My thoughts on the design document (post 1.0)

Anything related to PR, release planning and any other non-technical idea how to move the project forward should be discussed here.
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DestinedToDie
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My thoughts on the design document (post 1.0)

Post by DestinedToDie »

My wishes are to have a simple Morrowind-like engine with more customizability of existing features. The post 1.0 design document seems to touch on that, with features such as:

Small launcher changes to make total conversion installment more elegant.

De-Hardcoding:
GMSTs
Fallback Values
Dynamic Stats
Attributes
Weapon Types
Armour Types
Specialisation
Magic Schools
Skills
Armour Skills
Weapon Skills
Magic Skills
Weather
Water
Magic Effects

Music

Character creation chaining
Level-Up

Those are literally all I'd ever wish for... well, add shadows and distant statics to that, since they are kind of expected by the player. Anyway, it seems we'd need some kind of way of handling the new skills and attributes through script. Since my wishes are rather simple, small additions to oldscript would have proved more than sufficient, with no reason to go as far as to introduce newscript. But it seems that since we're locked onto newscript now, I'm not going to try and swim against the flow.

The other features in the design document don't really seem to make OpenMW better for me personally. For example, I don't plan on making use of the vibrant AI-like features listed there. This particular feature is new rather than a customized version of an existing game mechanic. Like I mentioned at the beginning, my wish is for a customized Morrowind-like engine. I guess I'm not against it in such a way that I'd have it entirely deleted from the document as some people might actually want to see it implemented. But features like these seem like deviations from the dehardcoding goal that I'm mainly interested in.

So... those are my thoughts I guess. Do you think that the post 1.0 document contains a slight feature bloat?
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xirsoi
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Re: My thoughts on the design document (post 1.0)

Post by xirsoi »

It seems to me that an unmentioned secondary goal of "modernising" the engine has been slipped into Post-1.0, so yeah, I can see a little bit of bloat there.

Then again, perhaps those modernisation features are intended to happen in later releases than the de-hardcoding features?
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Thunderforge
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Re: My thoughts on the design document (post 1.0)

Post by Thunderforge »

DestinedToDie wrote: 02 Jul 2018, 07:23 Anyway, it seems we'd need some kind of way of handling the new skills and attributes through script. Since my wishes are rather simple, small additions to oldscript would have proved more than sufficient, with no reason to go as far as to introduce newscript. But it seems that since we're locked onto newscript now, I'm not going to try and swim against the flow.
You raise a good point. Currently, oldscript has stuff like "SetAcrobatics 50" or "SetSpeed 100". With the de-hardcoding, it might be desirable to have something like "SetSkill Acrobatics 50" that would also work with newly created skills (so I could do "SetSkill Ventriloquism 50"). We also have requests like providing a scripted way to get the player's gender (since vanilla has the bizarre restriction of only allowing that to be queried in dialogue).

Personally, I would be okay with very limited additions to oldscript, especially if it's something that MWSE already provides. On the contrary, we wouldn't want to necessarily support whole new data types. I do realize that it's a slippery slope of where to stop, but ultimately, I don't see a lot of downsides to adding simple functions like this.
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Zini
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Re: My thoughts on the design document (post 1.0)

Post by Zini »

It is easy to figure out where to stop: Right here. No additions to oldscript. We want people to migrate to newscript. Improving oldscript will discourage people from making the switch.
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DestinedToDie
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Re: My thoughts on the design document (post 1.0)

Post by DestinedToDie »

Yeah I'm also of the opinion that if we go with one scripting language, we ought to fully deprecate the other. Having 2 script languages is redundant.
kuyondo
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Re: My thoughts on the design document (post 1.0)

Post by kuyondo »

I personally liked almost all the features listed in the design document. The more the merrier.✓

Although I would argue some features like the Queries is a bit sophisticated for the game. Usage would be impractical for the most part. At least for me :P
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Sslaxx
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Re: My thoughts on the design document (post 1.0)

Post by Sslaxx »

I'd rather see a more Oblivion/Skyrim-ish syntax with some commands, so

Code: Select all

setav speed 100
setav athletics 100
instead of

Code: Select all

setattribute speed 100
setskill athletics 100
kuyondo
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Joined: 29 Mar 2016, 17:45

Re: My thoughts on the design document (post 1.0)

Post by kuyondo »

Sslaxx wrote: 04 Jul 2018, 17:02 I'd rather see a more Oblivion/Skyrim-ish syntax with some commands, so

Code: Select all

setav speed 100
setav athletics 100
instead of

Code: Select all

setattribute speed 100
setskill athletics 100
Seems like a good point or we can just use both. :lol:
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Zini
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Re: My thoughts on the design document (post 1.0)

Post by Zini »

Since the first parameter can be a variable this is potentially an extremely powerful feature. We should keep this idea in mind when we start to work on newscript.
kuyondo
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Re: My thoughts on the design document (post 1.0)

Post by kuyondo »

I have a question for post 1.0,

Are we able to set variables in scripts?
For example,

begin testscript
local unit "npc_mission1" ; create a unit variable with name "npc_mission1", this variable can be use globally(other scripts can use the variable)
set "npc_mission1" = "caius cosades" ; set the variable to a specific unit
end

begin testscript2
if ( player(getstrength) >= 50 ) ;player is the pc player
sethealth(npc_mission1) to 0 ; killing the unit , ie "caius cosades"
endif
end

Im just making this up, but yeah thats cos im bad at this stuff. Hopefully someone get what i mean. And im not sure what kind of scripting language im using. :lol: sorry guys
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