Assorted Announcements #2 (Patreon)

Since we're mid-month, I thought it'd be good to put up a quick update of some in-progress items.

Discord

I've been taking some troubleshooting and feature requests over Scrab's discord and in my experience, it's a lot more efficient than LL threads and Patreon comments. Given the number of concurrent projects, I thought it'd be worth creating a server to centralize discussion and bug reports: https://discord.gg/7T2Cb5EqHD. Don't feel obligated to join if you're already inundated with servers; I'll still post regular updates here and on LL but dev builds will go up there first for feedback. This will be open to the public but I've set up a Patron-exclusive support channel.

Practical Defeat - Bad End

Since this is clearly the most requested feature after the reactivity system, I ended up moving this up in the pipeline ahead of robbery enhancements. I think I've come up with a spec to make the most out of Pama's excellent work while facilitating some immersion:

The smaller furniture like the chopping block and deadly tree stump can be spawned near the player with minimal chances for objects clipping or causing weird enemy behaviour. I can also justify this in-world since a bandit can reasonably move these objects. We'll call these dynamic executions (since they can happen anywhere).

However, furniture like guillotines, gallows, garottes are quite large. Not only would it not make much sense for these objects to randomly spawn out of thin air, they would likely cause all sorts of nasty clipping and stuck enemies. Instead, I can try to distribute these manually throughout the game world. If the bad end gets selected and one of these pieces of furniture is near by, fade to black, and teleport the player + some hostiles to the closest large furniture and play out the scene using it. Since I can deliberately place objects to minimize clipping/maximize immersion, this should provide a far better user experience. We'll call these static executions (since they can only occur in set locations).

As you can imagine, manually placing furniture across the entire worldspace is a very time-consuming endeavour so I'll be starting with dynamic for the first version. I'm planning on rolling out the statics incrementally through holds e.g. place furniture in Whiterun Hold, then Eastmarch, and so on. I'm concerned about compatibility since worldspace edits can get messy but I think some good planning can let us bypass most of these issues.

Devious Followers Redux

For those who haven't used Devious Followers Continued (feel free to skip down if you have), DFC turns your vanilla followers into tricky hirelings that will charge you every day you're in their service. You can pay them or failing that agree to certain "deals" which can range from wearing piercings to drinking skooma.

Lupine's work on the mod has made it a personal favorite but it's unfortunately been untouched since they left early last year. I've been working on a rewrite to make it easier to add new stuff and to finish implementing some of the stuff Lupine had planned on their roadmap. This includes a maid-themed deal. I'm getting close to releasing the next version along with a brand new "fitness" themed deal. Hoping to drop this some time next weekend. You can check out the development thread if you're interested or if you want to contribute some of your own ideas.

I'll likely put up another post/poll with new deals for those who are interested. Hopefully, that's at least one of you :)

Slaves of Tamriel Redux

Unfortunately, I identified some significant issues (surrounding scene AI) during playtesting that kept me from release. As soon as Devious Followers is wrapped up, I'll get back to this. The original plan is still intact but it just needs some more time to cook.