[WIPz] Madness & Amber Sets Overhaul

[ZuTheSkunk]

In short: this mod is supposed to fulfil gaps left by BethSoft in amber weaponry. Originally we've got bow, arrows, hammer, mace and sword. And this last one is, additionally, too wide to be shortsword, too short to be longsword and even don't have its own sheath. This mod is supposed to fix such state of being. So now we've got, as for other full sets: bow, arrows, war axe, battle axe, hammer, mace, dagger, shortsword, longsword, claymore and even a staff.

Why it's in WIPz, you might ask? Well, because I need help with three things from those listed above - bow, war axe and battle axe. Axes needs proper retexturing, due to fact they don't look enough good for now, and I don't have enough skills to retexture them for my own. And bow needs some modelling, because I want to make him longer (for now on he reminds me short bow, which looks quite strange in comparison with other bows), and for some unknown reason I can't do it that way that I usually do - mesh of bow stays unchanged in game.

Here's the screenshot of how it looks for now, plus comparison of amber bow and daedric bow:

I'm leaving my request for someone who can help me with retexturing for axes and modelling for bow. This is the only thing what I need to consider this mod as a completed. I'm able to send meshes of axes for retexturer; mesh of bow lies in BSA archive, so there shouldn't be a problem for modeller.

And no, I do not want to create a complete weaponry for madness set too. I mean yes, I would like to create such a thing, but I don't have enough skills to do it - the one thing is to create new mesh basing on the existing ones, and totally different thing is to create completely new mesh. Especially if madness weapons have got such unique style. The Cutter is truly, truly mad...

[_echo]

Why do you want to change the bow? is a short bow after all The Daedric bow is a recurve bow which are bigger.

Anyhoo, good work.

[ZuTheSkunk]

Why do you want to change the bow? is a short bow after all

Because it looks just strange on the back of player character, at least in my opinion. It can be an optional change.

[_echo]

well good luck. IIRC making bows is a pain and required you to revert back to nifskope version 0.88 just to copy the animation.

[grond]

I wish you the best of luck here, Zu. This week I'll take a look at the bow mesh and see if I can see what's up with it.

[InsanitySorrow]

Hmmm I see you are using the glass texture for the blade on the Axe, one way you could improve it is by taking parts of the longsword/claymore blade texture and using it as the base for the axe blade, Photoshops clone tool would help here.

[ZuTheSkunk]

Hmmm I see you are using the glass texture for the blade on the Axe, one way you could improve it is by taking parts of the longsword/claymore blade texture and using it as the base for the axe blade, Photoshops clone tool would help here.

I already thought about it, but I'm afraid I don't know how to do it properly, especially if I'm using Paint.NET, not Photoshop. I'm completely unfamiliar with this second one.

Grond - thank you very much, I'll be really happy if you can help me.

[InsanitySorrow]

Send the files myway and I'll see what I can do.

[ZuTheSkunk]

As I'm perfectionist (sort of...), I wanted to make amber material list look very professional, at least as far as I can. After some time fighting with HTML for books, I've decided to use one big picture instead of text. But for some reason, when I've done everything and tried to open the scroll, then I've discovered that doing so forces the game to instantly close itself. So, I've definitely done something wrong. My question is - what exactly?

Here's the texture, if you wish to test it for your own. And here's the PNG version to look at it directly. I hope you can show me where lies my mistake. Please, of course.

[YX33A]

Not that I'm a expert at all in any way, but did you set the book to be a scroll and not a book? It's a pretty big image, I'm not sure the normal page layout would allow it.

EDIT: I think I missed a step there. My bad, you said you made it a scroll, which I totally missed.

Sorry for being useless. -_-

Edited April 11, 2010 by YX33A

[ZuTheSkunk]

I think I've found a source of my problem. It seems that the picture in the scroll cannot be wider than 730 pixels (or a bit more) - 768 crashes the game. Never mind then.

And thank you, YX33A, for your willingness to help.

[ZuTheSkunk]

Okay, I think I should show you what I've made so far. You may notice that the title of this topic has changed - it's simply because the mod is now greater and does more that before.

The most important thing is that I've created a complete weaponry for both amber and madness sets. You can see it below. Except for the amber bow, which I want to make longer, and partially for madness warhammer, which has some strange problem with magnitute of light falling on it, this weaponry is finished. The important thing about them is that those weaponry sets are diverse now in stats - amber are light and quick, but does less damage, and madness does stronger damage, but are much heavier and swings slower.

http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/5968/madnamba.png

From other things I've already done, I've added diverse icons, meshes and stats for different matrices, so now they don't possess the same icon, mesh and stats despite of which item can be forged from them (the only diversity in vanilla was between armors and weapons in general). I've also organized a bit the dialogues about forging an items, with little overhaul for material lists (yes, also with unmarking them as quests items ).

From things I want to do:

- Add a scripts that update the weaponry and armors every time when we get enough high level. It's mostly completed, I just must complete this terribly long and boring scripting work.

- Add a completely new, unique enchantment for weapons. For now on, I'm thinking about adding such enchantment for madness weapons: every strike takes a bit life from opponent and heals the player, plus there's a 1% chance with every strike for a random magic effect (those are madness weapons, isn't it?). I don't have an idea for amber ones yet. Do you have any suggestions there? I'm opened for the ideas.

- Add an open helmet for madness armory and closed one for amber. I'm not sure for this second one, but this first is essential, simply because I hate the idea of flattening the muzzles of beast races (my favourite sort of races, you know).

If you have any idea about my work, I'm ready to listen. And I'll be happy to implement it if I consider it as good idea.

[ZuTheSkunk]

Okay, I think it's time to tell about progress.

- First of all, madness and amber sets are theoretically finished. Enchantments now works, meshes are done, and all this sort of thing. Although I'm afraid that I was forced to scrap out the unique effects from enchantments for weapons, because the game just said "NO" and I had nothing to say in this matter. So no unique enchantments. Because the game takes offence every time when it comes to do something with specific scripted effects.

- As I'm one of those folks who can get themselves involved into doing more than they was originally supposed to, the Vitharn Keep, with various little fixes for the stock quest as well, is now a place that can be turned into our personal estate. Check out my gallery for screenshots.

- The possibility of finding amber/madness matrices and pieces is now affected with your Luck attribute. Characters with higher Luck will get better results at searching, shortly saying. The same thing affects not only matrices and pieces, but also the objects from The Museum of Oddities quest, making the whole quest less annoying and easier.

Now I'm coming to you with my newest thought, which came to me yesterday. Since I have such tendency to add changes that theoretically has nothing or very few to do with original idea of the mod, I'm wondering if it would be a good idea to not just stop at those changes I've made, but keep changing everything from SI and turning it into my personal Overhaul, like OOO. For now on it's just a wild idea and I haven't started doing so, so if you have some doubts or ideas about such project, feel free to say.

About me, from the things I would like to see in the SI (I highlight it - it's "I would like to see", not "I'm certainly going to do it"!), is about 2x more of dungeons to explore and quests to do. The objects, locations, creatures etc. added by SI are great, but there is just too few to do with them, too low places to explore, too low interesting quests to do. Not enough locations on the map to find and explore, not enough treasures to seek. And what is really depressing about the quests is that NONE of them has any very noticeable amount of roleplaying. Not that the ones from stock OB had much more, but at least few. Here: nothing. Mostly we're just used as a errand-boy. And the creators still claims this game to be fully cRPG. Sad.

What about you? What would you say about the idea of such project and what you're really missing in SI expansion? Every suggestion might be useful.

[ZuTheSkunk]

I need some assistance from more knowledgeable folks.

I have those three helmets from screenshots below. All of them are made from the same material, while the left and middle ones are light and this right one is heavy. All of them should have names that begins with "<quality adjective> Obelisk", so it would be for example "Perfect Obelisk Helmet". And now I have a little problem - I need to give those helmets different names (other than just "(...) Helmet"), and I don't know what would be the best. I've tried to check some medieval helmets, but that haven't gave me any clue. Can you help me, please?

[Galvon]

hmmm for the one on the left I would say (...) mask not sure about the others but i'll have a think for you Zu

[grond]

Hmmm....not too many synonyms for 'helmet' besides 'helm'. Maybe you can give them titles? Like Obelisk Surge, Obelisk Storm, Obelisk Thunder, Obelisk Titan, Obelisk Crush...things like that?

[ZuTheSkunk]

I've thought already about that mask, Galv, but I was thinking that maybe there's some better name.

Hmm... nice idea about those names, grond. For this middle one I think that the "thornhelm" would be good.

So what you think about Mask, Thornhelm and Helmet? That's just enough difference to distinguish them.

[Galvon]

Yeah I like that idea it certainly gives enough difference