Total Realism Overhaul

[Mansh00ter]

I got good news and bad news.

 

Bad news is that I won't be able to release the 0.1a just yet. But, the reason is good news, which is that I yesterday managed to create a whole new way of enabling the AI to react to and anticipate player moves. Current combat mods using scripts usually rely on the onHit events to do their stuff like dodging and blocking, but that's always reactionary - meaning the hit HAS to happen for a block animation or a dodge animation to occur. The consequence is that, especially with this mod, you get a confusing result, the hit obviously connects but no or little damage is applied and the NPCs raises their weapon to block AFTER you have already hit them. It is confusing and it's not really a good solution.

 

The new system enables NPCs to detect when their enemy (not just the player) is attacking them, and react BEFORE the attack happens. This makes blocking and dodging have a much more profound impact on gameplay. It is also essential for this mod, because without it the new combat system actually makes the game ludicrously easy. Now NPCs with shields will raise them if you aim your bow at them, those with melee weapons will try to block if they see you swinging wildly at them, or bash you if you're too close etc.

 

That said, there is a lot of tweaking to be done, right now the whole detection and reaction system is too slow, there is no lag, but I want NPC behavior to be closer to that of the player, which isn't happening right now (for example they almost never intercept a fast slash which is also a first strike), and there are minor bugs, like NPCs getting stuck in a blocking position or strafing/dodging not happening when the player is aiming a bow at a NPC who has no shield. I also need to code in a whole bunch of other conditionals to make combat as varied and interesting as possible.

 

All that taken into consideration, there is no sense in releasing 0.1a now, since the new dynamic classification system does away with the majority of possible bugs concerning unbalanced boss fights and in it's current state the combat is just not what I want to show to people. It needs more work.

 

I won't be available for the next two weeks, after I get back I'll continue work on this. Overall I'm quite pleased with the direction this is going, I think in the end it's going to be quite fun to play, but for now have a little more patience. Good stuff musn't be rushed.

Edited July 7, 2012 by Mansh00ter

[Skrdrm]

Awesome news! These 2 weeks will be f*cking loooooong. :\

[TaranTatsuuchi]

Good things to hear, I've been holding off on playing Skyrim waiting for mods such as these to be created before I get into it.

[frostypaw]

I just thought of something. Would it be possible to use the enchanting mechanic to do durability? Like enchant regular weapons with a "durability" enchantment and have enchanted weapons break (disappear or turn into scrap metal/leather) when the magic holding them together runs dry (maybe "disarm" the player before destroying the dropped weapon). This would also add some more pressure to find and use soul gems on your favorite weapons. To do this well you would probably have to limit the weakness of enchantments to avoid people enchanting something with something really weak that takes forever to run out. This would add to the game too though; enchanted weapons should be more powerful than weak anyway.

 

Just a thought...

 

How feasible do you think this idea would be?

[TaranTatsuuchi]

Had a thought... Mansh00ter, iirc, you said that how the difficulty levels affect the vanilla game will make the difficulty selection not really do anything because of your tweaks, with you currently tweaking the AI around, how feasible would the idea of making differing AI routines based on the selected difficulty be?

[Galacticat42]

This is beginning to sound like Deadly Reflexes for Oblivion. 8)

 

On a semi-related note, I was wondering when/if you were going to go back to basic needs for a few tweeks/updates.

[Mansh00ter]

When I get back from my trip. :)

[tomislawus]

Manashota, where are thou....ouuuuuuuuuuuu....

[tomislawus]

...ououououuuuuuuu...

[Mansh00ter]

I'm back.

 

@TaranTatsuuchi - difficulty levels no longer have any impact whatsoever on gameplay. Total Realism Overhaul has only one difficulty setting, "Hardcore". :P

Although implementing some sort of a difficulty option wouldn't be that hard, I feel everyone needs to have a chance of not having an easy way out.

 

@frostypaw - I thought about it, and unfortunately there are just too many issues. For example, how do you stop the player from "repairing" their weapon with a soulgem? Ok, sure, you could say that a soulgem acts like a magical means of repair, but then, how do you set an enchantment on every single weapon in the game without having to go through the quite huge list and modding one by one? Also, there is an issue with custom weapons - those would either be indestructible, or destroyed on pickup.

 

I like the idea of weapon degradation though, and if I find a feasible way to implement it, I will certainly do it.

Edited July 24, 2012 by Mansh00ter