LE Need help/advice Dragon Combat Overhaul

[Apollodown]

**EDIT** I FIGURED IT OUT. Mod will be incoming soon. It ain't pretty, but it's good enough for Beta. And them dragons be fallin out of the sky.

 

**EDIT 2** This mod is now live at http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/32597

 

Two things piss me off about dragon fights: a) they are too predictable when it comes to the 35% injury and b)even if you manage to kill them before they land, they are immortal until they finally do touch down.

 

Here's my foundational idea for solving the issue: 1) disable dragon injuries based on health percentage 2) cause all dragons to immediately ragdoll when they die.

 

A more advanced version of this mod would allow for injuring a dragon based on chance and health percentage, for example every time a dragon is hit for over a low threshold of damage, there is a low percent chance that it will injure the dragon. The percent chance should, in my opinion, rise based on how low the health percent of the dragon is. This would look like:

 

When health is: Percent chance that each hit causes injury

100%-75% .05%

75%-50% .1%

50%-25% .15%

25%-0% .2%

 

Additionally, any hit that causes massive damage(I would personally define as 10% of the dragon's health) would have a 50% chance of injuring the dragon.

 

A final part of the more advanced idea is that if the dragon has been injured and is grounded, it does checks every 4 seconds to see how much damage has been done to it, and if it doesn't reach a certain threshold then it removes the injury flag from the dragon and allows it to fly again.

 

The problem is that this would literally be the first esp I've ever made(I'm a highly experienced mod user, never built one though), and it sounds to me like some scripting may be involved, so maybe I'm not the right person to make this.

 

That being said, if nobody else will make it, I plan to, but I've hit a couple of stumbling blocks, the biggest one is I don't know what prevents a dragon from dying before landing: is it from the DeathWait animation? Does anybody have any ideas for how to get a dragon to not play any death animations and immediately ragdoll on death? The second question I had is that if I were to build a script similar to what I outlined above, and ran it on every dragon, would that cause epic slowdown or would it be a simple equation for the computer?

 

By the end of this mod I expect to shoot dragons out of the sky and have them land on hapless victims(thanks to collision body fix).

Edited March 1, 2013 by Apollodown