Modified Smithing - testing the water thread

[Greenslade]

Hey guys

 

So, I posted this idea about a new smithing system the other day and didn't get many bites. That might have been because it was in the wrong forum, or because it was a mental nutso idea that nobody cares about and wouldn't work anyway.

 

I'm still at the stage of working out what individual things need to change, sitting watching tutorials to try to figure out what's doable and what isn't. There are a couple of make or break issues that I haven't worked out yet, so I thought I'd ask the collective brains here if I should just accept this ain't gonna happen, or if it's potentially achievable.

 

First thing - is it possible to adjust textures and tints for different parts of a weapon or piece of armor, from the same base model, in game? Either using multiple .obj files (kind of like is done with blood, scabbards etc), or ArmorAddons, or something of that ilk?

 

What I envision happening is this:

• Assume a basic 2 part sword — blade and hilt — and the basic set of 10 stock ingots that the user can pick to make it out of.
  
• User input changes the texture of the blade and hilt independently.
  
• In this case we would probably want to use at most 3 textures and tint them. Steel, Dwarven Metal, Gold etc would use a base "smooth metal" texture with a difference in tint to make them yellower or blacker. Moonstone, Ebony, Malachite would use a "glass" texture with different colours. Iron and Orichalcum would use a "rough metal" texture.
  
• The game would generate a unique instance of the sword model in game with the selected textures and colours applied to the blade and hilt.
  

 

There's also lots of other things to work out - a brand new smithing menu, changing the attributes based on user input, intrinsic effects, blah blah blah. Any one of which might also be impossible. But, if there's no chance of doing this bit, because the game just doesn't work that way, there's no point me trying to work out if any of the rest of it is possible either.

 

Any people who've tried something similar and failed on their arse, or who can tell me what I'm missing or completely misunderstanding about the system, or who think it might be doable, I'd love to hear your opinions on this. It would save me a lot of poking around trying to achieve the impossible if I can get shot down in advance, or alternatively would really help if I could get pointed in the right direction!

 

Thanks!

[Sunnie]

Hey guys

 

So, I posted this idea about a new smithing system the other day and didn't get many bites. That might have been because it was in the wrong forum, or because it was a mental nutso idea that nobody cares about and wouldn't work anyway.

 

I'm still at the stage of working out what individual things need to change, sitting watching tutorials to try to figure out what's doable and what isn't. There are a couple of make or break issues that I haven't worked out yet, so I thought I'd ask the collective brains here if I should just accept this ain't gonna happen, or if it's potentially achievable.

 

(1)First thing - is it possible to adjust textures and tints for different parts of a weapon or piece of armor, from the same base model, in game? Either using multiple .obj files (kind of like is done with blood, scabbards etc), or ArmorAddons, or something of that ilk?

 

What I envision happening is this:

• Assume a basic 2 part sword — blade and hilt — and the basic set of 10 stock ingots that the user can pick to make it out of.
• User input changes the texture of the blade and hilt independently.
• In this case we would probably want to use at most 3 textures and tint them. Steel, Dwarven Metal, Gold etc would use a base "smooth metal" texture with a difference in tint to make them yellower or blacker. Moonstone, Ebony, Malachite would use a "glass" texture with different colours. Iron and Orichalcum would use a "rough metal" texture.
• (2)The game would generate a unique instance of the sword model in game with the selected textures and colours applied to the blade and hilt.

 

(3)There's also lots of other things to work out - a brand new smithing menu, changing the attributes based on user input, (4)intrinsic effects, blah blah blah. Any one of which might also be impossible. But, if there's no chance of doing this bit, because the game just doesn't work that way, there's no point me trying to work out if any of the rest of it is possible either.

 

Any people who've tried something similar and failed on their arse, or who can tell me what I'm missing or completely misunderstanding about the system, or who think it might be doable, I'd love to hear your opinions on this. It would save me a lot of poking around trying to achieve the impossible if I can get shot down in advance, or alternatively would really help if I could get pointed in the right direction!

 

Thanks!

 

I'll try and answer some of these from my own experience with the way the crafting system is implemented...

 

First and foremost, the crafting system is simplistic. It looks at a recipe to see what it will destroy from your inventory and what it will place in your inventory. The only dynamic thing it does is change the base stat of the crafted item via an algorithm using your smithing skill level and any perks that may affect the calculation. It does not do anything more than this and does not have any engine support to do anything beyond that.The system relies on premade finished objects, so the only thing it can do is spit out a premade object.

 

 

 

As far as your points above...

(1) You could make a texture set that lets you change object textures via scripting, but the crafting system itself can not do this, it would have to be done after the fact and not as part of the crafting process.

 

(2) Again, the crafting system can't generate anything unique, it can give out premade items that are already set up.

 

(3) You can not make any new crafting categories, they are hard coded in the engine. They only thing you could do is rearrange the actual menu layout, if you can code Flash that is.

 

(4) Are you referring to effects like enchantments? This is not possible in the smithing system, but is handled in the Enchanting system. Again, the smithing system does not modify anything other than the base stat of the item (base armor rating or base weapon damage).

 

In order to change the way the crafting system works , it would need SKSE or Script Dragon support to change it at the engine level.

 

Sorry to likely burst your bubble, but it is what it is. :confused:

[Greenslade]

I already know it's not going to fit into the existing smithing system, don't worry. I assume, eventually, I'm going to have to make a completely new menu system and bypass the original smithing system entirely. I'm more just wondering if I can do any of the bits.

 

Reading on further about the contents of .nifs and texture sets, it certainly looks as if, in theory, one could create a .nif where the blade and hilt were separate meshes with separately assignable textures. Is that theory accurate? And, if so, will it royally f*** things up if one were to actually do that?

[Sunnie]

You should be able to just use Texture Sets in the toolset to hold variations of textures for the same base mesh, you shouldn't need to mess with the nif in that regard.

[Greenslade]

OK so I could apply a texture set to a different part of the mesh, even if they use the same .obj? That hasn't been clear from what I've read.

 

The whole point of this question being, if this mod eventually does what I want it to do, a basic dagger would have 55 different possible textures, a basic sword around 3,000, and a more complex armour over half a million.

 

Even without the alloying system, a basic sword would still need 100 possible textures.

 

The number of possible permutations mean it would be impossible to texture by hand. However, making a recipe specification that used 3-4 "base" textures for each part and varied between them in standard ways, while more complex than a simple armour, would be pretty doable IMO, at least from a modelling and texturing point of view.

 

Is there a tutorial on picking out different parts of a mesh and applying different texture sets to them?

[Jakisthe]

Boy oh boy do I love this idea...goes great with my arrows/archery idea. I agree completely that metals/swords should have different properties other than "does more damage/takes more damage!"

 

As it is, the smithing system, while very fun and a great part of the game, is effectively just a number changer, one of the more boring ways of introducing different styles of play into a game.

[wmrojer]

OK so I could apply a texture set to a different part of the mesh, even if they use the same .obj? That hasn't been clear from what I've read.

 

The whole point of this question being, if this mod eventually does what I want it to do, a basic dagger would have 55 different possible textures, a basic sword around 3,000, and a more complex armour over half a million.

 

Even without the alloying system, a basic sword would still need 100 possible textures.

 

The number of possible permutations mean it would be impossible to texture by hand. However, making a recipe specification that used 3-4 "base" textures for each part and varied between them in standard ways, while more complex than a simple armour, would be pretty doable IMO, at least from a modelling and texturing point of view.

 

Is there a tutorial on picking out different parts of a mesh and applying different texture sets to them?

 

You can only apply one texture set per object in the .nif file. But there is absolutely no problem in having the weapon split up into several objects. In fact, that's how all of the weapons in the game is already made. They all have separate objects for blood and enchantment effects for example. So making the blade, hilt, tip or whatever parts they have as separate objects is very doable.

 

You can then just assign the different material texture sets to those different objects. But unless you make those material texture somewhat specific for the part/weapon it will probably look pretty dull in game. You could go one step further and have a separate "detail" object surrounding the actual blade that has a weapon specific texture that has opacity, and only change the texture on the underlying object depending on the variant of the weapon.

 

But as it has already been pointed out, this is not something the in game crafting logic can handle, so it has to be a custom made menu and scripting system.

[Greenslade]

You can then just assign the different material texture sets to those different objects. But unless you make those material texture somewhat specific for the part/weapon it will probably look pretty dull in game. You could go one step further and have a separate "detail" object surrounding the actual blade that has a weapon specific texture that has opacity, and only change the texture on the underlying object depending on the variant of the weapon.

 

Aha! That's an even better idea than I had.

 

The way I'd imagined it would work would be that a model specification would include 3 or 4 base textures per part, and that the others would be standard variations of those, tinted appropriately, so that Orichalcum was basically Iron Texture+Green for example. But creating a single "detail" material would be even simpler for a modder wanting to add weapons to the system, and might well make for nicer variations in the material textures. Assuming the normal and specular maps would also apply in a non-ugly way on the "detail" model.

 

OK, thanks for answering the question. Next step is to dive in and see if I can actually make this bit work, I guess!

Edited March 1, 2012 by Greenslade