The Evolving Society Mod

[QQuix]

A quick status report:

 

Yes, I am working on it. At the moment I am finishing the selection of the architecture that should go with each facility (which buildings fit a lower level farm, which goes to high level hotel, etc) and adjusting the 'menu' feature to accommodate those.

 

Well . . . , to tell the truth, I took a short break to develop a small, personal mod and I would like to ask you guys whether other players would be interested in it:

 

Anticipating playing Skyrim (I will get it as a Christmas present) I remembered when I first played Oblivion how much I hated leaving loot behind and how I hated going back and forth to collect it.

So I devised this small project that goes three ways:

1 - Automated loot: A hotkey to be used at the end of each cave/dungeon section to collect everything on the ground, dead bodies and unlocked containers and send them to a central deposit.

2 - A Collector's dream: from the central deposit, save one of each object collected (and place it in a museum-like facility - if I had the time to create it) and sell the rest for 1/10 of the face value.

3 - [Cleared]: automatically add a [Cleared] tag on map markers and doors of cleared dungeons, caves, etc. (provided you used the automated loot feature to clean it up)

 

I am just finishing function (3) and will be back on the main project in a week or so.

[Keirgarth]

A couple of questions about your mod that you have mentioned.

 

1) Where is the end of dungeons that have no other exit than the main one and have multiple branches to go through on the inside?

2) With most everything being reset every 3rd day by default in Oblivion, does marking a dungeon "cleared" mean much? You can always go back in and do it again in a few days with new loot.

 

My personal way to handle the loot issue is the "Bag of Holding" mod which allows you to carry out as much as you want as you find it by letting you put items into the bag so it doesn't take any weight.

 

I do like the collector's dream aspect of yours though. For armors and such you might see about getting permission to use Reznod's mannequins to display them.

[QQuix]

I have all the vanilla dungeons/caves/forts mapped, so the script does know when all the sections have been cleared.

The cleared flag would just an indication that you have already taken care of that place. No restrictions on going in again for more loot. I am planning to play Oblivion once more and make sure I have visited every single place in the game. The mark is intended to help with that. I could even have a Journal with the name of the visited and/or remaining places.

 

Feature (1) is pretty much the same concept as The Bag of Holding, I guess, but you don't even have to open chests or collect from bodies. Just go thru, kill everything that shows up and press a key at the exit. A message will show telling you if there are still some foes alive or locked chests remaining behind. Pretty much intended for players that have played the game more than once and are tired of repetitive actions.

 

I don't think I will ever have the time to create the museum part (it would take a lot of time and I must go back to the main project), but mannequin-like NPCs are easy to create (like the player statue). The problem is having them in the same room. The game does not like to handle more than 15-20 NPCs at a time (even if they are frozen).

[Keirgarth]

Sorting would be another issue with the museum aspect as it would be difficult to send specific items to specific dummies. You would likely end up with dummies wearing all kinds of mis-matched armor, heheh.

I do like the idea of your push button collection system though, would make it easier to get the loot out without having to drag corpses off of each other to get to the lower ones in the stack. Just find a way to make the button at the entrance, with a check to see if there are any living NPC's in the place before it would work. Anyone left alive would eliminate the use of the button.

[QQuix]

I was thinking along the lines of having the Museum all setup up front with all the items in the game already positioned, but disabled. As the player collects each item for the first time, the corresponding item is enabled on the exhibit. A little more complex than that for clothes and armor, but the same general idea.

 

Good idea: the button will work only after no more foes are left alive. Thanks.

[Keirgarth]

I like the idea of the mannequins already setup waiting for the activation and starting disabled. It would probably be setup similar to quests in order for it to work correctly. You might have to place items in your inventory first if it is setup like a quest so that your quest book can be updated. You might also have to put in specific quest tags on certain items and when you actually find that item you activate the mannequin.

[QQuix]

Actually, it may be much simpler.

The mod knows (by the use of automated loot) which items have been collected, so it would be just a matter of removing one from the storage and enabling the corresponding item in the Museum (or equipping it on the mannequin).

[Keirgarth]

Sounds like a plan to me :) If you get it worked out, I will beta test for you :)

[ty13rm0rr15]

I was just looking around for a RTS sort of mod but for Oblivion so I searched around and found this! I've read every post in the past two days and I gotta say this is gonna be an awesome mod. I was wondering how everything is going since the last post was awhile ago.

[QQuix]

Thanks for your interest.

 

After the short detour to develop my personal The Collector mod (hidden here), I came back to VOX

 

 

As I mentioned before the building blocks are done and working together, so the mod is kind of playable already.

 

My current objective is to determine the best 'tweaking' on the many parameters the mod runs on. Things like: what is the ideal number of food units a farm produces per day? And a lumber site output? (considering that part of the logs produced will be used as building materials for new buildings and part of the logs will be raw materials for the sawmill production of planks). How many of each basic material a level 1 building requires? And how many of each 'sophisticated' material a level 3 building requires? Will production provide the required materials on time? How fast the people gets unsatisfied with each city service? Etc etc.

 

If these things are not balanced, the player may end up with too many wood and too few metal parts. Or worse, end up without, say, stones and without the required materials to build a quarry, actually dead-locking the game. And these flaws would only be perceived after many hours of beta testing by several testers.

 

So, instead, I am developing the necessary scripts to simulate the daily cycle so I can 'exercise' the mod from day one to the end, each time trying different combination of parameters. The mod plays by itself, so to speak. Each 'run' takes about one hour and spits a text log about 200,000 lines long.

 

At the moment I am finishing the daily decision process of which building should be built/upgraded next, trying to anticipate/simulate the real player decisions. Although developed for the sake of tweaking the mod, these scripts will be very useful to get the advisors suggesting what the player should do next, like:" The city health is bad. You should hire a Healer." or "The city needs more food. You should improve the Farm.".