Immersive Crafting System (includes dyes and far more)

[GuNSl1nG3R7065]

All of this mod was discussed in a previous post of mine, but probably was ignored because it was so lengthy and posted under Oblivion despite being primarily Skyrim focused. As such, I'm dividing and reposting the mods in the Skyrim section. I also don't know if they belong here or the request mod section, but since I'm willing to work on the mod myself I suppose its a mod in work at snail paced production.

 

This mod is especially lengthy due to all the details and being worthy of two separate large scale mods. A quick summary of it would be it allows for crafting of over tens of thousands different items using new materials. To give it a more common description: it lets you dye your items from weapons to armor to statics and clutter objects. It also gives each of those items different values, stats, and resources required. It's crafting system will be composed of performing actions rather than sticking something in the oven and waiting for it to pop out.

 

The counterpart idea for this mod is found here.

 

Craft & Establish (Craft): Summary

Crafting Overall Summary: First off resources will be found across the world similarly to how it is in Morrowind Crafting, with iron ores and so forth scattered in caves. Resources will vary from pottery, metals, hides/leathers, cloth/papers, woods, gems, and ink/magical materials. Each resource will be collected or crafted by their respective sources. Extraction of resources is done by using tools (either Skyrim's system or actual hitting the object with the tool - similar to "smithing" in the Real Time Settler mod for FO, but hopefully with less spammy "attacks"). The material deposits will be destroyed from extraction. Items are crafted at their specific locations, being a blacksmith or wherever. Skills determine what recipes and what materials the craftsman can create. All crafting requires blueprints of some kind, which are obtained from skill points, books, various scattered notes, random "luck" while crafting other items, or by blueprinting the item or static when you find it. Static objects or items not "registered" in the mod will be craftable, but the difficulty of the craft and materials required will be "randomly" generated for the item depending on its size or stats (glass cups may take metals, an iron chandelier might be made out of wood). All vanilla items and compatible mods will have their own specific material requirements.

 

 

This section discusses the "dye" concept of the mod as well as "random" loot (like the loot in Borderlands).

 

Item "Customization":

Crafting Molds Summary: Blueprinted items and statics will not have the option of selecting molds and so forth, but for all mod added craftable items they will use this system. For every item, whether static, weapon, armor, or clutter, a variety of molds and materials exist. For sake of example I will talk about smithing a sword (armor will be done similarly, but may have more limitations due to more details and odd shaped meshes). Each respective crafting method will have different options, but follow the same pattern. When crafting a sword there are 3 distinctive molds, each with their own materials. The three molds are the blade, the guard, and the hilt. Each mold has a variety of materials that can fill them. Each component will be explained separately:

 

The blade: The blade is the mesh (model) that the weapon you craft will have. The blade does restrict what kinds of guards and hilts you can use (no sense using a 2h hilt on a dagger blade) and vice versa, depending which molds you pick first. The blade determines several initial stats, such as the "volume" of material needed (weight), the damage, the attack swing timer, and the class and subclass of the weapon.

 

The guard: The guard is another mesh (mostly cosmetic) that is attached between the blade and hilt. The guard can give a few bonuses or cons to stats like how long it takes to enter and exit blocking with the weapon, as well as altering the weight, swing timer, and damage slightly.

 

The hilt: The hilt is the final required mesh located below the guard. The hilt mostly alters the swing timer. The hilt also determines what materials can be used for the blade and the durability of the equipment. Choosing a material (weight) that is outside of the hilt's supported weight will result in the attack swing timer being vastly increased. Meanwhile picking a soft grip (made for heavy weapons) for a lightweight blade and metal will result in a longer swing time as well as wasted materials, when a hard grip would be suffice and even better stats.

 

Blade material: The blade material determines (cosmetic) the color of the blade metal. The material also determines the weight of the blade (alters damage and attack swing timer) and can provide elemental or physical bonuses such as bonus blunt damage, bonus slice damage, or bonus damage to specific elements for enchantments (ie: copper gives a bonus to fire damage if the sword is enchanted with a fire enchant).

 

Guard material: The guard material is cosmetic as well. The material does slightly alter stats of the blade being its weight, swing timer, and durability (primarily this).

 

Hilt material: The hilt material determines (or is determined by) what the weight of the blade can be. The material can serve as a counter weight reducing attack speed but decreasing damage. The material can also lower durability.

 

 

All weapons and armor will have similar molds and materials that are primary stats. These 6 options determine the weapon's primary looks and stats. With a variety of materials and molds (~25 each, 75 meshes and 75 textures total) already over 200 million different (by texture or mesh) swords can be crafted. Note, most of these swords (over 90%) would be impractical to be used for combat, as they would break in just a few attacks or have low damage output for their swing timers. However, these are just the primary options. Additionally are the following options:

 

Blade sockets (0-2): Some blades will come with "sockets" where cosmetic items (with minor bonuses) can be placed. Some blades will have no options while others can have up to 2. These "sockets" can be filled with a gem holster that allows the socketing of a gem. Gems can effect the weapon's enchants (ie: +5% bonus damage to fire if the sword's enchantment is fire based) or grant minor stat bonuses or even unique bonuses such as reduced damage from fire.

 

Guard sockets (0-1): Some guards also come with sockets where gems (or other "artwork") can be placed. These sockets work the same as Blade sockets.

 

Hilt sockets (0-2): Hilts can also have sockets for gems, but they can also have some more unique items that serve a purpose. On the bottom of the hilt, counterweights and other unique "cosmetic" trinkets can be placed in addition to the gem options. These counterweights can vastly alter stats (compared to other cosmetics) with few negatives. This socket could potentially be used to prevent being disarmed or to disarm enemies (if disarming is available by some mod).

 

Blade Rune (2): Blades can be imbedded with runes. These runes can vastly improve enchantments on the weapon, or provide small enchantment bonuses of their own.

 

Weapon Damage: As the weapon durability decreases (or increases past 100%), damages will show up on the blade.

 

Blood stains: Blood stains will appear on the blade until it has been cleaned or worked on in a forge.

 

Even statics and clutter items may follow suit with these options. For modders it shouldn't be too difficult, as the textures do not vary too much other than color. Mesh work may take a while, as well as positioning of the sockets (there'll only be 2-3 socket sizes for different sized gems and trinkets). And for those interested in the new number of possibilities for swords assuming just 25 models/textures for each option: over 1 quintillion (10^18). Granted over 99% of those are "unusable" as practical weapons, stats vary by only ~3%, and cosmetics vary only by a small detail. Still a huge number of weapons to choose from and to loot. Additionally unmentioned before, the stats can vary vastly as there are also 5 qualities of "loot" resulting in 4x more weapons available with weaker stats and possibly even slightly altered textures.

 

 

The craft system will perhaps be the most interactive crafting system made for games, but will require quite a bit of work in animations and interfaces.

 

Interactive Crafting Summary: The player has the choice of 3 different crafting "methods". The easiest would be that of your standard mmorpg where an interface does all the work and stats determine the outcome. The other easy option but time consuming is a system like Real Time Settler's crafting (without the spamy hammer and power swings instead). The final option, far as I know, has never been done before at least for any rpg. (Sword example again) The option for hardcore crafting players is to actually work the forge and then hammer out the impurities. The player will actively insert the blade into the forge when they desire, heat it long as they desire, and as the blade heats impurities will bubble up. The objective is to make the blade fit its "outline" 100%. This essentially is just a 2d mini game. The craftsman has to position the hammer over the impurity, choose an angle and power, and then hammer the blade. The blade will deform from the strike. There's 5 outlines (one for each quality of "loot") and once the blade's particles are all within the outline that is the quality of the blade if finished. Working faster is better for the player, as cooling the blade immediately in water results in less impurities bubbling up which deforms the blade away from the desired shape. While a player can sit there for an hour cooling immediately after every hammer hit, they can finish much faster by being skilled at it. As the player's character skills improve easy materials' outlines will expand making their production faster and easier. All other crafting will work similarly (ie: cooking will require maintaining a constant oven temp for baking while still preparing other food). Each "profession" will also have upgradeable tools and furnishing making the work easier, faster, or reducing resource consumption.

 

 

Based on my own mod work so far of making retextures, making the textures for all the different weapons is quite easy. Currently for my mod for FONV I can make 55 textures in about 40 minutes at decent quality. I still consider myself a novice at GIMP including the available tools, so I wouldn't be surprised if over 100 textures could be made in less than an hour and all be randomized and slightly different. As long as one texture can work for most of the meshes for the blade colors and so forth, the textures needed for this mod shouldn't be too extensive even for an individual. The meshes on the other hand would probably be where most of the time is spent working. I haven't worked with meshes (not even wrapping textures on meshes), but from what I can gather one texture should work for most or all meshes if its done right.

 

I personally probably could do the textures for this with just some minor guidance or image searching. As for the animations, meshes, and all the CS work I don't have too much experience in, and as such the mod would be lacking in such areas or would take a decade for me to make. Until some hands on experience with Skyrim is obtained, its also questionable if such an immerse system is even needed, as it may already be there to some degree. Regardless, if anyone has interest in this or its counterpart they are free to contact me for whatever additional details or suggestions I have.

[Stormcrown]

Seems quite interesting, I'd love to see this.

[El`derina]

this is too early for me to say this really since I havent seen the creation kit... I read your customization post and as much as I would LOVE that mod, its highly impractical..... I am almost certain there is not a method for properly combining all that without designing a seperate mesh for each and every combination(which as you can imagine, is near impossible with that many options, and very wasteful to hard disk space for so much material that is mostly the same)

and then there would have to be a formID for each combination also.... omg my brain hurts just from thinking about it!

I suppose a scripting extender could 'possibly' acomplish this in a more reasonable way...

[GuNSl1nG3R7065]

Textures would definitely work without any script extension as they would work no different than bloodstains and the graffiti found on walls/objects in Fallout.

 

As for the modeling side of things, I was hoping/assuming the game could actually make its own IDs for items as it runs, perhaps during the loading screen when you enter the zone. I don't know enough about modeling to know for sure, but I was thinking you could do it similarly to how enchanting weapons sometimes add their own look to the weapon. Outside of the handle and guards, all the other pieces are mostly small gems and such. I was also considering about the possibility of the engine piecing together the weapon's looks as the coordinates for the face center of the models would be the same (ie, gem sockets would be centered at the same point as any other artwork pieces). That probably does require a script extender unless the game supports it from the start. I think I've seen a few games take the models to a certain degree like adding spikes or something to the armor, but I'm unsure how they coded that (they could have 1 mesh and a texture that makes part of the mesh invisible).

 

Regardless of how its done, it will result in some addition work for your pc or require longer loading times and larger save files. Seeing as Skyrim, with mods anyways, will be rather large on graphics and so forth, I imagine most people will be on desktops hopefully with more power and/or lots of hard disk space. Hard disk space shouldn't be a large concern long as the models don't have to be saved for each item.

[Stormcrown]

Hard disk space wouldn't be a concern, 1TB Hard disk is like $50

[El`derina]

@GuNSl1nG3R7065

Yes, notice I didnt mention textures,... its fairly obvious it would be the lightest part of this mod as far as worktime- see'ing as a trillion meshes could pull from the same exact texture.

The engine is perfectly CAPABLE of creating the formID's on the run, ingame, just like morrowind and oblivion... but the process for combining all that will likely not be included as part of the creation kit.

Like Oblivion, we had enchanting and how it created unique ID's to the save file for player created items. However, the process of setting up a crafting skill, or vastly changing an existing one- was not included... and we were left with 'pseusdo' methods or whatever you wish to call it. These things have to be thought of before hand and built into the engine. Scripting doesn't quite cover it.(although I am sure it could if they tried providing all nessesary functions, but what reason do they have to?)

So unless Bethesda takes the next step forward with providing those tools- you'll be left with needing a scripting extender.. and to be honest, I really don't think they are gonna be throwing that one out there anytime soon.

But who knows, I could easily be speaking out my tush and shame on me for being realistic.

 

But as far as meshes go, unless you plan on using the same model for, i.e., every weapon(so everything looks the same) or re-use just several models based on type of ore, or whatever; you'll need to actually have seperate meshes for each and every weapon combination.

cause thats what it sounds like in your description, swtiching out those hilts and blades and everything as if they are seperate files... it doesn't work that way. A complete weapon mesh is not a series of 'parts' as you put it. The game reads it as one single mesh file. Which in turn makes an ingame method of combining parts like that, impossible.

I 'suppose' a scripting extender would be able to accomplish that, but no way Skyrim will come equiped to handle something like that.

 

@Stormcrown

if you 'read' his post you'd see if he was to go the full 200 million different weapon combinations(by his estimate, I didnt bother calculating the actual amount) you would need more than that terrabyte i believe.... if he ever finished the mod for that matter.

no,.. if he went the more realistic route, which was suggested in my original post, he would use a scripting extender of some sort to create the formID's ingame, and enable the ease of combining said parts without going thru the standard method you usually would for each new item added to the game world. Unfortunetly, the more I think on it, the more I believe the extender would have to have specifically designed capabilities for this purpose alone.

 

EDIT: Okay, take armor for example... this can be done,.. why? take a look at any armor mod that offers it in smaller pieces so you put on each individual piece.. this works, yet still has its limits with the number of body slots. What happens with a weapon? it doesnt work that way, you equip one weapon and thats it (or two swords in the case of skyrim)

you dont equip a blade, a hilt and a handle...

what are you gonna do? equip a blade for the weapon, a hilt of your boots slot, and a hilt for your gauntlets slot?

Although if Skyrim supports unlimited miscallenious body slots, this could work...

Edited October 9, 2011 by El`derina

[GuNSl1nG3R7065]

Honestly I didn't mess with TES's construction set till now, and all I discovered is that I had already explored almost all of the options it gave (which is the rationale behind the Improved Interfaces mod that I presented in these forums). I wouldn't rule Bethesda out of actually implementing the possibility of allowing weapons, items, and objects to have "weapon mods" as they had in New Vegas. I'm sure Obsidian got tired of making all the models for those weapons, so its possible Bethesda may open the doors to allowing actual components that tack onto the already existing weapon. Bethesda said themselves that they experimented with FO3, and FONV in a way was Bethesda asking Obsidian for their ideas. Considering the popularity of weapon mods they could work their way into Skyrim in some way.

 

While you could make the weapons or armor using 100s of slots (yes, you could do the weapons if you go so far as adding slots as those new slots may be synchronized to be wielded with the real weapon slot). While doable, it would be highly impracticable considering the lag you already occasionally obtain from equipping items, and NPCs will probably bug and crash the game if given two weapons. Additionally the weapons in the world wouldn't have an accurate model since they can't combine the looks of all the components, as the components would magically appear in your inventory (as one of the dual wielding mod for Oblivion did for the offhand).

 

As for the programming to tack the mods onto the weapons, it wouldn't be too difficult on system resources. Several 3d rendering software already have options to align objects together (SolidWorks, used for engineering drawings, is completely capable of snapping together items in this manner) needing only 6 variable inputs to lock item in place. Having the weapon/armor model move together with the tacked on mods wouldn't be difficult for computers to handle even with 10+ mods, and it'd be no different if the engine spits out its own temporary model of the whole thing.

 

And in case anyone believes that the request is too specific, they're thinking too narrow. Almost any item can have individual mods. For example an static alchemy set could have swappable components (Morrowind and Oblivion have this already, but not as a single model - rather in the alchemy menu). In addition to the weapon, armor, and statics, modders could also give horses packs or items to carry which dangle on the side of the horse (tying a sword to the saddle, or setting a bag on the horse). And if you didn't know, Obsidian got stuck by their own limitations of not doing this, as they had to produce 8 models per weapon if that weapon had 3 possible addons. If they implemented this system, they would get 7 addons for 8 models with 128 different combinations - already over 10x more results for roughly the same amount of work for the PC (not the same amount of work for the modder though, as merging models is easier than making new ones). Additionally it'd let the player interact with the environment far more, like placing a torch in a torch holder or switching out other light sources. Model assembly isn't all that much work unless you want to open up options exponentially, in which case many modders and players would both enjoy playing with.

[El`derina]

eh... I am not so sure we are talking on the same wavelength?

Do you not understand that if the construction set 'does not directly support it', then you need an extender? it doesnt matter that your art program can do these things if the GAME ENGINE cannot.

Which it won't, or at least won't provide access to the functions in the way you think it will... why would Skyrim have any more need of this than Oblivion or Morrowind? sure when FO4 is out, this may be updated for the engine- but that is different, FO has need of something like that, TES doesn't.

 

sooo,... you basically stating your intention to do something you have no idea how to do, and have no conceivable way of doing it outside an extender?

im not downloadin it if your actually keeping 20 or more seperate meshes for each item, with only slightly altered appearance... thats,.. stupid... no one sane would bother. And without doing this with contruction ingame, via nicely made scripts and an excellent extender- you will have so many FormID's that your mod alone would dwarf the game's vanilla formID's count, easily a 100 times over and more.

and so far, thats exactly what you've made it sound like you intend.

Going that method, it would be better if each item had only a few models, re-used between the many combinations of the same item.(the handle of a weapon for example doesnt even need its own look).. but that still doesnt change that the FormID count would be monsterous...

 

eh,.. whatever- forget I said anything... sounds like you've only just opened the construction set days ago anyhow.

and who knows, Bethesda does keep hinting that an extender might not be needed for Skyrim at all, but they do have a tendency to oversell their games, now dont they? (basically, outside of allowing players to create their own contruction set interfaces, and create their own functions- Bethesda CAN'T outdo the usefullness of an extender)

[droscoe2]

Ooooh, this mod idea sounds enticing!

 

I am planning an armor dye mod, and can report that having 100 color variations for a single piece of armor, NOT including weapons, will be over 6gb in size when finished for all armors. If that helps in anyway...

 

Also, to create only 10 colored variations of armor (from Oblivion) it took me exactly one hour to do the male armor. Multiply that by 10 for 100 colored variations, you 10 hours of work.

X2 for Female armor = 20 hours

X16 (base armor sets in Skyrim) = ~320 hours for 100 color variations for armor alone

 

Again, just some notes of mine that I wanted to share with you, since this mod idea is extremely large in scale and scope. You mentioned like 75 textures, so keep in mind the time it takes to do it all.

 

Take care,

droscoe

Edited November 14, 2011 by droscoe2

[bebliba]

I would LOVE to see this mod...