the game engine itself. Oblivion doesn't like to run a lot of AI packages at once, so you'd still have to limit things. Nor does Oblivion care to have a bunch of NPCs crammed in one area. Stuff like that.

[JCP768]

Maybe try giving NPCs better schedules, and incorporating animation mods. bg2408 has a basic resource for this here. You could also try incorporating some of the bigger/broader animation mods but for them you'd have to deal with permissions and such.

 

Just about everything you mentioned has already been done once, or more... Except for the family thing, which I'm not sure what you mean... Personally I've always liked the idea of a progressive NPC life. You know they fall in love, have kids, grow old, and stuff like that.. and with each change their appearance, schedule, and dialogue changes too. This could be done with a over time type thing and disabling the current stage NPC and then enabling the NPC for the new stage (ie: disable Bobsingle, enable Bobmarried... Bobmarried being a completely new and different NPC... except for the fact that he looks, acts, and has the character much the same as the Bobsingle). It couldalso be done through quests, but that would be more work and likely result in less changes/stages. I've brainstormed about the idea before: here and here

 

The first one(strictly making NPC schedules better, with more animations and such) would be done with the vanilla NPCs and thus have a chance of being incompatible with some mods that might have to do with the effected NPCs. I wonder it'd be too much of an issue if you just used:

"use item dance at <inn name>" to replace "wander at <inn name>"

In that case you're just altering what the NPC does at a location they already go to, as opposed to drastically changing the schedule... which would allow for more interesting changes, but also more likely for compatibility issues.

 

The second one (involving growing old, or families or whatever) would be best done with NEW NPCs, probably in their own village. Less likely to cause compatibility issues, or any bad things but a lot more work.

 

I suppose if you're doing this primarily for school work comp[compatibility with other mods won't be an issue though. Well whatever you decide, I wish you luck.

[Cooly792000]

JCP768, your idea on the progressive NPC is a great idea. I had not thought of doing anything like that before. Theonly problem I would have with it would mean that there will be alot of NPC having to be made each with a slight variation and most likely alot of dialogue to be edited and added, but apart from that I think it would work fairly well. Thankyou for that idea. If you'd like I will mention your help with the mod?

[JCP768]

JCP768, your idea on the progressive NPC is a great idea. I had not thought of doing anything like that before. Theonly problem I would have with it would mean that there will be alot of NPC having to be made each with a slight variation and most likely alot of dialogue to be edited and added, but apart from that I think it would work fairly well. Thankyou for that idea. If you'd like I will mention your help with the mod?

Sure, glad I could help. :smile:

 

If JCP768 seems weird you can JC Phoenix instead... then again that probably sounds weirder. :laugh:

[Imrinfected]

Add npcs that go shopping.

 

Don't try to do too much at once.

 

I believe there are already AI packages that force npcs to eat food, but they don't actually go to shops and buy that food. It's just whatever is in their inventory.

 

Just make it so they'll go shopping after a certain period of time and buy some food or something. It would help with immersion a ton, because you'd see npcs in shops occasionally, buying stuff. After that, do a little more. Like, have adventurer npcs buy stuff from shops, or sell stuff to shops, or go into towns and walk around. Stuff like that.

 

It would be nice to see an npc adventurer on the road somewhere, and later see them in a shop buying arrows or something.

 

It would all be relatively simple with the right ai packages and a little bit of scripting.

 

Don't take on too much at once.

[Iapetus]

While trying to make the NPCs more life-like is an admirable goal, it really won't do all that much for the player. Sure, you could give each NPC an elaborate schedule with various deep and meaningful interactions with others, but most of these interactions would not be noticed unless they take place in an easily visible place; like in the middle of the street, or in a crowded inn (which would bring up Oblivion's problems with large numbers of NPCs onscreen at one time). Think of it this way: when you play, do you follow various NPCs around just to see what they are doing?

[JCP768]

when you play, do you follow various NPCs around just to see what they are doing?

Yes.... but then again, my name is Glarthir and I think everyone is out to get me.

Support Group: Hi Glarthir.

 

Seriously though it's really not a matter of normal play.Take Deus Ex for instance even after many playthroughs people still manage to find some new stash of items hidden away, or dialogue they've never heard. It keeps the game fresh, and makes it feel more real like everything isn't for the player and laid out to them in an obvious manner.(ie: realistic and immersive.)

 

Better schedules could have the same effect except instead of finding stashes, or dialogue you find two cheaters having sex behind a stable, a criminal stealing from guards as they sleep, or other little interesting stuff like that. When you see something that you would never see in normal gameplay it makes it all the more special.

 

 

Of course I'm still voting for my progressive life idea though. lol

 

P.S. There's also the matter of "difference of taste" like how I like immersion mods where you'd have to spend a lot of time in towns to ever notice,while I have no interest in graphical, or landscape mods. Different people like different things

Edited April 8, 2010 by JCP768