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[edit] shalley303

Contents 1 shalley303 1.1 Background 1.2 Modding 1.2.1 Morrowind 1.2.2 Oblivion

Shalley303's Sandbox

[edit] Background

I am a huge fan of Morrowind, and played it through twice. I still find it to be the funnest game I have ever played due to it's vast open ended design. I had never played a game which let me do anything and everything from the start, and found the skills concept of leveling skills by using them to be the best idea ever for an RPG. I have always hated experience grinding in RPGs, and felt that Morrowind was so refreshing. I also loved that I could raise all my skills regardless of what path I choose, or what kind of character I was playing.

I played Oblivion through on the PC when it first came out, and have been playing it through on the Xbox 360. When I played on the PC I found myself stopping the game too often to create mods to make the game more interesting. I forced myself over to the Xbox so that I would not be tempted to do this.

[edit] Modding

I am very familiar with the TES Construction Set for both Morrowind and Oblivion. Mostly my mods have been simple fixes and for fun, and nothing good enough for release. I have been using computer programing languages since I made a text adventure game with basic 17 years ago. So the idea of the construction editor, making my own scripts and changing the functionality of the game was very appealing to me.

[edit] Morrowind

For Morrowind I did make an Arena mod that created a random tournament bracket style fighting scenario that you could participate in. After talking to an Arena NPC you could start a new tournament. Eight players would be chosen and randomly numbered one through eight. Player one would then fight player eight, and two would fight seven, etc... There were seven NPCs and you. In the case of the NPCs each one was assigned to a faction, and you would have to fight one of three random NPCs created and assigned to that faction. The seven factions were Hlaalu, Redoran, Telvanni, Fighters, Mages, Thieves, and Imperial Legion. Each member of the factions fought according to how they should. So Telvanni and Mages guild NPCs would throw very powerful spells at you and had stacks of restore magicka potions. Since the players were chosen randomly and numbered randomly it gave the sense that each tournament was unique. I eventually was able to balance out the NPCs so that if you watched a fight you never knew who was going to win. Mages could hold their own against warriors even though they had low health and no armor.

If it was your match then you were instructed to enter the Arena and face your opponent. It was impossible to kill anyone in the fight, and the player or NPC would win by lowering their opponent's health to one. You had the option when it was not your fight to either skip the fight, or to enter the top level of the Arena and watch the match. If you chose to skip then a winner would be determined randomly allowing you to get to your fight faster. All NPCs had leveled items, skills, spells, and a vast amount of potions to drag the fight on and give them a chance to win. By the time your character reached level 30 the opponents you faced in the Arena were by far the toughest fights you would have in the game. After the tournament was over the people of Vivic City would have a new dialog where they would praise the person who won.

I was really excited about this mod, especially when I got it working flawlessly. However it was never released because of a problem with the Arena cell and Vivic City in general. There are so many scripts running in that area that I found that the mod would routinely crash the game a short time after completing a tournament, and would sometimes crash the game just by flying around the Arena when in Vivic City. I believe that the mod was just a little too ambitious, but was very fun for private use. Unfortunately I no longer have a copy of this mod.

[edit] Oblivion

At the end of my first time playing Oblivion on the PC I ran into my first Orc Adventurer in a cave. I was very excited to see another NPC going around killing things and taking loot, but my excitement soon died when I realized that they were so limited. They only stuck to that one cell, they didn't try to loot everything, and were basically worthless Adventurers. This set me off on creating a Hero Competitor mod. I wanted an NPC who would travel the world and compete with me for loot.

I got very far along in this mod, but the limitations of the scripting language basically killed any chance of this mod ever being completed. I created a new NPC called Hero of Thieves. He was a Breton who started out at the IC Palace with one gold and a complete Master Alchemy set. His stats were all 100 except that his strength was set at 255. The Hero had a number of find AI packages, wander, and two AI packages to use alchemy and train weapons. All of his AI packages were controlled by a script rather than a schedule.

The Hero, who starts with almost nothing (no clothing, armor or weapons), goes around and attempts to steal and collect anything he can. I even programed his script to evaluate how much gold a target NPC has and transfer that gold to him. He will loot any wearable items, misc items and food from from containers. He will pick flora to gather alchemy ingredients. During his AI package to use alchemy all food items in his inventory will be converted to potions. Unfortunately there is no functions to do that, so I had to make a script that evaluated every food item in the game, and give him a standard potions in return.

if (caller.GetItemCount AlkanetFlower > 0)
        set count to caller.GetItemCount AlkanetFlower
        caller.RemoveItem AlkanetFlower count
        caller.AddItem PotionRestoreIntelligenceS count
endif
And so on...

He would also sell all of his non-equipped items once a day. So if he got encumbered he would just have to wait until his sell quest got triggered. There is no way to evaluate all the items in your invetory, their value, and convert them to gold so I had to rig this as well.

if (caller.GetItemCount PotionRestoreIntelligenceS > 3)
        set count to caller.GetItemCount PotionRestoreIntelligenceS - 3
        set gold to (gold + (count * 60))
        caller.RemoveItem PotionRestoreIntelligenceS count
endif
In this case he would actually keep three potions for use and sell the rest.

Because there was no way to dynamically figure out what is in his inventory I had to create scripts that are a series of IF statements to figure out everything in his inventory. This creates a static problem in that if an item in his inventory is not in my script then he will continue to carry it around forever. This could eventually lead to an encumbrance problem.

I eventually ran into a wall with this mod when I tried to get the NPC to wander around all of the world. The NPC will not change cells during a Wander package, so you have to specifically tell them to travel somewhere. It was not possible for me to create enough travel packages in order to create a sense of him going off on his own. Once I ran into this problem I gave up on the mod. I still have my development version if anyone wants to check it out, or try to use new functions created with Oblivion Script Extender to make it work.

Since I could never get him to travel randomly I never got around to programing any sort of lock picking capabilities which might present a whole set of new problems to get this working. My disappointment with the scripting capabilities eventually lead me to abandon the game play completely and I never finished Oblivion. Over a year later I got the Xbox version so that I could play the game through without these distractions.