Primary Needs Mod for Skyrim

[Lazuri]

Greetings, community!

 

For years I've been using your mods, but I've never really created anything myself. I'm trying to change that. I have basic knowledge of the CK, and very basic knowledge of javascripting. However, I fear I'll need a bit more than this for making my vision a reality. and that's why I'm turning to you guys and gals for advise and ideas on how to handle this.

 

My vision is the following:

-A mod that makes the player dependant on satisfying hunger, thirst and sleep without making it feel like a hassle.

-Adding a system that makes cold weather dangerous and warm clothing/fire a must.

-Add bars that tracks these 4 stats.

-Diseases/penalties for eating raw/uncooked meat.

 

My idea for tackling hunger/thirst/and sleep is quite simple. Unlike similar mods seen in earlier games/Fallout, going without food/water/sleep won't kill you. Instead I'm thinking of reducing health/stamina/magicka regeneration rate by percentages according to how satisfied the need connected to it is. For instance: 75% fulfilled hunger = 75% health regen, 50% fulfilled thirst = 50% magicka regen, 25% fulfilled sleep = 25% stamina regen, etc.

 

The cold tracking system would as far as I see it require me to alter all armors/torches/firesources in the game with a "heat" stat where X points heat = % of protection against the environment. Frost resistance would also contribute to this I suppose, and being indoors would have course make the "cold bar" go down. This seems to be the most complicated task if doable at all without conflicting with every other mod out there.

 

As for the UI bars I have no idea of how to handle this, but I'm looking at mods like Fallout Wanderers Edition and Oblivion Basic Primary Needs, as well as Fallout: New Vegas for guidance.

 

The diseases seem like the easiest thing to handle as it just requires me to alter every raw meat manually, but I'd very much like a more "elegant" solution.

 

I'm very open for receiving both suggestions for improvement and assistance, as the mod is simply on the drawing table at the moment. And if someone is working on something similar, perhaps we can share ideas and/or cooperate?

 

Cheers!

Edited February 20, 2012 by Lazuri

[elvinkun]

Well, for sure, but I'd personally like it FNV style. It was enjoyable enough and sure added a lot to the RP feeling, without being too intrusive and annoying - Some measure of realism is adding to the game, but too much is making it annoying. Most people play games to escape from the boredom and troubles of reality, not to speand time in a world where they won't be able to exist if they forget to cut their character's fingernails.

 

One of the problems here would be that the game wasn't made for this, so you also need to add a lot of water troughout the world and think about what could do what.

Also, it's a bit "eh" but I'd say Sleep > Magicka, Thirst > Stamina would prolly be more logical.

On a sidenote, it would be cool to add X% chance to get certain diseases from eating raw meat, rather than always getting it.

 

For the warm-ness, I wouldn't integrate armors into that. Let's face it, the equipment screen is pretty annoying as it is, swiching armors (and mind you, not parts, you need to swich whole sets) everytime you change location would get pretty tiresome in a while, not to mention it wouldn't work with armor mods and would be deadly from the fashion viewpoint. Instead you could give in the characters cold resistance. Also "warming" potions and alcohol. Not sure about the warmness of location, because that would probably mean you'd need to place markers as to what's cold and what's warm by hand all over Skyrim. Thousands of markers. That's a lot. But I don't know how that part works to be honest. Well, frankly, unless it's just an imagination caused by my lack of skil, this all coul be so extremely hard to make, that i'm not sure the warmness is worth it.l

Edited February 20, 2012 by elvinkun

[AurelTristen]

I've seen several ideas along these lines, and there is at least one in every open-world type game. It would be cool, and if it was balanced right, I'd want to have it, but:

 

Despite our greatest hopes, the CK is actually quite limited. To get new GUI elements, you'd probably need to use the same script-injecting tech that makes SkyUI work. I won't go so far as to say this can't be done (I was convinced flying on dragons would be super tough, but people do some amazing things), but it will require some serious work. You've got to find a way to identify when the player is in a cold location, or if they are near a heat source. This means applying some new form of detection to all cold places in the world, and then putting some sort of detection on every heat source in the world.

 

Giving armor a warmth rating would probably require a beast of a script watching the player's equipment and checking it against a pre-defined list ( that you would create ) of armors and what their heat rating is.

 

In general, hunger and thirst might be handled the same way a debuff is. You'd infect the player with hunger that could only be 'cured' with food. Such and so forth. I'm thinking something close to what you want could be done via some serious custom magic and a good script.

 

Search around, or ask around and I'm sure some veteran modder from previous games will swoop down and crush your hopes and dreams, or tell you how it could be done :P

[Pittcrew]

Also, you should make it so the player is required to bath in a water source or else they get maybe at first a decrease to their speech skill and eventually the armor skill.

[Lazuri]

Thank you for your responses so far. ^^

 

Aurel:

Regarding cold/warmth detection I was thinking this could be done with two boolean variables, one that checks for weather condition and one for water. Since basically all water in Skyrim is icy cold it would be easier to make an exception for those areas that aren't cold than the opposite. :3

 

elvin:

As for diseases from eating raw meat I'd definitely add a % chance of disease rather than a 100% chance, yes. Though concerning the FNV sleep/hunger system I found it a bit "clunky", especially having to go through the Pipboy and scroll through your inventory. What I did enjoy was the Basic Primary Needs mod for Oblivion that allowed you to hotkey any cup/utensil in the game and the character would eat/drink a random food item from their inventory when pressed. It even included an animation, so that's definitely something I'd like to add.

 

Pitt:

I'm pretty sure a bathing mod will show up sooner or later so I don't think I'd try adding that as well, but it's a good idea and something I'd definitely like to have in my own game. :3