Pamatronic
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Fighting with the Wildlife (and skyrims AI...)
🕑 Added 2023-06-24 18:08:31 +0000 UTCJust a quick update on the state of things.
Originally I would have liked to present you with the next Beta at this point, but since I'm not quite there yet, I should at least let you know what I´ve been up to.
Main reason for the delay is my inexperience with the faction/aggression system and the more complicated AI-procedures. And testing this is kinda tedious.
Bit of a hurdle which has presented itself early on were random attacks by nearby predators on the Orcs, which would of course wake up the camp and ruin your escape, but I think after some fiddling I have sorted this out now. On the plus side, this knowledge can probably be applied to the Outdoor pack to avoid similar issues if other mods spawn wildlife along the walk paths.
On the Gameplay side, I´ve had some thought about the sneaking system.
Two major issues here:
- In the early Game when the player has low sneaking skill, Its exceedingly difficult to walk around the camp without waking anyone up, which will make retrieval of followers/items tricky
- Sneaking is completely trivialized as soon as the player acquires the "Muffle" spell, which makes walking soundless
So I´m thinking about Disabling Vanilla detection and using a parallel Detection system (Another UI widget with a detection-bar) which uses scripted events to determine movement/proximity and listen to scripted events like traps or doors/chests beiing fiddled with to manually trigger the wake up.
Tell me what you think about this. Is the Vanilla System good enough and I´m just wasting time, or would a parallel system be a meaningful addition?
Again, I apologize for the somewhat sluggish pace with updates. The current Heat makes sitting in front of the PC in my Attic a bit of a daunting task, So I'm not quite as motivated as I would like to. But I will nonetheless try my best to get it done as soon as possible,
Comments
Twilight Asura
I also agree with Bob and Flying Leaf. I would suggest playing with the lighting as well. At my current playthrough, my PC's sneak is high enough that I'm barely detected in the shadows, but when I step into some sort of lighting, I'm found easily. Placing lighting in certain locations, along with bear traps and tripwires in dark spots would definitely turn it up a notch. Would be cool if an NPC that stood watch at a watch tower constantly looked left and right too, so aside from avoiding making noise, and the 2-man patrols, you'd have to steer clear of the watchtowers as well. Though this idea, would be for a much bigger camp.
Red Chew Toy
I agree with both Flying Leaf and Bob. Get a stable release and use the existing game mechanics. If you want to up the difficulty post a guard on the player or have an invisibility potion nearby to make it easier if necessary.
Bob
I'd second @Flying Leaf's suggestion above. Narratively, it makes sense that a low-level PC will struggle to escape from bounty hunters - and if they're being delivered back to prison and PA, you've already built in additional opportunities to escape there just by using the existing prison escape system. From a narrative and systems standpoint, I think it works as is, unless there's something I'm not seeing. If you try to break out, imo, you take the risk of being caught/losing your stuff/losing your allies. I would suggest at most, perhaps going with the option to include an invisibility/muffle potion nearby that the player can find, which I think mechanics-wise shouldn't be too hard to implement. In my view, the real challenge will be to keep it interesting for high-level PCs with stealth skills - here you could potentially scale up the camp with your ideas for a separate detection system, or additional patrols/noisemakers/etc. as FlyingLeaf mentions. But only if it isn't too much trouble to implement - I think the bones of your vision are already great as is. :)
Flying Leaf
I personally feel it best to be wary of adding in extra systems/new systems on top of systems that are already in the game unless absolutely necessary. It risks confusing the player and is a potential headache for implementation as well. My suggestion would be to--at least for now--accept that a PC that is prepped for stealth has a significant advantage here vs a PC that is not: this feels natural to me within the core flow/rpg mechanics of the game. Once you have your current core concept here working you can always return to see if and how you want to spice up the escape situation. Whether that is a true new system you'd like to try or vanilla options. Just some ideas of the top of my head: tripwires, beartraps that make noise, a night-watch or 2 that patrols around (maybe scaling to how much the orcs perceive the player to be a threat). And similarly you could add a stash with a muffle potion near the player if the orcs are confident/lax (or just accept that a non-stealthy PC can only save themselves).
