Realism Mod Possibilities

[huzegun]

I tend to come back to Oblivion every year or so to check up on the mods, and I've found some truly interesting things that I didn't know one could do with Oblivion's engine and scripting engine. Sorry if this is not in the right sub-forum, but I figured this was more of a discussion than a request (as I wanted to actually do the work behind the mod).

 

So my imagination got peaked when I became irritated at some of the realism mods I've seen, especially related to Health, Fatigue, and Magica. There is a certain level of realism that I enjoy to them, but I think that there's just a big... big concept being missed here. And the idea was relatively simple, if not latent until recent frustrations and poor lamentations;

 

You only have so much fatigue and magical essence per resting period.

 

I thought it was a simple enough idea, which is why it perplexed me that I saw no mods that related to it. It was a wonderful way to make beds more useful than an arbitrary "You are tired and must sleep" kind of switch, and made a lot of realistic sense.

 

But basically, players would start off with something like 50,000 or so fatigue (scaled by a few skills and stats, naturally) and would very, very slowly recover (Recovery being minorly scaled by some agility related stats). The idea here would be you and your character only has so much energy he/she/you can put out before you just -have- to rest. If you've ever gone and run 10 miles or something else that is incredibly challenging for you, you would -just not- be able to sit down for a few seconds and feel like new. It would take an hour, at the absolute least, to properly recover, and that's still energy lost that you wouldn't be able to commit elsewhere. Doing all these kinds of activities through your day cycle - however short it may be - would result in that feeling of being tired, and the need to sleep, as your energy is completely exhausted. When you rest for an APPROPRIATE period for how much energy you've lost, then you can properly return to your activities.

 

A second thought is that the above system would be implemented into a stat called 'energy' or at least akin to, and that fatigue would remain mostly as it is, except that recovery and drain would be scaled by how much total energy you have, or something like that.

 

In my mind, I always figured magic would have that same kind of system. You would have an arbitrary pool of available magic (heretofore 'magica') at any time, but it would replenish at a slow(er) rate and the overall size may even be damaged or completely destroyed by more powerful spells (I figured summoning would be a prime example of mana pool draining). Regardless of level of expertise though, you'd only have the ability to call upon so much magic per resting period, and you would have to rest for such the period of time to recover it all. Mage-types would probably have to rest more, as the first part of their resting would likely be to recover fatigue (the concentration to control that much supernatural energies must be draining, after all) and then an additional period of 'meditation' where the magic-user would merely relax and focus, recover their balance and their magical prowess.

 

The side effects can be worried and conquered later; my question is merely about the feasibility of such a system with OBSE if needed and in the Oblivion Engine. Or what kind of work-around COULD be done that at least retains some of the primary features of that system.

 

Many thanks for any help.

Edited January 15, 2011 by huzegun

[grmblf]

It is feasible and you don't even need obse, that could be done simply tweaking some game settings.

 

Some time ago I was experimenting with some similar concept, instead of recovering fatigue by sleeping it was some sort of 'long term' fatigue (it took more than 2 minutes to fill the fatigue bar) so you couldn't simply run a marathon and then just slash a few enemies as you'd be so much fatigued. Anyway I went for the easy way, simply tweaking Tejon's Fatigue Effects mod and lowering all values a lot, but it could be cool to preserve fatigue on it's own for 'short term' tiredness (so it kinda forces the player to take some break when fighting, just a second each a few to take a breath and not continuously striking with a weapon), but also adding that 'Energy' stat that would control overall 'long-term' fatigue. HUD Stats Bars mod let's you add more stats bar to the hud to represent anything you want, so it could be visible alongside with 'normal' fatigue. The only prolem I found to that is that I don't know how to force the game engine to calc an average value of both stats when it gets fatigue percentage (so to make damage done with weapons is affected by both types of tiredness), but if you simply replace fatigue with 'energy' then that's not a problem at all. Problems will raise, of course, with mods that burn fatigue, as they'll most probably be designed to work with vanilla-like settings.