Epyrion Posted June 15, 2016 Share Posted June 15, 2016 (edited) So I have looked at the Skyrim martial arts mods and I have seen that they have failed to encompass the most kung fu-ish thing in all of Skyrim lore: The Greybeards. The Greybeards are a solitary group of old sages that have secluded themselves in a remote temple to study a powerful mystical art that gets them in tune with nature, requires decades of study, practice and contemplation to develop. Furthermore the art cannot be taught through books alone or simply through study and reason and requires wisdom from its students on the path to true mastery. Not only that, this art has been used numerous times in the past on wars and has a strong association to bloodshed and strife and, according to the legends, it was once used to free humanity of its greatest threat. It took the repentance of a powerful practitioner of that art (Jurgen Windcaller) to, heeding what he thought was the will of the gods, turn a tool of war into a path to illumination and to found an order dedicated to following that path. That would be the Way of the Voice and the Greybeards. There are also rare individuals which are born with a supernatural gift to master such art, a talent much beyond even the wildest geniuses of the art. The birth of such individuals are often the stuff of prophecies and they are summoned by the Greybeards to be taught and guided into the good Path, and often end up changing the course of history itself. The signs (tropes) are undeniable: the Thuum is a powerful Kung Fu! So why not have a mod that makes the Thuum look like kung fu, instead of a very irritated insult in russian? Lore-wise, I thought that the story of the Thuum should be changed a bit. Sure, it can be described as a "shout" in the legends, because it began as a way to imitate the power of the Dragons, who SHOUT their words and make things happen. People wouldn't know any better and that is kind of a metaphor. But the Greybeards would know that regular humans can't "shout" properly, that such an ability is just for Dragons. What Kyne taught them wasn't the "voice" of the dragons, because that would change the very nature of human beings. Instead, she taught them how to use their whole BODIES to vibrate and resonate with a Thuum. Humans still needed to learn the Words, learn the precise correct pronounciation, the vibrations and sounds that made them. Humans still need to attune themselves with the Words and understand the various layers of concepts and meanings encompassed by them and to acquaint themselves with the primal and powerful nature of the dragon language. But with intention, understanding, breathing and moving acting as a unified and harmonious whole, she taught, humans could also project a Thuum like Dragons did. The art begins with correct speaking, pronounciation and yelling. Mantras and continuous sounds and special breathing exercises help the student feel the notes and sounds of the Words reverberating in the lungs. The forms and katas help them feel the Words in their very bones and muscles and hairs. And then their very souls. The shout begins with the vibration of the Words, but the complete "human shout" should not stop at the breathing and yelling and moving. The full fledged Shout integrates all to reverberate and resonate through the chackras and meridians and all things taoist and then explode in a Thuum worthy of a set of dragon lungs. Kyne taught the foundations of what would eventually become a martial art. And if you are now picturing Jurgen Windcaller in the Avatar State then you just hit the right idea. So here is the action plan to have a mod about the ultimate martial art in Tamriel, Thuum Fu: Kung Fu of the Dragonborn. CORE AESTHETICS AND SYSTEM - THE BASIC OF THUUM FU (without these features, the overall feeling and richness of experience of the mod might be somewhat diminished) <> Refurbish all animations where the player has both hands empty. Change the stance, running and walking animations to more kung-fu-ish ones. Have different animations for standing left attacks, standing right attacks, left to right power attacks, advancing attacks, retreating attacks, right to left power attacks. All combinations of mouse movement, character movement and holding or pressing of mouse buttons that is possible to detect should get its own animation. Have the attack be as seamless as possible with the basic standing/moving stances such that it gives the sense of fluidity when the moves are activated. <> Each shout should have a separate cooldown. It is important to rely on the variety of shouts available in order to effectively fight using Tuum Fu. If you can only use one shout every so often, the player might decide to rely on axes instead and this would ruin the experience of becoming an accomplished kung fu master. As the player acquires more shouts, Thuum Fu should become an increasingly powerful and reliable option of combat. Optimally, it should become the best form of combat the player will have at his or her disposal. <> Each shout should have its very own animation, which plays like a kung fu form. The animation should match the overall theme of the shout so, shouts that blast things apart could sport vigorous palms, hadouken motions or double flying kicks while more passive shouts like animal allegieance or ethereal form should have stomps to the floor or gently spreading the arms while on horseman stance. Think Avatar - The Last Airbender (The NICKELODEON CARTOON NOT THE MOVIE, google it if need be) where each bending move is inspired by a martial art but the move itself need not hit the target, rather it serves just to guide the element mass it is currently bending, be it a boulder, a fireball, a gust of wind or a water whip. ADDITIONALS (Letting these out should not hurt the core feeling of the mod but they would greatly enhance either the aesthetics, immersion or the regular experience of playing a kung fu practitioner.) <> Have the player need both hands empty in order to use a shout. <> Make the use of heavy armor be a hindrance to the correct "resonating" of the shout through the form, thus increasing shout cooldown. <> Create a kind of levelling system where the shout cooldown time diminishes as the player progresses. Either that or integrate the mod with another mod that does it. <> Have the player be able to use lesser powers or something similar to disarm or ragdoll the opponent if he or she is staggered to allow the Dragonborn to manage a combat in the in-between shout cooldown. Have animations play while that happens, like leg sweeps or ragdolling or palm to the face for disarming. Integrate unnarmed fighting with the Blocking skill, since it is self-defense, and give it perks that will grant access to such lesser powers. <> Have each level of a shout play a different version of the basic animation, with higher levels displaying more "intense" versions of the animation. <> Have the greybeard set be remodelled to look something more Shaolin. Keep the "ragged" look but make them less like a dress or a robe and more like a viking warrior-monk tunic. I like the cowl though, keep the cowl. Have the set come in "cold" and "warm" versions for those who like to roleplay and get annoyed by having to wear furs in Riften, or for compatibility with mods for which exposure levels really matters, like Frostfall. Give these items the enchantment to decrease shout cooldown and give the player a way to get them whenever he or she goes past a certain point in the main storyline. Or better yet, have several different sets of robes indicating the progress of the player through the main line, from disciple to master-level Thuum Fu practitioner and give each set increasingly greater bonuses to shout cooldown up to a maximum. As the player begins to rely more and more on his or her Thuum Fu, they should opt to have any shout cooldown they can get their hands on, this also kinda symbolizes that the character is kind of adhering to the Greybeards "religion" or worldview and acquiring their knowledge. <> Create warpaints or tattoos sets (to be used by mods that can apply tattos, like Slavetats) of Dragon language glyphs, words, sentences or prayers for the player to use in their character for flavor. Have the greybeards sport such tattoos in their head, face, body to make the player feel like those tattoos and paints are something the Greybeards do and show devotion to the Way. <> Give the outfits an HDT feel to them, with rags blowing in the wind or flailing around aimlessly as the Dragonborn dodges and kicks, punches and do the Thuum Fu. <> Add unarmed blocking, also equipped with suitably kung-fu-ish animations. <> Integrate the unarmed fighting and dodging with a mod that already takes care of these things and handles them to keep the combat exciting. <> Have a WHOLE LOTE MORE SHOUTS than there are available in vanilla. The more shouts there are, the more versatile and pretty the Thuum Fu will be. <> Add lore to the game. Add NPCs and books that can communicate information about this new layer of the Thuum. Stories of great heroes or lost knowledge. Have the old legends about Dragons and Shouts be retold in a way that makes reveals to the player that the Thuum really is a martial art. Give the player the impression that these versions of the legends are "inside knowledge" and that a commoner would never grasp them. This makes the player feel like the Dragonborn status grants access to hidden knowledge. <> Change the animations for any NPC that uses the Thuum either for fighting (Looking at you Miraak) or in any cutscene (the Greybeards). Have those animations be the appropriate Thuum Fu animations. <> Have COUNTERSHOUTS! Shouts that can cancel the effects of other shouts. Ice blocks fire, unmoving shield blocks unrelenting force, fury blocks animal allegiance. That sort of things. That would make the battle against Miraak (and Dragons!) pretty intense. Make it so that Dragons, or another Thuum-user, can be fought by cleverly applying the proper Thuums. <> Add practitioners of the Thuum wandering around in interesting places, former Greybeards or active disciples that are not secluded in High Hrothgar for some reason, with the masters. They can teach the Dragonborn some exclusive Shouts that they themselves have discovered through their lives, tell tales of their own or legends of old... Or maybe they want to test the Dragonborn and prove that they are better by killing him or her and then using their superior art to slay Alduin! <> Add "disciples" to High Hrothgar, younger people grappling with the difficulties of the Way at its earliest stages, most of which will give up within a year or two and return to their common lives, a bit more humble but still unaware of the Way. Give them backstories and highlight their struggles. Have their dialogue change based on how far in the main questline the Player has progressed. With some showing respect for the Dragonborn as he or she embarks in such a perilous journey to slay Alduin and save Nirn... while others envy the seemingly effortless way in which the Dragonborn knowledge and power grows while they themselves are stuck for years. <> Have those disciples show up in High Hrothgar one at a time as the Dragonborn progresses through the main questline and his or her feats get recognition. New Tongues become aware of their gifts and long for training and development under the guidance of the Greybeards after witnessing the Dragonborne using the Voice to bend the forces and creatures of Nirn to his or her will. I have purposefully gone crazy with some of the requests, mainly because given how old the game is and how little martial arts mods have been created, I doubt that the fans of such mods would be numerous enough to have in their midst crouching tigers or hidden dragons of such power that should they gather their various modding abilities, they would really be able to spawn such a mod, either in its full glory or at least the best version of it that happens to be possible. Which is another thing, I have no idea if any of that is possible. I know that there is a mod that makes the shouts cooldown separately so I thought "what the heck, maybe more things about shouts is separable, like... their animations" and that is basically the reasoning I followed =P. Thus, I leave this request here as a solemn reminder of how awesome the Thuum Fu would be if all the requirements were met and it was done. Truly, those would be interesting times. Let's all take a moment to marvel at the power... And with this, I bid you all farewell. Sky guide you. Edited June 18, 2016 by Epyrion Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fantafaust Posted June 15, 2016 Share Posted June 15, 2016 I can tell you right now, this mod would require a top notch modder, or maybe a small team of specialists. You would need someone that can edit and make new animation, someone that can script behavior, someone that can script complicated code concisely, someone that can model and/or texture, and finally someone that can actually write in a lore-friendly way and can proofread. The concept is very cool, I grant you, but it is highly complex and demanding of great skill and time. So it seems unlikely to happen. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Epyrion Posted June 16, 2016 Author Share Posted June 16, 2016 (edited) First of all, let me congratulate you! You were the first to reply :D! Furthermore! YES! I know. It would require a very tight team of incredible specialists. Truly, crouching tigers and hidden dragons. However... Do consider the CORE system... Ponder my following words and see if you agree with me:It would be great if ALL of the things I put there could be done. But it seems to me that the root of the project hinges, essentially, on one thing: Whether it is possible to assign one animation to each shout separately. If that is possible, then the path is highlighted. If it isn't, then we are just catching mophs in Buddah's palm. Anyways, there is a fixed topic in this forum that says the "Request Mod" forum is less about requests and more about "pitching ideas". I am a beginner modder myself and I wouldn't be afraid to tackle this, provided I had an animator. And heck, maybe I will at some point. I'm just too busy right now writting a PhD thesis and decided not to hold the idea back. To throw it here and let it prosper if Fate would let it \o/. Still, it's nice to see that someone thinks it's cool. Thanks a lot, friend o/. Sky guide you. Edited June 16, 2016 by Epyrion Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fenryr3001 Posted June 16, 2016 Share Posted June 16, 2016 One problem with that is that everyone will use the new animations for hand to hand.Old women,thugs et cetera. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Epyrion Posted June 16, 2016 Author Share Posted June 16, 2016 (edited) On 6/16/2016 at 11:54 AM, Fenryr3001 said: One problem with that is that everyone will use the new animations for hand to hand.Old women,thugs et cetera. I thought about that too. But then, there is this: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/14871/? Which allows for the player to have his or her very own animation path. But, admittedly, without a clever workaround, we would need every goddamned Tongue in the game to have their animation path with the right hand-to-hand animation... But NPC revamping is in ADDITIONALS, the core system is having the Player use the unarmed animations, even if other characters do too.And for those who want to rectify that wrong in order to increase immersion, the above mod solves for it. ----------------------------------- On a somewhat related topic, there is this: http://www.loverslab.com/topic/3755-animated-katana-and-one-extra-pose/ This is the discussion of a mod called Yamato Animated or something like that. Basically it takes a sword called Yamato, modelled by a different modder if I recall correctly, and add animations and a pose to it. In the first page of that topic there is an exchange of posts which I found interesting. Post by Rosewind goes:"Dose the pose animation replace something or it is a new animation accessed during game-play?" And then invalidfate, the creator of the Yamato animated mod says: "This pose replaces an animation in a certain quest(TG05 in esp?),and I guess it won't affect the game play in the most of time. Without a matched version of havok behavior SDK, I'm afraid adding new animation is a very tough task, unless someone makes a behavior (not animation) hkx reader/writer." Which seems like what Thuum Fu would need. However, we are not really "making" a new animation, necessarily... Sure, we are adding new RESOURCES, but it's not like we would be creating a whole new trigger for an animation or a whole situation to animate. We would just want the replacing of old animations to be conditional to the shout at hand. So while adding new animations without replacement is a hard thing, maybe this is just a matter of FNIS and some clever script-fu to actually replace the animation of shouting conditionally. I suspect that maybe that is the case for mods like sexlab, which seem to add a lot of animations, but if adding animations is such a hard open problem in Skyrim modding community, then there must be a trick there, right? What are your thoughts in this matter? Sky guide you. Edited June 16, 2016 by Epyrion Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shiroryoo Posted June 16, 2016 Share Posted June 16, 2016 Why no make it into a equipable weapon only given to the player and give that its own animation path that is scalled to using fists? Not sure if it can be done just a idea instead of using a thuum or two Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Epyrion Posted June 16, 2016 Author Share Posted June 16, 2016 (edited) On 6/16/2016 at 1:54 PM, Shiroryoo said: Why no make it into a equipable weapon only given to the player and give that its own animation path that is scalled to using fists? Not sure if it can be done just a idea instead of using a thuum or two I thought about that too, but you see... While replacing the "shout animation" conditionally for each separate shout might be still considered animation REPLACEMENT, hopefully solvable by some papyrus magic, creating a new category of weapon which has its very own animation path certainly counts as ADDING a new animation, and I was told that this is a very hard thing to do, if not impossible. And that would have to be a new weapon category because otherwise it would apply the animations for the normal weapon types of 1H, 2H, daggers and stuff, that every NPC would use. Still, it's an idea. Maybe I'm analyzing things the wrong way and it might be that creating a new weapon with a different animation might actually be the way to do it. I'm just throwing ideas I saw somewhere else, none of these reasoning has any solid experienced modding grounds, I'm basically a modder newbie for all intents and purposes. Either way, I appreciate the feedback very much o/ Sky guide you. Edited June 16, 2016 by Epyrion Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AfroGamerNinja Posted June 16, 2016 Share Posted June 16, 2016 Quote The signs (tropes) are undeniable: the Thuum is a powerful Kung Fu! So why not have a mod that makes the Thuum look like kung fu, instead of a very irritated insult in russian?Because nowhere in lore it is stated that the Greybeards are capable in hand-to-hand combat. If anything, punching a dragon may very well result into a broken hand and the dragon hunter's blood probably getting out of it. Why else would there be no Unarmed skill tree in this game? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Epyrion Posted June 16, 2016 Author Share Posted June 16, 2016 (edited) On 6/16/2016 at 6:37 PM, AfroGamerNinja said: Quote The signs (tropes) are undeniable: the Thuum is a powerful Kung Fu! So why not have a mod that makes the Thuum look like kung fu, instead of a very irritated insult in russian?Because nowhere in lore it is stated that the Greybeards are capable in hand-to-hand combat. If anything, punching a dragon may very well result into a broken hand and the dragon hunter's blood probably getting out of it. Why else would there be no Unarmed skill tree in this game? I think you missed the point. The idea is to change the Thuum backstory and turn it from a yell to a martial arts somewhat like the bending disciplines of the Avatar cartoon. The Thuum would require the whole body to reverberate in order to project a shout and this would be done by wushu movements as well as breathing techniques, instead of simply a yell. But the effects of the shouts would still remain the same. The Tongues wouldn't try to punch a dragon, they would use fireballs, become ethereal or push them with unrelenting force like they did previosly, it's just that the aesthetic appearance of the Thuum would change to look like a martial arts... ...and the background story would be adapted to follow suit. I'm not saying to leave the lore alone, I am proposing to change it mainly because I think it would look cool and so much of the lore already have tropes that suit that. The seclusion of the Greybeards as a sect that practice the Thuum, its power, the discipline required to master it, the wisdom of its most accomplished practitioners, its belicose history and the foundation of the Way of the Voice by a legendary genious of the art all fit in wuxia tropes which I personally find appealing and decided to pitch the idea and see who else likes it. A few paragraphs below that line you quoted I explain things in more detail. Edited June 16, 2016 by Epyrion Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Epyrion Posted June 18, 2016 Author Share Posted June 18, 2016 On 6/16/2016 at 1:54 PM, Shiroryoo said: Why no make it into a equipable weapon only given to the player and give that its own animation path that is scalled to using fists? Not sure if it can be done just a idea instead of using a thuum or two Hey Shiroryoo, I looked harder on weapon mods and saw this one: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/62609/? -- Spears by Soolie. It adds a new spear weapon which apparently have its own animations, without messing any other weapon animation, so there is that. Maybe your idea is the way to do, at least for the unnarmed-stance bit of the mod. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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