Natural Character Growth and Decay - An OpenMW Leveling Mod

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Greywander
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Joined: 04 Dec 2014, 07:01

Natural Character Growth and Decay - An OpenMW Leveling Mod

Post by Greywander »

Whew, finally finished it. It only took me a week.

Here's the Natural Grow leveling mod we've always wanted. (Maybe.) I know a lot of people loved Galsiah's Character Development, and so did I. Since GCD didn't work quite the way it was supposed to, I set about to create my own similar mod. And here it is.

Natural Character Growth and Decay - Morrowind Edition

Highlights:
  • Your attributes grow automatically as your skills increase.
  • Your skills and attributes can grow past 100, but...
  • It becomes increasingly difficult to increase your skills the farther past 100 you go.
  • Your skills will also decay over time. (Optional)
  • Finally, since vanilla levelups are disable, I've implemented my own system of determining the player's Health.
I'll probably be uploading several smaller mods making minor tweaks. I've already got one for Health/Magicka regeneration and another for carry weight/fatigue, I just need to upload them.
Naugrim
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Joined: 08 Jan 2016, 01:32
Location: Spain

Re: Natural Character Growth and Decay - An OpenMW Leveling

Post by Naugrim »

Not having Galsiah's Character Development was my only restriction to start using OpenMW!

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
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Greywander
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Re: Natural Character Growth and Decay - An OpenMW Leveling

Post by Greywander »

I don't know why I didn't do this before, but last night before bed I looked up the Oblivion skill list, and some of the connections between attributes and skills make more sense than the ones I used. For example, I wouldn't have thought to make Acrobatics have Speed as a primary attribute (I believe it's tertiary at the moment), but it makes a heck of a lot more sense for a mobility-related skill like Acrobatics to have Speed as it's primary attribute than for, say, Short Blade or Hand To Hand.

I'll fiddle around with it some more and hopefully update later today. OpenMW 0.42 should be just around the corner as well, so you may want to wait until then anyway.
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Greywander
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Re: Natural Character Growth and Decay - An OpenMW Leveling

Post by Greywander »

Alright, it's done, version 1.1 is live. I'm still not totally happy with the skill-attribute relations, but I have to work with the skills and attributes the game gives me. It might be interesting to look into "re-purposing" a skill via scripts, adding some entirely new mechanic to the game while streamlining the remaining skills. (Morrowind, in my opinion, has entirely too many weapon and armor skills.)
Naugrim
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Joined: 08 Jan 2016, 01:32
Location: Spain

Re: Natural Character Growth and Decay - An OpenMW Leveling

Post by Naugrim »

I tested it yesterday and it worked pretty well :D

Now comes the list of little requests:
· Could it be possible to add some magicka regen?
· Would it be possible to add in-game explanations? For instance a book (e.g. "Greywanderer's training guide") that lists at least the primary and secondary attributes. I found myself checking on the README too often and I love lore-friendly stuff like in-game books.
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Greywander
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Re: Natural Character Growth and Decay - An OpenMW Leveling

Post by Greywander »

Naugrim wrote:· Could it be possible to add some magicka regen?
Ask and ye shall receive.

Alternatively, there's already a plethora of Magicka regen mods out there. I was using this one before I made my own:
http://mw.modhistory.com/download-37-15220
· Would it be possible to add in-game explanations? For instance a book (e.g. "Greywanderer's training guide") that lists at least the primary and secondary attributes. I found myself checking on the README too often and I love lore-friendly stuff like in-game books.
I've been thinking about this, too. I think what I'll do is change the tooltips for each skill to indicate which attributes they influence. That seems like the most user-friendly option. I've already changed the governing skill to match the primary attribute, but there's currently no indication of secondary or tertiary skills. Maybe I can get to that tomorrow.
Naugrim
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Joined: 08 Jan 2016, 01:32
Location: Spain

Re: Natural Character Growth and Decay - An OpenMW Leveling

Post by Naugrim »

Greywander wrote: I've been thinking about this, too. I think what I'll do is change the tooltips for each skill to indicate which attributes they influence. That seems like the most user-friendly option. I've already changed the governing skill to match the primary attribute, but there's currently no indication of secondary or tertiary skills. Maybe I can get to that tomorrow.
I saw the the primary shown, but I forgot you can edit the tooltips. That would be really neat.

Btw, the magicka regen inclusion is for convenience only :P I am kind of lazy and having all options in one mod would be nice.
Loriel
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Joined: 28 May 2015, 00:44

Re: Natural Character Growth and Decay - An OpenMW Leveling

Post by Loriel »

Testing it at the moment (initial version) and looking good so far - I think I've just achieved my first 100+ attribute.

Minor suggestion - notify attribute rises, as well as skill rises.

Loriel
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Ravenwing
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Joined: 02 Jan 2016, 02:51

Re: Natural Character Growth and Decay - An OpenMW Leveling

Post by Ravenwing »

This is great, I'd never heard of the original inspiration before being on these forums, but I quite like the idea. I'm glad you were able to get this done before the Great Dehardcoding, which I imagine will make doing all of this easier. I'm probably most excited about the health and magicka regen though. Is that mod in it's final state, or are you going to be making any changes?

Can't wait to try them all out!
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Greywander
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Joined: 04 Dec 2014, 07:01

Re: Natural Character Growth and Decay - An OpenMW Leveling

Post by Greywander »

Loriel wrote:Minor suggestion - notify attribute rises, as well as skill rises.
Already working on it. I'm also going to backtrack on a previous decision and notify the player when a skill/attribute decays.
Ravenwing wrote:I'm probably most excited about the health and magicka regen though. Is that mod in it's final state, or are you going to be making any changes?
That li'l thing? Yeah, I guess, I'm not sure what else I would change. There's also already a plethora of regen mods out there, some weaker, some stronger. From the playtime I've put in testing it, mine seems pretty balanced, doesn't regenerate too quickly, and the size of your magicka pool is still important (in that regeneration is slow; regeneration is not affected by the size of the pool), but it helps refill health and magicka between combat.

I've also discovered a bug in NCGD related to growing skills past 100. When it says you need to train more and gives your progress, the progress needed is shown as 1 less than it should be, e.g. it will say you have to train more then say "progress 1 out of 1". It still works the way it's supposed to, it just tells you the wrong amount. So be aware of that until I get around to putting out a new version.

As per a discussion in another thread, I'm also going to make Intelligence slow down the rate of decay, and conversely I'm going to make decay speed up as you learn more skills. (Alternative idea that literally just came to me: make rate of decay depend on level rather than skills, as level is a dependable marker of how many attribute points you have received. Need to sleep on this.) Dumber characters will need to specialize in fewer skills, while smarter characters will be able to learn more skills. I still expect getting to the skill cap of 475 with even one skill to be highly unlikely, but I don't want to make it actually impossible.

(If you're wondering why the skill cap is 475 instead of say, 500, it's because of how I applied skill bonuses past 100. There's a +25 bonus, a +50 bonus, a +100 bonus, and a +200 bonus. The game just applies different combinations of these bonuses (almost in a Tower of Hanoi way) such that overall bonuses are handed out in increments of 25. You could think of these different combination as binary bits where 1 = +25, 10 = +50, 100 = +100, and 1000 = +200, so you could have a combo like 1011 = 200 + 50 + 25 = 275. Thus the maximum possible skill is your base skill of 100, plus 25 + 50 + 100 + 200 = 475.)
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