LE Airships - Kinda Like Dev Aveza but not

[MarsUltor1997]

HELP WANTED! PROGRAMMERS, MODELLERS, TEXTURE CREATORS, MODDERS IN GENERAL CONTACT ME!

 

Basic Idea

So, I've been using the amazing Dev Aveza mod with Skyrim ever since I started on my computer, but I've been thinking, what if there was an entire set of cultural motifs, idealisms, skills, and talents for airships and enemies with their own? My idea sounds basic but what I'm implying are things like sets of armors or armor enchantments that meant if you exceeded a set of parameters, say falling 2500 units in under 15 seconds, your enchantment kicks in and teleports you to the deck of your airship (designating the ship as your's would probably be very difficult). Beyond that, I'd suggest that the enchantment could trigger a dialogue set in NPC's like "Ah, I saw your airship coming in, I didn't know whose it was until now." or "You smell like coal friend, do you work an airship?". This or hundreds of trillions of possibilities that I alone could not come up with, but the combined, lovely minds of mod users and makers on the Nexus would engineer in concert with one another within the basic framework of this idea. Now I'll include some of my own specific ideas, parts of these may or may not be on the Nexus, I'll admit I just don't know.

Guilds

I would suggest a guild or set of guilds and guild plugins, what I mean by this. You can join a Smugglers' Guild, or Air Pirates Guild, or even a Traders' Guild linked with the East Empire Company. You could also install plug-ins allowing specialized quests in the Thieves' Guild, Dark Brotherhood, Mages' College, and The Companions with characters that will only address you if you own an airship. IE if a subroutine occurs during loading screen, "true/false? value (x)" so in other words, once you buy, or have an airship constructed, x = true rather than false. Which, if you are a glutton for punishment in terms of programming set a routine that sets (x) to false if the dirigible is destroyed.1

Beyond this, you could have motifs, or decorative items, you have the option to add to your dirigible’s exterior or interiors with merchants specializing in that sort of thing. For example, a small token of esteem in the Companions due to your service to them as a captain. So you can have shelves (I have no idea how difficult this would be to program, apologies) that if you place an item within the shelf inventory, say a max of three items to a shelf, and have it display a static version of the item that would be dynamic if merely out in the world to be picked up off the ground. IE the models you see in your inventory. Or a banner, rug, or drapes mount of some sort within the interior. So you coudle mix a Sithis' skull rug with Thieves' Guild green drapes and maybe a Smugglers' Guild banner. 2

Weaponry

So, I don't know about any of you, but I've been wondering how a magical society would design and make weaponry on our level of usefulness for relatively long range engagements, like ship cannons. For example, these characters may not feel the need (I know it's a game, but honestly its a hell of a lot easier to refer to people in the game as people, so I'm gonna do that from here on out.) or even actually have it be a requirement to be able to produce gunpowder (or black powder) to make the equivalent of a firearm. Especially when thinking of spells in game like "Frost Rune","Lightning Rune", or "Fire Rune" which obviously emit a pressure wave, which in essence, is pretty much what you need to create some sort of projectile weapon like a compressed air gun, or rifle, shotgun, pistol, cannon, or cannonades. Well, that is to say, a instantaneously pressurized (As in, a cylinder, with an open end, that can and will emit gases, propelling a projectile, when a detonation produces a pressure wave of some sort that occurs on the back side of the projectile, ie at a particular instant). So my thoughts are, why not have a cannon with a soul gem that powers a rune enchantment on a localized area, within the barrel, that acts as a projectile's propulsion mechanism.3

You can also have rifles, shotguns, pistols, and other random early single shot weapons4 that you can have people using.5 of course, you'd need to change reload speed, probably. Yet still, you can rip a lot of code for the cannon aiming and gun aiming by NPCs from the preexisting code, changing the variables and reason for attack variables to fit the range of a flint, match, or wheel lock rifle.

Shipbuilding Dynamic

Anywhere you can find a dock, I'd suggest a screwy, and eccentric engineer itching to build some dirigibles, the engineer you choose would also be the quest giver for future Airship Related Guild recommendations (rumors that start quests for the guild, starter quests to join guilds, other things). So maybe a nutty as peanut brittle Dunmer woman in Windhelm, a weird off-putting, dwemer-obsessed Nord outside Winterhold, down by the sea. Or even an odd Altmer in Solitude, things like that. Yet these characters, when you are purchasing a ship from them, they give you a menu, this menu has maybe a display area like in a normal inventory. This displays the ship so far, so you could have a small, medium, and large hull set for all twelve races (includes Falmer and Dwemer, but I'm probably off on my count) that vary in price and style with a display model for the outer hulls. Then depending on your hull, you can choose from a series of (five?) interior layouts for each hull. This, already gives a player 540 customizable options, for their Airship, not including possible ship armor upgrades, or speed upgrades, or weapons upgrades.

From here, I would suggest we could go with a menu determining the original price of your cannons/cannonades, straight from the drydocks. Or we could go into ship propulsion, which could mean a soul gem powered boiler, powering a steam engine turning props that allow forward momentum, or some crazy experimental mechanical system equivalent to a jet engine or rocket thruster. Which could be led into or lead into an actual control system, (steering) for the Airship. So if we assume that a player can have up to 3 random upgrades of say 30 upgrades to each system6, and each system has 30 possibilities for what it can be basicly and 30 unique upgrades6 a player now has around this many possibilities.

12 x 3 = 36, 36+36+36+36+36, 5(36) = 180, 180(30) =5,400, 5,400(30) = 162,000,

162,000(30) = 4,860,000, 4,860,000(30) = 145,800,000

So, I’m not saying these all control each other, that would drive us all insane if we were all working on this mod. No I’m saying if you select any one of the 36 hull options, or class of hulls, then the menu goes deeper into the interiors menu, and you choose one, entirely undecorated, interior (if combined with the code and menus from say, Placeable Statics Mod this could work with various cultural motifs like a large squishy looking mattress for a cat/khajiit bed). So, no more options are available to you right now after you select what you want the interior to be.

Now, for the “Shipbuilding”, after you’ve selected your style, and paid the nutter, you have maybe two ingame days till a little message is triggered in the message section of the screen saying, “You get a feeling, and think of (shipbuilder NPC), maybe you should check on your airship.”

From here, you go to the nutter and every time you load the entire world, (IE load a world area) past a consecutive set of variable-hour time periods, the dry docks by the docks, where your airship is being built shows a different, partially complete conglomerate, nonmoving model of the ship. And when you get there one day, you can’t find the engineer, but the ship is mostly complete, (IE, now it is a dynamic mount, with a door on it, however the door is not present when flying the ship.) so now there is a door, you go through it and the Interior Area loads up, there's the engineer. Holding a weird little thing, a pistol.

So the engineer is holding it gingerly, inspecting it and a new dialogue set triggers, “what’s that” or something along those lines is said, and at this point the individual character’s story quest, launches. Maybe the engineer’s father went missing working for the Airshipping community, and so on and so forth, until you get to an agreement where they’ll be your first crew member, and on a medium airship you’ll probably need five and then yourself at the helm (a large may need only a few more, because in terms of realism you can only have up to a certain size airship before you break the damn thing by making it fly). Then on a small, it’s implied that a captain could run it on his own.

How to get It moving

I would suggest that a quest begins here, by helping or killing the engineer. If you help the engineer, you get a waypoint, an engine, the balloons, and cannons and it’s easy. Kill him or steal everything from him you get a map, and a journal full of numbers. The numbers are a cypher and you must break the cypher to find where you’re going but you get the cannons, engine, and balloons anyway.

Mechanics of Ship Destruction7

So before I suggest the most massive part of this, I want to say I’m sorry, so sorry, in advance. I will be working on this part myself, as I have now gotten a tutor to work on programming, modeling, and texturing with me.

First off, let’s get the worst parts out of the way, environmental destruction factors. Realistically, the list of that which can destroy a frakking airship is numerous and terrifying. Lightning strikes and fires will be ignored entirely. Mostly because creating a new set of randomly occurring events and what happens to the Model of the airship when a random event effects it will be difficult enough without trying to modify likelihood of a lightning strike to the airship.

In my opinion addressing this outright is great, because we will either have to figure out how to script a transformation from a dynamic “mount” object into a ragdoll “corpse” that can and will break apart in dynamic ways. Now in light of an attempt at realism, I figure if the Player lives through a fall, he ought be to grab the stuff that he had in the ship, so I figure the ledger, if had in inventory, allows the character to get everything back from the hold. The other stuff, you're just SOL.

So let’s list what can get an airship destroyed.

1. Opposing crosswinds striking the hull with great force.

2. Going too high could cause the balloons to fail and begin leaking.

3. Going too high can cause the ballonets to fail, preventing the ability of the blimp to fall.

4. Going for too long over bad landing areas could result in a lack of fuel, (doubtful, considering these are magic dirigibles which means their fuel will be soul gems, firewood, charcoal, or any other such nonsense.)

5. It’s crew suffocating (doubtful).

6. An enemy airship destroying it.

7. A catastrophic encounter with a dragon.

8. Crashing into the ground, trees, sea or mountains.

9. A rough landing.

10. A rough Water Landing

11. Dropping too fast and losing control.

12. The ship and balloon catching fire.

1. Now, addressing crosswinds, I’d say, the best thing would be to essentially just install a script that is active at random intervals which would destroy the ship with a certain animation and model. However I volunteer that anyone who wants, and is scary of mind enough to do this can if they wish, but it would be needed to have a map of hazards, or set of maps that once gained into the possession, or read, by a captain, would show the hazards on his own map. Similar to the dynamic of Shalidor’s book in the level One-Hundred, Destruction School Quest, an updating book, but as a map.

2/3. Addressing the balloons failing, A height barrier, that causes the ship to lose all control capabilities, which cannot be regained, but gives you enough time before crash to grab your stuff and ditch. This however brings up the idea of survivable falls, in this case, I’d just suggest parachutes, I mean they talk of glide suits that the Bosmer have in lore, so why not chutes too. The animation and control dynamics though, will still be complicated, or it could just be key(]) true/false is value 1 true, yes? Then you fall slower and the animation with a chute is triggered. Such the same continually, on and on throughout. The ballonets failing could cause an event where control is lost and ship continually rises, and you are now allowed to jump off with a chute.

Abandoning ship however needs to be a command through a menu, which causes all characters aboard to jump off, deploying parachutes, then have them return to their homes as if they were followers who were dismissed.

4. Losing fuel, I dunno, makes you need to intermittently heat the boiler or crank the motor or something with an assigned character doing the animation, or you doing it yourself and assigning a helmsman and location.

5. Suffocation could be a side effect of going to high and staying aboard while the ballonets fail, and the airship rises above a certain height.

6. Enemy airships, will spawn very infrequently and will be difficult to kill, however if in Airship control mode, we can figure out how to disable the effect on the player character itself (or rip it all from the code for riding a horse) then we can add some commands in to do things like, engage docking animations at certain places we install the code that registers an area as dockable to them.

But now, addressing the docking dynamic, if you were in a fight you can use the other airship’s docking sequence code to board their vessel and destroy them all, or destroy the ship in some way.

Beyond that you can install a coded key that allows you to shoot the cannons specifically, during airship piloting mode, similar to AC4, with accuracy against the other airship by putting your cursor over their ship, the longer you aim, the smaller the aiming reticle gets. (hugely complex).

7. Essentially, if it engages you, and the airship kicks you out of pilot mode and you must kill it, using guns, and bows, and crossbows. If the ship catches fire, you’ll need to abandon it ASAP.

8. Making the tree architecture and applying it to all trees in game will be aggravating, due to the sheer number of tree models, and the specific dynamics you’ll want them to have if landed upon, like maybe a small pine area turns to a bunch of fallen trees due to being landed on, or similar things.

Creating architecture to match the lay of the land and water will be simple, if we copy the basic shape of the map, change it’s nature and then reapply it in the game as overlapping the normal map, with particular triggers that cause the ship to break apart in ragdoll.

9. Causing minor to major damage, triggering the damaged appearance models to be until the they are repaired.

10. Causing minor to major damage, triggering the damaged appearance models to be until the they are repaired.

11. The same effects of a crash landing as addressed in group 8.

12. Can possibly destroy the ship, but the fires on an airship are unique and can be put out with a bucket I’d say.

The Suggested New World Area and World Area Transfer plugins

So, we all probably know that the Nords are from Atmora, and no one goes to Atmora anymore. If we are going to have guilds of airship pilots, they’re going to have to have been somewhere if their were some in Skyrim. I suggest a great floating city in another world area, to the north, above the Sea of Ghosts.

This would be where the Airship Guilds are located, or in other similar world areas added by the mod. My idea for these is essentially a trigger box, if the character, or any airship enters a 3D coordinate area, they automatically go to that area. Now these would be small boxes that if you entered, you would be doing it on purpose.

Beyond that, the HUD would also have to change in flight, so you could find the coordinates that allow you to go to the Dark Brotherhood’s Sky Sanctuary, or The Thieves Guild Floating Dock, or The Companions’ Floating docks. Or the Other Guild’s personal areas.

Going into this I would also suggest the same dynamic for Solstheim, Wyrmstooth, Falskaar, and If the Project is ever completed, Dark Creations - Beyond Skyrim Mod.

Possible Programming Issues I See

1 I say a glutton because you'd have to figure out, essentially, how to design a flying, horse with a moving door to an interior area. I say horse specifically because horses are mounts, with codes dictating if it is stolen or being driven or somesuch nonsense as that, or perhaps, dead. Current airship mods, don't do what a horse does if an enemy hits it too many times (dies), or if a tree hits it (joke, don't rage at me please)(also, stopping which occurs on horseback). Users of the Dev Aveza mod will attest, the Dev Aveza is by no means a mount, it is a beautifully made mod that essentially creates an airship shaped building which you can move, which within the framework of Skyrim, is an amazing and damned impressive feat all alone disregarding whether or not the door is actually present during travel (which I don't know) or the working rope ladder, or the adaptive planc.

2 Another glutton's task, due to the models that would need to be made to show maybe folded drapes in inventory menus and when not mounted, with labels or insignias showing indicating it's motifs and quality of materials (like Valenwood silk, Skyrim linen, or maybe Elsweyr cotton or something like that) this would be an extremely arduous task. Then you would also need to design and program a mount trigger to trigger the ingame, flowy, pretty drapes models, or non rolled rug, or folded banner or flag. So yes, some of you are seeing how large a mod I'm talking, but I'm also suggesting this as a compatible mod with things like Falskaar, DC ESV: Tamriel Project , Wyrmstooth, Dragonborn (which adds Solstheim as an area), or Dawnguard (which adds open air places like Castle Volikaar Courtyard, Castle Dawnguard, and the Forgotten Vale, which we cannot land in (sadly(yes I just intentionally placed parentheticals within parentheticals to be silly(it's twelve minutes til midnight as I type))).

3 Once again, GT, but possibly simplifiable, you know, if you rip or edit code from other games with similar mechanics (AC3-4), but we're talking mods here, (not for sale) so no copyright infringement on the code. However, let's just hope they wrote in the same languages, and within a workable framework, or made operation simple enough it is mimicable. But yes, you could have a little book in your inventory that could access the ship's inventory and allow you to store ammunition (which could automatically be loaded) or change cannon sets. This could also hold things for a trade ship's dynamic, I would also suggest that you could have multiple accesses to the interior, and have inventory access to the hold's actual items and the weapons’ and armors’ actual items, beyond individual containers on the ship. Similar to the chests and things in the Dev Aveza. You could also have variant sorting systems and layouts for the dirigibles.

4 With ripped animations.

5 "Disguise the modified for longer range bow and arrow dynamics with special gun looking models, textures, and animations, Luke." -Not Actually Ben Kenobi

6 Same things, same upgrades I mean.

7 This entire section is a programming issue.

Edited September 6, 2014 by MarsUltor1997

[MarsUltor1997]

I told you I'd edit it.