Asigning LL Armors to NPC

[VileTouch]

Hello. One of the most appealing tricks i have tried with my game is to merge a bunch of Armor mods (say 100 or so) and include all of them in Leveled Lists

so every spawned NPC have a chance to use one of these custom armors

 

but i have to admit things have not turned out as well as i expected. for starters:

 

- Due to the random nature of leveled lists, NPC often end up with Cuirass / Greaves /Boots from TOTALLY different sets.

- For the same reason, they could end up with two greaves, two gauntlets, and no boots or cuirass, or worse, i have seen them with five pairs of gauntlets on their inventory and no other armor pieces. (that is SO annoying!)

 

The other major caveat i've found was to try to assign Leveled Amor sets to non-respawning npc (named ones and essential) so they "change clothes" regularily. basically they would 1) CTD or 2) walk around naked or 3) Be assigned a set of Clothes/Armor but not use it or 4) Be assigned a set of clothes, use it correctly but then change back to another clothes. then be assigned another set of armor, and dump it as well ending up with their inventory full of armor sets or clothes sets.

the best i have managed to do is take advantage of the "pick the best armor in their inventory and use that one" but that have a not so obvious inconvenience: they will always be changing clothes only for the better, and never going back to a "less powerful" set.

 

 

As my intent is to have ALL of tamriel change clothes every three days (or randomly if i they can afford it), scripting every single clothe change in every character would be overkill (considering my game has over 10,000 named npc, compared to the 3,200 or so in vanilla)

 

So, is there a reliable way of asigning a consistent,pseudo-random set of Armor or Clothes to an NPC (or 10,000) and then taking it back from them on a schedule and assigning another different set? short of making 10,000 scripts, one for each npc??

 

 

What i mean for pseudo-random is that it picks the clothes/armor based on some simple rules. like if the cuirass is from a certain set then the rest of the pieces should match.

 

or i don't know, maybe my approach of assigning stuff directly to NPC's inventories is the problem, maybe i could insert a "change clothes" behavior in their schedules and they could go home (whatever it is they call home) and place their equiped clothes on a wardrobe and then pick up the set that have been readied for them... but that does not solve the problem of "what armor pieces should i wear to not look like a freak"

 

 

help? comments? opinion? advice? ideas? feel free to share your thoughts :happy:

[VileTouch]

Well, obviously i'm doing something wrong here, but a can't seem to figure out what it is yet. :blush:

maybe it is the way i am putting together the elements of the Leveled List

 

If only i could assign a script to the LL to fire whenever it is about to generate a result... but then agan, what would i put in it if i could assign it? hmmm... right... time for tutorial hunting.:pinch:

[David Brasher]

Good luck!

 

I have pulled my hair out over trying to get NPCs to change clothes and wear the clothes I want them to. Like you say, they wear the wrong things, and like to run around streaking. The Oblivion game engine is just not good at this. The assumption was that NPCs would always wear the same clothes, and a few special NPCs important to quests would have their clothes changed by script once or twice during the entire game. Even the "take off your heavy armor before getting in bed" hard coding is buggy.

 

So I don't have any simple answers for you. If it is really important that certain NPCs dress and change clothes as you wish, then you may want to mod them individually one by one with a new script for each NPC.

 

One thing I have not researched much is the disabling of leveled lists. It sounds like a leveled list can be turned off by script. Maybe you could have different leveled lists and they could be turned on and off.

[VileTouch]

Good luck!

 

I have pulled my hair out over trying to get NPCs to change clothes and wear the clothes I want them to. Like you say, they wear the wrong things, and like to run around streaking. The Oblivion game engine is just not good at this. The assumption was that NPCs would always wear the same clothes, and a few special NPCs important to quests would have their clothes changed by script once or twice during the entire game. Even the "take off your heavy armor before getting in bed" hard coding is buggy.

 

So I don't have any simple answers for you. If it is really important that certain NPCs dress and change clothes as you wish, then you may want to mod them individually one by one with a new script for each NPC.

 

One thing I have not researched much is the disabling of leveled lists. It sounds like a leveled list can be turned off by script. Maybe you could have different leveled lists and they could be turned on and off.

 

Well, a few mods somehow manage to assign random, yet consistent armor sets to NPC (bandits and smugglers,yes, not merchants for instance) OOO does it, Warcry does it. and what they do is stack leveled lists (a leveled list that calls another leveled list, that calls the armor piece) but i can't seem to acomplish that myself no matter how much i study those mods

 

Now i "think" it's not possible to have a script directly called by a leveld list, instead of an item or spell (which is what we are all used to) just so it would decide which items should be placed in a meta table and then having NPC pull from that rigged meta table. problem is that if this script would fail to run (which usually happen on low fps situations) then the whole world would turn into a big Cap D'Agde until the next cloth change... and scripting every npc individually with a script that reference more than 1000 (much more in fact) armor pieces is... well... crazy to say the least...not to mention very prone to incopatibilities. unless i follow your advice and edit only a handfull of npc....

 

well, yes disabling all LLI armor sets except one would solve the "picking items from diferent sets" problem... but that would not prevent the isue of ending up with five of the same item.

 

uh....i hope i have not forgotten anything

[VileTouch]

upudate:

i tried using a token ring, and had some very interesting results!

first off since the ring is just an invisible item that fires the script,it now asigns a random full set of armor or clothes to the npc wearing it... great!

 

problem is it does not yet removes the currently equiped garment. so the npc might or might not wear what it's given.

besides if i try to do that, it might remove some other important piece of armor from said npc, thus causing even worse a problem...

 

second is the problem that the clothe change fires every time the npc equips the ring...that sounds good, but that would mean they could be using a more valuable ring and just unequip mine... even if it's a hidden token. :S... real bad

but that also generates another problem: "IF" i succesfully manage to weld the ring to their finger so they won't take it off... how would i force unequip/re-equip the ring to trigger a clothe change then?

 

that leads me to the last problem. anything and everything that wears that ring would get a shiny brand new custom fully matching set of armor in their inventory. if for some reason one endup with two of those rings and equip them, it's an insta-CTD (i had to learn that the hard way). so what you say? well, looting npc, might pick up one of those hidden rings and decide it would look good on them and bang!, i end up staring at my wallpaper.

that is a problem since for some reason beyond my understanding, said rings tend to appear randomly on dead enemies, even though i am quite sure it has the hidden flag on...

 

so that's it... comments are welcome... and some coffee if you wish. :biggrin:

[TodaY]

I don't know if this will work, but try making different lists for each type of armor (gaunlets, boots, cuirass, greaves) and adding the 4 of them to an NPC

[David Brasher]

Well, a few mods somehow manage to assign random, yet consistent armor sets to NPC (bandits and smugglers,yes, not merchants for instance) OOO does it, Warcry does it. and what they do is stack leveled lists (a leveled list that calls another leveled list, that calls the armor piece) but i can't seem to accomplish that myself no matter how much i study those mods

 

It sounds like maybe you would be happy with an effect like OOO or Warcry accomplishes. So the best thing to do would be to reverse engineer them and copy the form and function of their leveled lists. Just build yours so that their branching structure is just like the branching structure of theirs. Study it very closely and refer to it repeatedly to make sure yours is built with the same structure as theirs. Worse come to worse, you could just take a copy of Warcry and copy the parts you want to a blank mod, or if that crashes the CS, then modclean out 99.5% of Warcry and leave only the skeleton you want. After taking one of these approaches, change all the leveled list names and change all the contents and it will no longer be pirated.

 

Leveled list are not so bad. You build a leveled list with a variety of things on it. Then might put the new list into another list which calls on a list instead of an item. Then that list might even be within another list. Just examine the other mod very closely and do exactly what it does in terms of structure.