[WIP] Belua Sanguinare Revisited

[phil11]

@Phil11, I stole it all. Thank you for the help!!!

 

Ok, more feedback and I hope you guys are OK with this implementation. The easiest way to deal with sleeping and ensuring that vampires can go through their "metamorphic stage" either for progression or regression via SLEEP is this - I have to effectively disable/override the hunger mechanics during sleep. More appropriately I reset their satiation levels to what they were before they entered into sleep. This has two affects.

 

• Sleeping becomes a bonus to the vampire. You do not lose your satiation when sleeping, therefore it becomes a method to wait around, but you have to find a bed to take advantage of it. I like to tell myself, when they're sleeping they're practically hybernating and don't consume as much energy. That's what it takes to keep me asleep at night. :)
• It keeps vampires from going into the staved state while they are sleeping for the purpose of progression. For regression it has no effect.

 

So to me, I think this is acceptable, and not really a loss. I want to know what others think. Off to wire up the progression messages and then kick the tires so to speak.

 

Edit: Oh, and I see I can do this conditionally too...i.e. Satiation not drained but only if the player INTENDED to sleep more than X hours.

 

-MM

 

Edit: I could use some help on these messages. Here's what I have. I need some lore friendly(ish) linguistic wizardry here:

 

Vampire Regression:

Your starving body is struggling to maintain its current state. You can feel your strength slipping. Do you...

<button> Regather my senses and resist the urge to change.

<button> Give in to the struggle and allow my body to be free of this level of burden.

 

Vampire Progression:

You sense that you're feeding has made you stronger, feeling a surge of power struggling to break through the surface do you...

<button> Resist against my dark nature and remain in my current state

<button> Give in in to my dark nature and become a stronger Vampire

 

Thanks,

 

MM

Yay, I'm finally contributing something that I'll look at later and think, HA! I did some of that! I gotta laugh at you 'stealing' anything though, when I added like 5 words. Anyway, good ideas with the progression/regression. I like the implementation via sleeping. It makes sense that it doesn't affect your thirst very much, and it's balanced from a gameplay perspective. Oh, and here's my wording on the progression/regression messages. Some of it might be a little over the top. If you like any of it, feel free to 'steal it' again! :D

 

Vampire Regression:

Your blood-starved body is struggling to maintain its current state. You can feel your strength slipping as you experience an inexorable pull towards a metamorphic regress. Ultimately, you decide to...

<button> Collect every last vestige of strength and energy in order to resist the urge to change, knowing you will remain very weak and vulnerable until your voracious appetite for blood has been sated.

<button> Give in to the struggle and allow the metamorphosis to occur, knowing that you've freed yourself of this level of burden by devolving from a higher, albeit darker, state of existence.

 

Vampire Progression:

Your greater experience and gradual consumption of sapient blood has finally culminated. You sense that you've reached a metamorphic threshold, beyond which lies untold power. You decide to...

<button> Resist against your dark nature and remain in your current state, (preserving whatever fraction of your humanity may remain)

<button> Give in to temptation and embrace your dark nature in order to become a stronger Vampire.

Edit: or... Give in to temptation and embrace your dark nature in order to ascend to a new level of Vampirism.

 

The parenthetical would not apply to the stages (I forget which ones) that entail not having any humanity left.

 

By the way, I'm sorry to hear you've run into trouble with the scripting stuff. But knowing you so far, I don't have to hope. I have very high confidence that you'll figure it out and fix it all up. Because you're the frickin' man! :thumbsup:

Edited March 13, 2012 by phil11

[elricshan]

hmm maybe the jurnal could be signed from a person that cals himself/herself: No-Life King/Queen. nothing fancy but that will give the imersion of an old vampire that is watching the younger ones. and if it becomse a quest chin later one meybe we could meet this person (but i think that is thinking to long into the future :P )

 

edit 1: the jornal was written pretty good and gave a good feeling

Edited March 13, 2012 by elricshan

[Jakisthe]

Well, regardless of who signed, it's less important than what it does: provide info! And provide it does. :thumbsup:

[phil11]

Well, regardless of who signed, it's less important than what it does: provide info! And provide it does. :thumbsup:

 

Just curious, but did you ever have a look at theru's havok file for the Bite animation? If so, did it have any promise or help in any way?

[deama]

I like the heart idea as well. Not sure if adding animal hearts would be a good idea, might make it too frequent, but I don't know.

 

I was thinking you should add unique hearts that you can harvest from IMBA creatures like another sire vampire, or a really powerful dragon, or one of those dragon priests. I was also wondering if you could make it so that the unique hearts would permanently increase your health, magicka, or stamina (or both); or maybe some other effect like raise your vampire level to some sort of IMBA thing?

 

PS: I have no idea if this is even possible (probably not), but I was wondering if you could make a heart draining system, e.g: lets take the healthy heart for example, if you have it then you could use it almost like a restoration spell and cast it to heal yourself; if you would heal 1000 pts of HP then it would explode (or something like that) from your hand. 1000pts might be too much though...

 

Deama,

 

You mean like being able to eat a little to regain some health a little at a time? Where eventually you consume the whole thing? I can't say it would be impossible, but it's likely not easy for the return value it provides. You should be able to get at least one heart of some type from every battle with humanoids that have a heart so allowing for partially consumable objects (something not built into the game) would take some work. I can think of ways to do it.

 

On the animal things, I tend to agree here. Adding animals into the mix might make this too abundant. Wildlife is everywhere and we don't support feeding from animals so why would we add hearts. Any one else agree/disagree?

 

On the dragon thing. It's entirely possible to do. If I did that, I might lower the actual health, stamina, and magicka rates of hearts to actually provide a purpose for going after them. So, 100 for damaged hearts, 300 for healthy hearts, and full for Dragon Hearts. And yes, it's entirely possible to permanently increment the base values of health, magicka, or stamina. It's not generally recommended because removing the mod doesn't remove the effect, but i don't think people would mind too much. I'd have to give it some thought and consideration. It's not really where I was intending to go with it. Jakisthe might think otherwise so I'll let her weigh in (and other's too).

 

What does IMBA mean?

 

-MM

 

IMBA means like really powerful, its an internet slang word.

 

I didn't mean eating the heart :S I meant it like you drinking the remaining blood from it. I was thinking it should work like a restoration spell.

 

unquoted:

 

I like the idea of increasing the carry weight; complaining that the carry weight was already too much in the vanilla? Pff, I don't care! Vampires are supposed to be ridiculously more powerful then almost any mortal alive!

 

How about once you become a vampire, you get a letter from a courier that tells you that you have been challenged by some sort of vampire; once he is defeated you can eat his heart and gain even more power!

 

PS: I'm not sure if its a good idea for me to continue to suggest ideas because I'm seriously obsessed with power, I don't care much if I can't find anyone as powerful as me (that would be good though), I simply want more power! That is why I'm trying to find a mod that makes the loot more like how diablo made it, you know, randomly generated stats and all.

[MofoMojo]

 

IMBA means like really powerful, its an internet slang word.

 

Haha.... ok, shame on me not bing'n/googl'n that first.

 

I didn't mean eating the heart :S I meant it like you drinking the remaining blood from it. I was thinking it should work like a restoration spell.

 

I like the idea of increasing the carry weight; complaining that the carry weight was already too much in the vanilla? Pff, I don't care! Vampires are supposed to be ridiculously more powerful then almost any mortal alive!

 

This is starting to make more sense. Quiet honestly the carry weight has little bearing on any other gameplay short of carrying more so....perhaps a bit more than 10 each level. Let's get some playtesting under the belt.

 

How about once you become a vampire, you get a letter from a courier that tells you that you have been challenged by some sort of vampire; once he is defeated you can eat his heart and gain even more power!

 

Jakisthe has some notes around our future plans which may or may not involve a type of civil war with other Vampire Tribes, and Werewolves. I'll leave those specifics up to her.

 

PS: I'm not sure if its a good idea for me to continue to suggest ideas because I'm seriously obsessed with power, I don't care much if I can't find anyone as powerful as me (that would be good though), I simply want more power! That is why I'm trying to find a mod that makes the loot more like how diablo made it, you know, randomly generated stats and all.

 

Hahaha... Well, one thing that REALLY stinks about the implementation is that you can't really create dynamic weapons/weapon enchantments.There might be some very CREATIVE ways to achieve some random secondary bonuses to new or modified weapons created in the game. I can think of some approaches, but I bet it will be a while before you find something like that. Let me know if you do, I'm curious from a coder perspective just how they approach it.

 

Just curious, but did you ever have a look at theru's havok file for the Bite animation? If so, did it have any promise or help in any way?

 

I know this was directed to Jakisthe, but I also have his file and haven't had a chance yet. To be honest, I've been personally reluctant because I'd have to replace an animation unless I hook up another mod (which I may very well do) to allow me to add it without replacing. That's going to be a significant chunk of time that I haven't had the opportunity to invest yet.

 

Status Update:

Modifying the original VampireQuest and VampireQuest scripts to achieve this work, and ultimately all the new work I did in re-writing the code completely broke some stuff PERMANENTLY such that it wouldn't work with anything but fresh new games. I went back and stripped ALL of the stuff out and have left the original VampireQuest alone because of that. That took a significant amount of time, but it all appears to be working now. The only problem SHOULD be for testers where STOPPING and RESTARTING the quest will break the OnGameTimeUpdate() and your JOURNAL until you feed again. People shouldn't be STOPPING and STARTING quests willy nilly though. It was a valuable teaching lesson, and quite honestly I'm surprised it took this long to utterly break considering the extensive amount of work I put into the original Bethesda scripts.

 

At this point I think I'm back on track, although I haven't been able to do extensive testing to ensure of what I broke and what I didn't. lol. But at least I'm feeling better than I was last night about it.

 

There's one immersion breaking thing about the journal. And I'll leave it up to you guys to steer me...

 

You can completely disable regression for each of the vampire levels. I even support regressing from a Vampire Fledgling back to a human in case someone should choose to do that (it's not enabled by default). To disable it you specify a -1 on the "BeluaVampireDaysToStarveFromProgenitorToMaster" setting, for instance. In the journal, it will show that if you starve for -1 days you may regress. Making that text actually dynamic is difficult. It's not impossible, but doing the wiring up of the dynamic text for just the Vampire Level based on your level took about 4-5 hours. I would expect it would literally take me 3-4 times as long to handle whether or not to show you regression info if you can't regress and to show it when you can. So for now...that's out of the question. So here are two thoughts:

 

Remove the regression information altogether

Leave the regression information where it is (or back one page if it still shows up on the first page)

Add the regression infformation to a seperate section in the BACK of the journal, perhaps outline for each vampire rank.

 

I figure most of the information people are interested about will be on the first page, so putting the immersion breaking -1 on the second page will likely be missed most of the time.

 

Oh and finally

 

Vampire Regression:

Your blood-starved body is struggling to maintain its current state. You can feel your strength slipping as you experience an inexorable pull towards a metamorphic regress. Ultimately, you decide to...

<button> Collect every last vestige of strength and energy in order to resist the urge to change, knowing you will remain very weak and vulnerable until your voracious appetite for blood has been sated.

<button> Give in to the struggle and allow the metamorphosis to occur, knowing that you've freed yourself of this level of burden by devolving from a higher, albeit darker, state of existence.

 

Vampire Progression:

Your greater experience and gradual consumption of sapient blood has finally culminated. You sense that you've reached a metamorphic threshold, beyond which lies untold power. You decide to...

<button> Resist against your dark nature and remain in your current state, (preserving whatever fraction of your humanity may remain)

<button> Give in to temptation and embrace your dark nature in order to become a stronger Vampire.

Edit: or... Give in to temptation and embrace your dark nature in order to ascend to a new level of Vampirism.

 

Love it. Put it in there, and then realized that at 800x600 that you can't read all the choice text (I hope that multiple choices are done in two columns, rather than across a single row or in game config menu is going to be BAD). At home I run 1600x900 and it looked fine...

 

-MM

Edited March 13, 2012 by MofoMojo

[deama]

 

Hahaha... Well, one thing that REALLY stinks about the implementation is that you can't really create dynamic weapons/weapon enchantments.There might be some very CREATIVE ways to achieve some random secondary bonuses to new or modified weapons created in the game. I can think of some approaches, but I bet it will be a while before you find something like that. Let me know if you do, I'm curious from a coder perspective just how they approach it.

 

 

actually, there is this guy from Bethesda that is working on something like a random loot generator that simply generates the properties of an item; I think his internet name is DragoonWraith.

I made a thread about this, some guy said he is making the thing I was talking about; I just hope I don't have to wait long; and I hope he is right!

 

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/576509-randomly-generated-loot/

 

here's that thread

[MofoMojo]

 

Hahaha... Well, one thing that REALLY stinks about the implementation is that you can't really create dynamic weapons/weapon enchantments.There might be some very CREATIVE ways to achieve some random secondary bonuses to new or modified weapons created in the game. I can think of some approaches, but I bet it will be a while before you find something like that. Let me know if you do, I'm curious from a coder perspective just how they approach it.

 

 

actually, there is this guy from Bethesda that is working on something like a random loot generator that simply generates the properties of an item; I think his internet name is DragoonWraith.

I made a thread about this, some guy said he is making the thing I was talking about; I just hope I don't have to wait long; and I hope he is right!

 

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/576509-randomly-generated-loot/

 

here's that thread

 

Yup... no ingame (re: CK only) way to do it. I can certainly see a way you could do this with SKSE as at that point you could hook into the weapon itself. Cool though, I'll have to set a watch on the thread.

 

-MM

[deama]

 

Hahaha... Well, one thing that REALLY stinks about the implementation is that you can't really create dynamic weapons/weapon enchantments.There might be some very CREATIVE ways to achieve some random secondary bonuses to new or modified weapons created in the game. I can think of some approaches, but I bet it will be a while before you find something like that. Let me know if you do, I'm curious from a coder perspective just how they approach it.

 

 

actually, there is this guy from Bethesda that is working on something like a random loot generator that simply generates the properties of an item; I think his internet name is DragoonWraith.

I made a thread about this, some guy said he is making the thing I was talking about; I just hope I don't have to wait long; and I hope he is right!

 

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/576509-randomly-generated-loot/

 

here's that thread

 

Yup... no ingame (re: CK only) way to do it. I can certainly see a way you could do this with SKSE as at that point you could hook into the weapon itself. Cool though, I'll have to set a watch on the thread.

 

-MM

 

yeah, I'm trying to contact that guy and find out how long I'm supposed to wait lol.

 

PS: can you make a water walking spell or thing that activates when your in vampire speed; it supposed to, again, represent how fast the vampire really is.

[phil11]

Just curious, but did you ever have a look at theru's havok file for the Bite animation? If so, did it have any promise or help in any way?

 

I know this was directed to Jakisthe, but I also have his file and haven't had a chance yet. To be honest, I've been personally reluctant because I'd have to replace an animation unless I hook up another mod (which I may very well do) to allow me to add it without replacing. That's going to be a significant chunk of time that I haven't had the opportunity to invest yet.

 

Ohh. I didn't know if there was some way to preview the havok file outside of the game. And I guess it's not quick and easy to write a script to call that particular animation whenever you choose 'Bite'. Haha, I really have no clue about this stuff; I'm way out of my depth.

 

At this point I think I'm back on track, although I haven't been able to do extensive testing to ensure of what I broke and what I didn't. lol. But at least I'm feeling better than I was last night about it.

Glad to hear it!

 

There's one immersion breaking thing about the journal. And I'll leave it up to you guys to steer me...

 

You can completely disable regression for each of the vampire levels. I even support regressing from a Vampire Fledgling back to a human in case someone should choose to do that (it's not enabled by default). To disable it you specify a -1 on the "BeluaVampireDaysToStarveFromProgenitorToMaster" setting, for instance. In the journal, it will show that if you starve for -1 days you may regress. Making that text actually dynamic is difficult. It's not impossible, but doing the wiring up of the dynamic text for just the Vampire Level based on your level took about 4-5 hours. I would expect it would literally take me 3-4 times as long to handle whether or not to show you regression info if you can't regress and to show it when you can. So for now...that's out of the question. So here are two thoughts:

 

Remove the regression information altogether

Leave the regression information where it is (or back one page if it still shows up on the first page)

Add the regression infformation to a seperate section in the BACK of the journal, perhaps outline for each vampire rank.

 

I figure most of the information people are interested about will be on the first page, so putting the immersion breaking -1 on the second page will likely be missed most of the time.

Leaving it in is fine by me. At this point, I'm totally onboard with how you're choosing to do regression since there's player choice involved. So I'll be using the default version anyway. However, you could always create another .esp that has the journal with that part removed. And your instructions could simply direct the user to choose whichever .esp they want depending on whether they want to allow regression.

Vampire Regression:

Your blood-starved body is struggling to maintain its current state. You can feel your strength slipping as you experience an inexorable pull towards a metamorphic regress. Ultimately, you decide to...

<button> Collect every last vestige of strength and energy in order to resist the urge to change, knowing you will remain very weak and vulnerable until your voracious appetite for blood has been sated.

<button> Give in to the struggle and allow the metamorphosis to occur, knowing that you've freed yourself of this level of burden by devolving from a higher, albeit darker, state of existence.

 

Vampire Progression:

Your greater experience and gradual consumption of sapient blood has finally culminated. You sense that you've reached a metamorphic threshold, beyond which lies untold power. You decide to...

<button> Resist against your dark nature and remain in your current state, (preserving whatever fraction of your humanity may remain)

<button> Give in to temptation and embrace your dark nature in order to become a stronger Vampire.

Edit: or... Give in to temptation and embrace your dark nature in order to ascend to a new level of Vampirism.

Love it. Put it in there, and then realized that at 800x600 that you can't read all the choice text (I hope that multiple choices are done in two columns, rather than across a single row or in game config menu is going to be BAD). At home I run 1600x900 and it looked fine...

 

-MM

Cool! Though I feel bad for anyone playing Skyrim in 800x600 resolution, especially since it's such a good looking game. I play at 1080p, but even at 800x600 there must be a way to shrink the font or something.

Edited March 13, 2012 by phil11