Is it possible to create a shout that adds insects/butterflies into th

[dirtfoot84]

I just started using the creation kit yesterday, and I have a goal of creating a quest line mod at a later date that adds different nature related shouts to the game.

I was playing around this morning trying to see if I would even be able to do this but, one of the shouts is going to be a restorative type of shout, and I want it to give the feeling of life eminating from the player once it is used, one of the effects i was thinking of was adding insects to the world (bees, butterflies, etc.) but I don't even know if that's possible. The only type of object I found so far was the critterbee that

you can actually add into the game, otherwise I have no idea how to spawn, say for example, a butterfly in front of the character that will fly about as they do. Any ideas? Thanks for reading.

 

edit: Just to be clear I meant that I was trying to create a shout that adds insects into the world.

Edited October 22, 2012 by dirtfoot84

[steve40]

It's possible. But some things shouldn't be attempted by inexperienced modders. This is one of them, imo.

[dirtfoot84]

It's possible. But some things shouldn't be attempted by inexperienced modders. This is one of them, imo.

 

I haven't had any luck with it, any time I create a shout and a spell to add spawner, it doesn't work. I can't even unlock the shout without a CTD. I'm pretty sure it's something that would have to be entirely scripted from scratch, I can't find anyway to bring the insects into the game except for using the critterspawns they give you.

 

I'm looking into the scripting stuff right now and it looks entirely possible to bring them into the game using that, so... i'll just keep trying.

[EnaiSiaion]

Note that any feature that lets you put a brick on the mouse button to gain an advantage is exploitable. In this case you could just go afk for half an hour, come back to a swarm of butterflies and harvest them for gold.

 

Anyway, what you can do is create a new activator or static with an insect model, and add a script to your magiceffect that gets the location of the caster, adds a random delta to the X and Y values, then places your new object at this location and destroys it after a few seconds. It's not the exact same as the normal insects but much easier to implement.

[Kapt]

In this case you could just go afk for half an hour, come back to a swarm of butterflies and harvest them for gold.

Lol. Why not just add whatever amount of gold you wanted with the console and save the time? If someone wants to cheat in Skyrim, they don't need user mods to do it.

[steve40]

The vanilla critter system is designed to work for hand-placed spawners only, and you will also notice that landing markers have been hand-placed at strategic locations near every critter spawner. Without these markers, the critters won't work unless the vanilla scripts are extensively modified. Also you will have to deal with the potential danger of bloating your savegame if the spawning isn't strictly controlled, which is one of the main functions of the critter spawner script. The critters themselves will not "live" if they are simply placed into the game. The spawner has to set the required variables and call a function in the critter to start it living. So unless you are a very experienced scripter, there's a real danger of creating another bloatware mod like SOS-Civilizations.