Complete Carryweight-system Overhaul

[MarethRavenlocke]

He means the disarm shout, which is basically Dovahkiin Flipendo. Knocks your enemies' weapons out of their hands. Now, if you can pick up their weapon, the strategy works, because without their weapon, they have to fight unarmed. But if you can't pick the weapon up, the AI will just go and grab it almost instantly, no fiddling around and fumbling for it like the player has to do when she's disarmed.

 

The second point of immersion that I'd like to bring up is that Dungeons & Dragons, the most immersive, roleplay-friendly RPG in existence, has an item called a Bag of Holding for a reason. These are decently expensive, about 10,000gp for the biggest ones, but they work to solve the carry weight and space issue while providing an in-character, immersive solution to the problem of not being able to carry your loot effectively. The neck of a Bag of Holding is a rift to an extradimensional space, sort of a pocket dimension that doesn't exist on the material plane. Anything that you put in the Bag of Holding goes into this pocket dimension, which can store about as much volume as a small apartment, 80 square feet of stuff. The Bags themselves weigh about 60 lbs., but anything put into the bag is weightless, because it doesn't exist on the material plane and thus the laws of gravity don't apply to it.

 

If you're going to have something so incredibly limiting, perhaps consider including a Bag of Holding which, while expensive, would provide an immersive solution to the problem.

[Leeira]

Ah, this shout, thanks. But this mod is all about immersion, so if you want to use this strategy, better not carry too many weapons with you. So, if you think about realism, it's unrealistic to carry as many weapons as you can and then think you could even take up your enemies weapons.

The bag thing... Well, there is this bag mod which I think would fit well into my mod. Maybe with some little ajustments (some bag increase carryweight, some MaxPotionCount and so on). But beeing able to use this bags to carry more weapons would just destroy the goal of my mod.

But I think I'm going to ask Dragten (the mod author) if I'm allowed to use his mod in mine (with credit and so on ofcourse) or if I may make it that way that you have to load his mod and then my esp which changes some aspects of the mod to make it compatible with mine.

 

I have two little problems right now and maybe someone of you can help me:

1. How can I change how many MaxCarryWeight you get when increasing your stamina by 10 points when leveling up?

2. When you are carrying too many items of one type (lets say 3 onehanded-swords) and put one sword into a chest, it first says the vanilla game message "you are carrying too much", then my own massage "you are no longer carrying too much". The game recognizes that you are no longer overloaded and it's no big bug, the message is just annoying and may confuse some people. Does anyone know how to fix this (I mean, how to disable the vanilla message in this case)?

The problem seems to be that my invisible-weight-item is removed correctly, but after the game shows it's vanilla message. When I simply drop the weapon to the ground, only my message shows up, as it's ment to be.

[tox2ik]

But what did you mean with disarming your enemies? I played as a mage for most of the time so maybe I have missed a game mechanic, please explain it.

 

There are two options for this:

• Zuun Haal Viik: Shout defies steel, as you rip the weapon from an opponent's grasp.
  
• Shield Wall -> Power Bash -> Deadly Bash -> Disarming Bash: Block perks
  

 

After you use one of those, the enemy will drop the weapon on the ground. If you don't pick it up, they will. So if you shout or bash your enemies to make them lose their weapon and can't take their weapon up afterwards, those two abilities become totally useless. When you fight the Deathlord at the end of "Under Saarthaal", for example, this is very effective becasue he can't fight for s*** without his ebony warhammer / blade.

 

A note on movement speed:

There is a dragon-script movement-jumping-fall tolerance mod which is great, but kind of OP with default settings. That mod increases movement speed as you gain levels. With ACE - Armor and heavy armor you have speedmult == 80. Which is alrite, but boring after a while because you have to switch apparel all the time.

With my settings I have speedmult ~91 at level 28 in heavy armor and speedmult ~106 with clothes. If my math is correct I should have about 118 movement unarmored at level 81. Which is totally fine. It makes the game more fun.

; file: Skyrim/asi/basicAthleticsAcrobatics.ini
/* NOTE: values below must be integers, not decimals.
* With the default settings, 
* Speed increases by 0.2 every level and 0.9 every 10 points of Stamina. 
*  Jump increases by 0.3 every level and 1.1 every 10 points of Stamina. 
* Aglty increases by 0.4 every level and 1.2 every 10 points of Stamina.
// speedPerTenLevels=2
// speedPerHundredStamina=9
// jumpPerTenLevels=3
// jumpPerHundredStamina=11
// fallPerTenLevels=4
// fallPerHundredStamina=12
*/ 
speedPerTenLevels=1
speedPerHundredStamina=2
jumpPerTenLevels=3
jumpPerHundredStamina=11
fallPerTenLevels=4
fallPerHundredStamina=12

Both Oblivion and Morrowind had you moving faster and jumping higher as you gained levels. I was thoroughly disappointed when I discovered that athletics and acrobatics were excluded from Skyrim. I dunno how you guys enjoy your game, or how high you plan to make the movement penalties in your mods, but reducing the movement speed below 70 with almost full inventory is just... boring?

Edited May 18, 2012 by tox2ik

[Leeira]

I think I'm not going to make the player faster than vanilla, because the player would get overpowered because NPCs don't get faster and you can easily run away from them (correct me if I'm wrong and NPCs get faster at higher levels in vanilla).

But making him slower when carrying much (much, not too much)... would definately be immersive but maybe annoying to most. What do you think, should I slow the player down more and more as he carries more (not dependand on a total value but on his percentage of MaxCarryWeight used).

 

Oh, one more idea: To change armor while fighting is impossible, so I should make it impossible. Does anyone know how I can check if player is in combat? (It must be possible because it is impossible to fasttravel while in combat)

[sukeban]

@Leeira

 

I've found that adjusting movement speeds dynamically is... kind of wonky with the way that animations seem to work/are registered. Basically, your movespeed will not update (even if it does as a statistic in console) until AFTER your character enters into another animation type. What I mean is that a character who just went from 100 --> 90 movespeed won't actually start moving at 90 until he enters sneak/draws a weapon/starts sprinting, etc. Then the new value will be recognized and the speed will be modified. It still "works" and, I mean, I'm going to keep it just cause I like the idea. But it is kind of weird.

 

Maybe somebody smarter than I when it comes to scripting + animations knows of a way to have the new animation register at the same time as the updated movespeed?

 

Anyway, the way that I did the scaling was the multiply the %carryweight by a given range based on the race and gender of the PC. Orcs are affected much less by carrying a higher percentage, Wood Elves much more, etc. Originally, I had it something like the inverse of the % multiplied by the movespeed, but that was ridiculous. The percentage way is better IMO because it gives latitude to PCs with higher carryweights. There is more of a benefit to investing in capacity versus health or magicka.

 

Your "No Armor Swapping" idea sounds great, too. Sadly though, I have literally NO idea how to implement that. I'm sure somebody around here does though.

 

@tox2ik

 

Gameplay versus realism, the problem, as we all know, with no real solution. I think that you're 100% correct that moving faster likely results in better gameplay, but becoming extremely slow when carrying heavy things is far more realistic. I think that probably both Leeira and myself are trying to reach some sort of an accommodation (though probably a bit less myself) with gameplay so that our mods aren't just total PITAs to play.

 

I've always just liked the idea of having a "loadout" or something when adventuring (too much Resident Evil back in the day) so that choosing your loot pickups is almost as important as the fights themselves. I also thought that the vanilla movement speeds were WAY too fast and that jogging across Skyrim without draining stamina was show-stoppingly unrealistic. So I'd like to have characters walk. Or jog slowly. Or buy a horse.

 

@Anybody who knows

 

One other thing, is it possible to limit the amount of movement options available to the PC? Like, if you are carrying 90/100 inventory you can no longer sprint. At lower movespeeds the sprint animation looks ridiculous because you still animated as running fast but you go practically nowhere. I would like to simply remove the option to sprint via a variable. I know that this IS possible because that's what happens when you are overencumbered in vanilla, but I have yet to find the Source script that contains this functionality. If anybody knows, I would be extremely happy to hear about it :)

[Leeira]

@sukeban: Yeah, I ran into the same problem that movementspeed, attackspeed is not updated directly. So I decided to remove it and instead add the invisible item to make the player overloaded (which is updated directly of course). And further, when using "setAV" it modded value will not be persisent when loading saves as far as I know, it always reverts to vanilla values when changed via "setAV".

 

@all: I thought about some things and I'm not going to change things like stamina-regen, stamina-usage and such things dependand on how much you carry. I want to keep my mod as compatible as possible and there are many great mods ot there which change this stamina things (most combat mods, vampire mods, Basic Need mods and so on). And I definatly want to avoid that people have to choose if they want to use my mod or a combat mod or whatever.

[sukeban]

@Leeira

 

For making the changes persistent on saves, try using ForceActorValue. I find myself constantly having to check back to see which stats are persistent with only Set and which ones require full Force so to speak (ba-dum-chh). You can find a handy reference for it here: http://www.creationkit.com/Actor_Value_List . It's definitely saved me a lot of headache.

Edited May 19, 2012 by sukeban

[Leeira]

Ah, thank you Sukeban. But the problem would be that if I change attackspeed and force it to let's say 80% and afterwards I want to reverd it, I could force it to 100%... but maybe the original value was different (may be solved with getAV.WeaponSpeed and store the value before I change it) or the value gets changed while I force it to 80% which would be erased when i force it to 100% (which could not be tracked so easily as far as I know).

 

Right now I'm trying to change some things in the Bags and Pocuhes mod to make it fit into mine and release my mod. (To use the bag mod will be optional, but highly recommended. Dragten's version will still be required, I will only provide a... let's call it compatibility patch.)

[Leeira]

I've just uploaded my mod, so please come to the comment thread there and read and write there instead of in this topic.