Burn to Ashes

[ThomasCovenant]

I would like to request a mod that does this: when you use a fire spell or "fire" arrows, the intended victim, if not properly immune, nor protected from fire in some way, visually is consumed by fire with the flames intensifying over the length of the spell duration ending with just a pile of ash, use the in-game item "vampire ash"(rename it to humanoid or non-humanoid ash, depending on the person or animal to be incinerated.)

Depending on where the pile of ash is...interior:ash stays where it is, not to disperse,except as per the normal npc corpse fade time, and exterior:ash should fade almost immediately because of wind. Any speed of wind would disperse the ash.

Balance:whatever the NPC was carrying is now ash as well. The only benefit to the pc should be points to your destruction magic if you used a spell or points to your marksmanship if you used a bow and "fire" arrows.

Make the spell buyable from the cheap spell seller in the Market District in the IC. (In-game)Guild mages would never use this spell, so making it guild-only would be illogical.

The duration of the spell should dictate it's price:the faster a person/thing burns the higher the price. As an example: Base "Burn to Ashes" novice-> intensity=5pts. for 60 seconds, 20Gold.

Advanced(Ultimate) 1000 pts. for 3 seconds:1000Gold. Or, if you want, for those that want to watch NPCs being incinerated, you could increase the duration between first flame and ashes, and then the longer the duration the higher the cost.

This would also be a good mod for Morrowind..

 

I don't care if you stick your name on the mod, be my guest.

But, it wasn't your idea, or you would have already done it, please put my name in the readme and at TES Nexus as credit for coming up with this idea.

[David Brasher]

I don't care if you stick your name on the mod, be my guest.

But, it wasn't your idea, or you would have already done it, please put my name in the readme and at TES Nexus as credit for coming up with this idea.

 

Interesting attitude there. You were considering not letting the modder put his or her name on the mod? Perhaps you ought to just make the mod yourself, then there won't be any hard feelings over who deserves the credit since you will then get all the credit yourself.

 

The Oblivion game engine is not real great for these type of actions. A dead body goes into ragdoll mode. The game makes it difficult to do dismemberment or transformation. The Fallout game engine is more geared toward this type of thing. It is easy to disable a dead body on death, but you want an animation of burning, and then to have an ingredient replace the body, and then have the ingredient stay or disappear according to various circumstances. (There really isn't a wind speed global variable or anything of that nature. You would have to key it to something less accurate like, "Is it raining?" That would assume that wind accompanied the rain.)

 

It seems like if you weren't careful, the dust could cause savegame bloat.

 

It might be a little tricky getting a script to apply to all NPCs and creatures everywhere at all times.

[Skevitj]

Creating this into a mod is well outside my capabilities (time and skill), but as a starting point, have a look at http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=25613 for a possible death animation

Making a spell that burns someone to a skeleton if it it kills them shouldn't be too hard. It would probably be possible to add an item to their inventory on death by the spell as well.

 

Following up on what Dave said: having items float around the world free like ashes being blown away, could probably be faked with a shader effect or something similar, but spawning lots of items outside of containers is notorious for causing trouble. If you want it so nothing is left on them appart from the ashes, doing a removeallitems followed by adding the ashes is probably the way to go. (Possibly) The easiest (imo the most logical) way to govern how long the body would last would be to test for an interior cell (if possible, I remember seeing it somewhere), and use the logic that there's no wind inside, and there's probably wind outside. 2 values is your best bet, I can't see having a proportionl time adding anything worthwhile.

 

As a final note; It's more than just good maners to credit people for their ideas and work, don't assume we're all going to steal them. Mods made for a special request will almost always state who the mod is for and their contribution. Have a bit more faith, no-one's here to rip people off. I hope.