Clothing and Armor Overhaul

[007Bistromath]

I haven't done a three-hour exhaustive no-stones-left-behind search, but I have poked around a little, and all I can find so far dealing with clothes are things based on "I want to look like THAT dude!" and making female characters look ridiculous. I have the strangest feeling that's all I'm going to find, since I might very well be the only person who cares about this, so. That.

 

Anyway.

 

One thing I've always found kind of weird is the tendency in these types of games for it to be totally normal for you to walk around looking like two-thirds of a Sherman tank when you're just shopping and chatting up that Argonian shopkeeper hotty. I usually put up with it like everyone else, because switching gear is annoying, and you never know when some guard might go Dirty Harry on you because you had the gall to defend yourself from those crazies in Hackdirt, (to borrow an example from this one) and in most games, good-looking civvy clothes are kinda... undersupported anyway. In the first five minutes of Oblivion though, I fell in love. I MUST HAVE the infinitely stylish Mythic Dawn robes on whenever I walk into town. Just look at them, man! On the other hand, somebody who knows their significance would probably give me some strange looks unless I were famous enough to "reclaim" that new hotness for the side of awesome. So, I'm finally fed up with armor and clothing not mattering in my games. There is a pretty decent-looking disguise mod up that does some things for specific outfits, but to be honest I don't think it reaches far enough. This isn't just about stealthiness. I want to give people a reason to change clothes, so that if they want to do that, like I do, they don't feel silly for carrying around some junk that just sits in their bag being weighty.

 

1) What you're wearing, aside from any significance of the specific kit you've got on, should affect peoples' reaction to you. If you're wearing something particularly expensive and/or awesome, personality and/or speechcraft bonuses should come into play. If you're wearing a bizarre pastiche of fur and chainmail armor with a helmet that looks like you picked up a chamberpot and beat it somewhat into shape, they shouldn't. That negative effect should be magnified for rough/rusty/etc. armor.

 

If we want to get really ambitious with this, wearing a bunch of armor and generally looking like a tough guy in town for no good reason could cause people to be scared of you, or maybe even try to come to you with their problems occasionally. If you really want to be enlisted to save some idiot peasant's chicken from some goblins everytime you walk by the inn, then go to it and good luck, but I know that would be annoying enough to make me want to change. Also it'd be cool for the ubiquitous "I don't have time for this garbage" dialog option to be a useful thing even for a nice-guy character for once. :P

 

2) If you're wearing a uniform, that should also matter. Now, something like the Mythic Dawn robes, most people still aren't going to care about. I haven't played a great deal through the game, but if I'm not mistaken, regular civilians and rank-and-file guard members would just think "huh, one of those cult nutjobs" if they've ever seen that before at all. (But don't spoil it if I'm wrong!) Somebody from the Blades, on the other hand, would recognize it, and would be likely to react to you less positively (but not negatively, since you're helping them so much) if you're in it. This stuff is small time, though.

 

Naturally, the first thing I did when I went through that gate at Kvatch was gank all the stuff off that dead guard. It looks good, and most of it was better than the mixed garbage I had accumulated up to that point. Now, when I go in dressed as Adventurer #23764 and come out as one of the guard captain's fallen brothers in arms, and he doesn't notice, that seems kind of weird to me. If somebody knows you're you (I would like disguise to also be an option here!) and they see you wearing the distinctive uniform elements of their faction, they should do something about it. What they should do should be based on whether they like you or not, and what you choose to do about it. If they like you, they will give you the option of either giving the stuff back, like you did with Renault's katana, or paying for it, in which case you would also be inducted into that faction. (I don't think you can actually join the city guards in vanilla. I say you should be able to, but if that would be too annoying to put in, then just have them stop hassling you about the armor after you pay for it.) If they don't like you, then you have the choice of either giving the stuff back, like the katana, or having them put a bounty on you and possibly start wailing on you because you're wearing stolen goods.

 

Oh and wearing guard armor should make Thieve's Guild people want you to go away.

 

3) While we're at it with this other junk, there are a couple other things about armor which bug me. Firstly, you shouldn't be able to sleep in it. Seriously, who does that? I mean yes, maybe if you're in the middle of nowhere and could get eaten by a grue, but since your character in this game can't sleep at all unless there's at least a nice comfy pallet in the middle of a camp, then it's really just unreasonable.

 

Secondly, found armor should not be so great. Real armor is made for an individual to exacting specifications. I think it'd be going a step too far to say it's totally unwearable, but you shouldn't be able to just pick up anybody's junk and immediately claim it as The New Hotness. Rather than (as I believe is now the case) NPC armor starting at 100 durability, it should start at 75 (maybe even 50!) and have a decent chance per piece to be lower, or possibly even zero so that the thing is totally useless. Simulating the poor fit of a given piece of armor through messing around with the durability seems like the way to do it, because it means that you can repair the armor to make it yours. This effect should not apply to magic/enchanted items.

 

So, what do you guys think?

[Vagrant0]

Simply put, would require a total overhaul of dialogues (including new voices), more scripts than you can count, and doesn't actually add anything to the game outside a few minutes of "hey did that NPC just say something new". It won't be done, as much as you think this sort of thing matters, it doesn't really do anything. The amount of time and effort required to pull something like this off just isn't worth the result, and making a total conversion, or expansion would likely be easier. Additionally, by the time any group of people managed to finish such a project, TES V would probably already be out on the market with a few expansions. Essentially most of what this would accomplish would be more of the "you look fit, been running alot?" type of dialogues which just get annoying and stale after the 50th time you've heard it.

 

Trying to add diversity to found armor would only complicate the process further by either creating sets of lower duribility/defense armor, adjusting the dozens of leveled lists to work with that armor, adjusting merchant containers to either have, or have a lack of those armors, or creating a script more complicated than planning a mission to Mars to adjust the duribility of armor (via OBSE) based on who it was spawned on. Again, not going to happen in this lifetime.

[Sypron]

There are something you could do to simulate what you want. For example, in Sanguines quest, there is a guard who is blocking the door to a certain party. If the value of your equipted items exceeds a certain amount, he will let you pass. That script MAY be manipulated to make peoples disposition raise if your "value" is above a certain amount. However, I do not know if that can be applied as a global script. Other things such as "He has black armor, I should fear him" are rather impossible, as the game doesn't understand the concept of color. Like Vagrant said, the only way to achieve most of the things you want is to attach scripts to every item that makes NPC's react differently. This wont work with modded items though.

[007Bistromath]

Woah, hold up. I think you guys are making this somewhat more deep than even I wanted. There does not need to be a complete system of "do these pants make my butt look big?" that has stats for every item of clothing. That's dumb and overcomplicated. Non-armor clothing can, as has been suggested, just be based on value, though more of them will have to be given some value obviously, since most of what I've seen, whether it looks nice or not, costs about two bucks. The Mythic Dawn robes in particular cost nothing. I think I understand why, but they really should be in the fairly decent range. So newbies get a little extra starting cash from them. Oh noes.

 

Armor's value for this purpose should be based on matching sets. You'll generally get a personality penalty for wearing armor around town, but the penalty goes away in dangerous situations, and goes down if you're wearing stuff that makes sense, i.e. a full set of leathers rather than a Chorrol cuirass, a daedric shield, and a bunch of fur garbage. Doesn't need to be a hugely complex thing, you just get better reactions as you wear more things that are the same type of item. If you get inducted into a city guard, you can also wear their uniform at no penalty in town.

 

So, for the most part, I'm not suggesting anything that requires big mucking around with voice files, just mechanical tweaking.

 

No, the bit with the disguises/guards, that's a little tougher, but I still don't think any truly new reactions would be necessary. Some hand-waving may be necessary to avoid them, but even so. Basically what I'm going for is that if you're wearing a uniform and somebody from that organization notices, their disposition towards you determines whether they react as if you've got stolen goods or not. If they don't, you can basically pay them some "union dues" to get in. Again, depending on the execution, no new resources are required, just new things that trigger use of the ones that are already there.

 

Other than that, yeah, the bit about people asking you for help was a bit much. A guy can dream.

 

As to the armor durability thing I'm having trouble making sense of this.

Trying to add diversity to found armor would only complicate the process further by either creating sets of lower duribility/defense armor, adjusting the dozens of leveled lists to work with that armor, adjusting merchant containers to either have, or have a lack of those armors, or creating a script more complicated than planning a mission to Mars to adjust the duribility of armor (via OBSE) based on who it was spawned on.

It seems like you very much misunderstood my suggestion, or else I am very much misunderstanding your reply. There has been some kind of miscommunication here.

 

I don't want to have anything based on who has what or anything like that. That's overthinking it. The process as I envisioned it is very simple.

 

1) Is this piece of armor being purchased from a merchant?*

2) If so, its durability will be at 100%.

3) If not, is the item magical?

4) If so, its durability will be at 100%. (assuming it hasn't actually been damaged)

5) If not, its durability will be a random number from 0-75. The item can be repaired to 100 the same as any other.

 

NOTE: It occurs to me that the problem may be that I am not using the right word here. When I say "durability," I mean the amount to which the item has been damaged, which impairs the effectiveness. I know that's not what the word durability means exactly, but I thought that was the name of the game mechanic I was talking about. Maybe I've mixed it up with something else. Anyway, basically what I am getting at is that found armor should count as already being damaged.

 

*If I'm not mistaken, you don't even have to make this check. If I remember correctly, whenever I sell armor to merchants, they show up in the buy list immediately afterward as being fully repaired. So basically, anything in a merchant's inventory is already always at 100%. So, there just needs to be a magic check, and after that, all armor everywhere can just take a durability hit before you pick it up. Simple.

[Sypron]

Woah, hold up. I think you guys are making this somewhat more deep than even I wanted. There does not need to be a complete system of "do these pants make my butt look big?" that has stats for every item of clothing. That's dumb and overcomplicated. Non-armor clothing can, as has been suggested, just be based on value, though more of them will have to be given some value obviously, since most of what I've seen, whether it looks nice or not, costs about two bucks. The Mythic Dawn robes in particular cost nothing. I think I understand why, but they really should be in the fairly decent range. So newbies get a little extra starting cash from them. Oh noes.

 

Armor's value for this purpose should be based on matching sets. You'll generally get a personality penalty for wearing armor around town, but the penalty goes away in dangerous situations, and goes down if you're wearing stuff that makes sense, i.e. a full set of leathers rather than a Chorrol cuirass, a daedric shield, and a bunch of fur garbage. Doesn't need to be a hugely complex thing, you just get better reactions as you wear more things that are the same type of item. If you get inducted into a city guard, you can also wear their uniform at no penalty in town.

 

A few problems there. Say you wanted to make it so people react better if your in a FULL suit of steel. The game can't detect that type of thing, only humans can. There is no real link between any two pieces of armor, the only link is the ones that we humans can understand, like "Those guantlets look like the rest of the armor. That person deserves repect." You can't tell the game to make NPC's have a higher disposition with you if you are only wearing Steel Armor, because the game doesn't know you are wearing all steel armor. It is possible to make this happen, but only with thousands of scripts, or few incredibly long scripts. Think about it, the script would have to check if all armor pieces are similiar, so it would have to have built in lists of what "similiar armor" actually is. Then custom items would come into it. My character has a full suit of enchanted steel, but NPCs don't react possitively because the script doesn't recognise the armor as steel anymore.

 

In short, the computer (including oblivion) cannot register the types of realistic "matching sets" that humans can. Trying to make it recognise such things would be like developing a new form of AI.

[Vagrant0]

The problem is that very little of that can be scripted with in those simplistic terms. Essentially the only thing you could use would be a check to see if what you're wearing is expensive. That is all, and it would be limited to http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index...etClothingValue. Which means that you're pretty much stuck with a scale from 0 to 100. Even then, you would STILL have to make new dialogue entries to have anything like this work.

 

For uniforms, you are looking at a very complicated process even if you just want them to have a lowered disposition. This requires placing scripts on the actor to determine if the player is wearing something they would object to. The more actors you want to do this, for the more suits you want, the more scripting you have to do. Now if you want them to actually say something, you would need to find a specific dialogue group that would be appropiate (not easy, occasionally sounds wrong) or create a new dialogue group (Much harder).

 

As for the shop scripting. While OBSE can record how much durability an item has, this value cannot be changed through scripting. Additionally, there is no way to detect what item is being bought from a merchant, and there is no way to reference an inventory item from any remote source. This means that the only scripting you can have that might affect equipment would have to be placed on that equipment within the CS. Which means that since you can't spawn pre-damaged equipment, can't damage equipment though scripting, you would instead have to do the next best, and only thing that would seem remotly close, and just make most of the sources of lower quality equipment, actually have leveled lists containing new sets of lower quality equipment.

 

I wasn't jumping the gun here... To do anything like this, it's really as difficult as I had said, and that's doing it the easy way.

[DeusXMachina]

Get OOO. In the newest release (RC3), people's reaction is dependent on what you wear. It may not be implemented as deeply as you like, but there are "good" and "evil" armors to be found which enforce a specific reaction. It also deals with your third point; though it doesn't deal with the condition of looted armors, it implements a lot more worthless kinds of armor and weapons.

[007Bistromath]

Eh. I've looked at OOO. It seems to have a few good points to it, but it's too far-reaching in ways I'm not interested in. I wonder a little bit why so much different stuff is even released as one package. I know you can turn some things on and off, but I'm no power user, I'd be worried about obscure dependency problems. To say nothing of the fact that something as big as OOO is going to break at least one of my other mods without me knowing. I'd rather put up with any problems that could be solved by downloading OOO, to be honest. :P

 

As for the durability thing, I didn't realize before how little power modders actually had with this stuff. No wonder there are so many weird little game fixes that people handle by making new spells and books rather than just putting them in. Thanks for clearing that up.

 

Regarding armor types: I think I'm starting to see where you're going, but I'd like to know more. I'm having some difficulty understanding what the hard part is about picking out armor pieces which obviously belong to matched sets, and just manually assigning them some kind of category and/or synergy. Maybe you think I'm actually talking about armor materials when I say fur/steel/meteoric cardboard? I am not. I know there is very likely more than one "set" of steel armor in this game. There are very likely more than a dozen "sets" of steel armor in this game. I wish to know what type of scale we're talking about, so that I can understand why labelling all the (to pick a super-easy example) Kvatch armor pieces in a way that the system can recognize is a Herculean task. At this point I'm not doubting you that it probably is, I'm just curious about the kind of stuff Oblivion modders have to contend with. What is trivial and what is not seems quite different from what would make sense.

 

Perhaps a stickied thread in this forum is in order that details the kinds of things which are too hard to bother with?

[Sypron]

Like I said, the implication with telling the game to make sence of a set is the fact that there is no relation between any parts of armor. To us steel gauntlets and steel helmets are both steel, but to the game there is no real relation between them. If you were to make lists of armors that are the same set so the game can recognise them, that would not be able to include any custom armor pieces (enchanted). The only real way I can see to detect armor as beeing part of a set, is for the script to check the model associated with the armor type (so the script has a list of steel models, if a piece of armor uses that model it registers as a set piece) but I do not no if this is possible, even with OBSE.

[007Bistromath]

You know, I'd almost say that a good way to handle this is to just declare that enchanted items are counted as part of every set, so as not to penalize the player for the fact that they'd probably want to wear it despite it not making much sense. It doesn't seem like that would solve the larger problem if I get what you're saying, though. I don't know what attributes can be modified on or even given to an item, but it seems like Oblivion modding tools are generally not comparable in extent to those I see in other games.