LE [Req] Psuedo-randomized dungeons

[Midicow]

To anyone who's ever played Daggerfall. Do you remember those non-storyline and non 1 level crypt dungeons, how each one was a new experience? How you'd find a map to one in a chest, or how you'd talk to the king of daggerfall, and he'd send you on your merry way to defeat a rebellious atronarch in a deep temple for the King's Cousin?

 

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Dungeons

 

Remember when you had to use the right hand rule just to not get ridiculously lost traversing the multi-branched and multi leveled, trap and pit filled dungeons awash with skeletal remains and devious plots?

 

Sure, they weren't handcrafted. Sure you'd make one wrong turn and then contract a deadly disease, and then spend five ingame days struggling against your mortality as you try to figure your way out.

 

But they were new. They didn't make much sense story-wise, but that didn't matter. You were an intrepid adventurer, out to find loot and slay things that got angry at you stealing their loot. You never knew what sort of devious twist the game would throw at you next.

 

I really miss those dungeons, and while I'd be absolutely ecstatic if someone managed to cobble together a similar quest-dungeon-random system for Skyrim that made deep-earth spelunking of random nonlinear dungeons possible..

I just don't see that happening.

 

There was a random dungeon generator for morrowind, that took game assets and certain predetermined blocks and stuck them together.. but in order to use it you had to have some knowledge of how to map.. and you had to manually place the entrance to said dungeon in the world, and you had to do all sorts of crazy junk for it.

 

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1661

 

 

So here's my thought; What if you distributed a package? You'd have the plugin that makes npcs have a chance to give you quests for random dungeons as well as vanillia places. That'd be part one. Part two is something you run when you install; A dungeon generator, but not just any. One that was set up to generate dungeons based on settings, then randomly pick from a list of valid cell locations for the entrance, and do this for 40+ dungeons. Then it'd output an esp or esm or whatever is needed to be used for the first part, and that's the second part of the mod.. the generated dungeons that the quests point to.

 

True, you'd have to reinstall the second part for the dungeons to be changed, as they'd be static until you regenerated them by hand, but I think it might work better as a compromise.

 

I'd just like something beyond skyrim's mostly linear dungeons. They're certainly an improvement over Oblivion's "Limestone caverns. Limestone caverns, errywhere.", but its just not something you can get lost in.

 

 

So feasibility? Discussion? Hate?

 

If anyone manages the monumental task of improving ai, Skyrim has the potential to be much more than it is now too.

 

[selflink] http://www.thenexusforums.com/index.php?/topic/463657-req-improving-skyrims-dumb-ai/ [/sl]

Edited November 18, 2011 by Midicow

[Midicow]

Bump.

I must type too much and scare people away more.

[Midicow]

Super necro bump because not a single reply. :<