Changing Character Appearance

Support for running, installing or compiling OpenMW

Before you submit a bug report for the first time, please read: Bug reporting guidelines
deranderejan
Posts: 4
Joined: 17 Feb 2019, 00:14

Re: Changing Character Appearance

Post by deranderejan »

Hi,
and sorry for the bump, but I couldn't find anything about this elsewhere.

I just stumbled into the same problem:
Cannot do any cosmetic changes at a later point in the game with enableracemenu, without resetting all stats to level 1.

In vanilla Morrowind, I'd occasionally change hairstyles into a gradually more "classy" cut, to reflect my social progress (think, "rising from feeble pawn to noble Samurai - you get the picture).
Therefore, I am very sure that vanilla did not reset anything unless you ignored all the warnings (only once per session etc.).

Is this issue being addressed in any way, or is there some kind of conscious decision to drop that feature? Should I report this as a bug somewhere? Or maybe, is there a better solution than enableracemenu in openmw?

Many thanks!
User avatar
silentthief
Posts: 456
Joined: 18 Apr 2013, 01:20
Location: Currently traversing the Ascadian Isles

Re: Changing Character Appearance

Post by silentthief »

deranderejan wrote: 17 Feb 2019, 00:36 Hi,
and sorry for the bump, but I couldn't find anything about this elsewhere.

I just stumbled into the same problem:
Cannot do any cosmetic changes at a later point in the game with enableracemenu, without resetting all stats to level 1.

In vanilla Morrowind, I'd occasionally change hairstyles into a gradually more "classy" cut, to reflect my social progress (think, "rising from feeble pawn to noble Samurai - you get the picture).
Therefore, I am very sure that vanilla did not reset anything unless you ignored all the warnings (only once per session etc.).

Is this issue being addressed in any way, or is there some kind of conscious decision to drop that feature? Should I report this as a bug somewhere? Or maybe, is there a better solution than enableracemenu in openmw?

Many thanks!

Yeah, there is no "proper" way to do this. enablecaremenu is probably the only way to do this at this time. The way to do this kind of thing in vanilla was enableracemenu or to edit your save file in the Enchanted Editor utility. I think it would be a good feature to have, but I don't know if this has been put on feature request yet.

ST
deranderejan
Posts: 4
Joined: 17 Feb 2019, 00:14

Re: Changing Character Appearance

Post by deranderejan »

silentthief wrote: 19 Feb 2019, 14:56
deranderejan wrote: 17 Feb 2019, 00:36 Hi,
and sorry for the bump, but I couldn't find anything about this elsewhere.

I just stumbled into the same problem:
Cannot do any cosmetic changes at a later point in the game with enableracemenu, without resetting all stats to level 1.
[SNIP]

Yeah, there is no "proper" way to do this. enablecaremenu is probably the only way to do this at this time. The way to do this kind of thing in vanilla was enableracemenu or to edit your save file in the Enchanted Editor utility. I think it would be a good feature to have, but I don't know if this has been put on feature request yet.

ST
Thanks for the quick reply!
I suppose this would be a great feature for the post-1.0 phase...

Until then, the (somewhat tedious, but totally doable) workaround is:

1. make a screenshot of your stats for later reference

2. use enableracemenu to change what cosmetics should be changed

3. Save, Load

4. Use player -> set[skill] (x) to manually restore your Skills one by one.
Remember to leave out the blanks in the skill name (Example: player -> SetShortBlade 37 sets Short blade to lv. 37). I'm not sure whether caps matter, but I think openmw is pretty forgiving on this.

5. Since I am using the ncgdMW Mod, I didn't need to bother with he following steps, but I'd assume it would be a bunch of these (I might have dependencies / order wrong):
player -> set[Attribute] (x)
player -> setlevel (x)
player -> sethealth (x)

6. Check if everything lines up

7. Save, Close Game, Restart, Load.
User avatar
Jemolk
Posts: 237
Joined: 20 Mar 2017, 02:12
Location: Sadrith Mora

Re: Changing Character Appearance

Post by Jemolk »

Just for the record, there's a far, far worse problem than reseting your attributes and skills -- showracemenu also wipes your spell list. So custom spells are just gone and need to be made again, base spells need to be bought again, and abilities given as quest rewards, such as Almalexia's rewards for one of her quests in Tribunal, need to be re-added with the console.

Specific quest spoilered out of consideration for anyone who may not have played through that portion yet (hey, you never know!).
Spoiler: Show
The result is utterly miserable. I have a mod from vanilla that essentially creates a mirror that activates showracemenu. It would be simple enough to script it to also save your attributes, skills and level, and reset them to their previous values after the mirror is used. But because it also wipes your spells, it's useless to do so, at least to anyone who ever uses magic, which I always do.
deranderejan
Posts: 4
Joined: 17 Feb 2019, 00:14

Re: Changing Character Appearance

Post by deranderejan »

Jemolk wrote: 25 Feb 2019, 17:35 Just for the record, there's a far, far worse problem than reseting your attributes and skills -- showracemenu also wipes your spell list. So custom spells are just gone and need to be made again, base spells need to be bought again, and abilities given as quest rewards, such as Almalexia's rewards for one of her quests in Tribunal, need to be re-added with the console.
Ouch, I had totally missed that, thanks.
Definitely a lot more tedious to restore everything then...
Dyskos
Posts: 64
Joined: 17 Feb 2017, 03:51

Re: Changing Character Appearance

Post by Dyskos »

Jemolk wrote: 25 Feb 2019, 17:35 Just for the record, there's a far, far worse problem than reseting your attributes and skills -- showracemenu also wipes your spell list. So custom spells are just gone and need to be made again, base spells need to be bought again, and abilities given as quest rewards, such as Almalexia's rewards for one of her quests in Tribunal, need to be re-added with the console.
That's... utterly horrid! :shock:
It also doesn't make sense... resetting stats and wiping spells seems like something that one has to go out of their way to implement. Why can't appearance simply... not affect anything? At least after the character was already created?
Chris
Posts: 1625
Joined: 04 Sep 2011, 08:33

Re: Changing Character Appearance

Post by Chris »

drakovyrn wrote: 27 Feb 2019, 03:38 That's... utterly horrid! :shock:
It also doesn't make sense... resetting stats and wiping spells seems like something that one has to go out of their way to implement. Why can't appearance simply... not affect anything? At least after the character was already created?
Because setting up your character's race is more than just your appearance. It also affects your character's stats (height, weight, skills, attributes) and starting spells and abilities. Showracemenu was designed to run during character creation to set up your character correctly where it affects these things (essentially replace the starting default male Dark Elf character you technically start as), and it wasn't a consideration to use afterward for purely aesthetic reasons. It would need special handling to behave as you want after character creation, in which case, it may be better to make a new menu designed to just alter your appearance and nothing else.
User avatar
Jemolk
Posts: 237
Joined: 20 Mar 2017, 02:12
Location: Sadrith Mora

Re: Changing Character Appearance

Post by Jemolk »

Chris wrote: 27 Feb 2019, 05:11
drakovyrn wrote: 27 Feb 2019, 03:38 That's... utterly horrid! :shock:
It also doesn't make sense... resetting stats and wiping spells seems like something that one has to go out of their way to implement. Why can't appearance simply... not affect anything? At least after the character was already created?
Because setting up your character's race is more than just your appearance. It also affects your character's stats (height, weight, skills, attributes) and starting spells and abilities. Showracemenu was designed to run during character creation to set up your character correctly where it affects these things (essentially replace the starting default male Dark Elf character you technically start as), and it wasn't a consideration to use afterward for purely aesthetic reasons. It would need special handling to behave as you want after character creation, in which case, it may be better to make a new menu designed to just alter your appearance and nothing else.
Perhaps, yes. Personally, I'd love to see a way to change race mid-game while retaining skills, attributes and spells as well, as that would be actually notable further functionality. Showracemenu works fine for aesthetics changes in vanilla, though, because it doesn't reset skills unless your racial bonuses have changed, nor attributes without racial bonus changes, nor spells without racial spells changing -- in other words, as long as you don't actually change race, none of the other changes occur, and it doesn't trigger a total reset. This is something I'd very much like to see emulated at the very least.

Again, though, what I'd most like to see is a way to use something like the race menu to change race, but only remove racial spells, and not alter attributes and skills at all, for use in the game later. Also a way for scripts to directly change a character's race in that fashion. This would open up so much in terms of potential for a polymorphing character, which I absolutely love the idea of.
User avatar
silentthief
Posts: 456
Joined: 18 Apr 2013, 01:20
Location: Currently traversing the Ascadian Isles

Re: Changing Character Appearance

Post by silentthief »

Jemolk wrote: 27 Feb 2019, 17:09 Again, though, what I'd most like to see is a way to use something like the race menu to change race, but only remove racial spells, and not alter attributes and skills at all, for use in the game later. Also a way for scripts to directly change a character's race in that fashion. This would open up so much in terms of potential for a polymorphing character, which I absolutely love the idea of.
Yeah, it would be nice. I like the idea of things like customization of character in the (original) Fable game. There was only one character, so they had less to deal with - but you could go to a barber and get different haircuts for example.

ST
Dyskos
Posts: 64
Joined: 17 Feb 2017, 03:51

Re: Changing Character Appearance

Post by Dyskos »

silentthief wrote: 27 Feb 2019, 18:38 There was only one character, so they had less to deal with - but you could go to a barber and get different haircuts for example.
In Dragon's Dogma, there was a "barber" that could change hairstyles and facial hair etc., but they also knew cosmetic magic, or "alteration", I guess, but anyway, at a higher cost, you could also get eye color changes, facial reconstruction, skin color changes, etc... I think it was only a part of the Dark Arisen DLC I had, but it was even possible to change body shape, size, and sex. I personally loved the last one. The possibility of role-playing a transgendered character! :D

Anyway, it sounds like the feature doesn't support vanilla behavior 100%, so wouldn't that already be a bug? Personally, I would still like to be able to change race if I wanted, too. Height and Natural Abilities should change, of course, but spells shouldn't be wiped, and stats should only be affected by subtracting the previous race's base stats and then adding the new race's base stats. I don't know what the progress implications would be in that situation, but I don't think it should really be dwelled on too much, as changing race through the console is already cheating...
Post Reply