Rape Tattoos Continued 2.0.3

More color configuration options for tattoos

This is the big feature, and the reason I ended up updating the mod to begin with! There are now more comprehensive options for configuration of tattoo color, glow and gloss in the MCM. You can pick from a fixed color (like in the original Rape Tattoos), a competely random color, a custom weighted color scheme (see below), or no override (using whatever color the tattoo comes with).

• There is now a slider controlling the probability for a tattoo to be given a gloss effect. Set it to 0 to never get glossy tattoos, and 100 to always get them (or anywhere you like in between).

• Color and glow can also be customised with a weighted set of colors by providing your own JSON config file (or using one of the templates provided with the mod).

• The mod now ships with a basic color configuration file as its default behaviour, and provides a few presets which you can use as drop-in replacements

• See the rapeTattoos/colorConfigs/README.md file included in the mod or this gist to learn how to create your own color configurations

Responsiveness & performance

The MCM is now much more responsive - your tattoo sets are no longer automatically loaded whenever you open the MCM. This used to take an awfully long time if you had thousands of tattoos installed. There is now a "Load tattoo config pages" button in the MCM which you can click to load the tattoos and assign them groups as you could before. On the other hand, if you've already configured all of your tattoos (via the MCM or just editing the JSON config file), then you no longer need to spend 10 minutes waiting for the MCM to load just to tweak a few options at the start of a playthrough.

I also made a fair few small performance optimizations and code cleanups throughout the mod - probably nothing too noticeable (as far as I can tell, the main performance bottleneck at the moment is SlaveTats itself), but every little helps.

Multiple tattoo support

You can now configure minimum and maximum tattoo counts for rape events in the MCM to spice things up a little! Note that this doesn't affect tattoos triggered by other mods (unless they trigger a rape event) to preserve backwards compatibility (otherwise mods like SL Survival could end up adding a lot more tattoos than they intend!).

Actor-dependent tattoo settings

RTC adds more fine-grained control over tattoo chances, counts, permanence, duration, and lock state depending on whether the target is the player, an NPC, or (optionally if you have Zaz Animation Pack installed) a Zaz slave (part of the zbfFactionSlave faction).

• This behaves similar to Monoman1's tweaked version of Rape Tattoos, but with some additional configurability

• Note: One important difference to be aware of - if you (the player) get added to the Zaz slave faction at any point, the mod will consider you to be a slave, and the settings you have chosen for Zaz slaves will now apply to you!

Additional debug options

• There is a new debug hotkey ('Y') which can be pressed when in debug mode to trigger a post-rape event (this includes the random roll factor, so it may or may not result in tattoos being applied)

• The debug hotkeys will now apply to the character currently under your crosshair (or yourself if no one is under your crosshair)

• There is now a debug MCM option to configure how many tattoos should be added when you press the 'N' key. You can set this up to 20, although SlaveTats can take a while adding that many tattoos at once - YMMV.

• Lots more logging. You'll notice that when you have debug mode enabled, the mod will spam your notification feed whenever it does anything. There's also a lot more trace-level logging under the hood, which should help to identify any potential issues from Papyrus logs. I'd highly recommend not turning debug mode on for an actual playthrough.

For Modders

Additional functionality has been added if you want to make calls to Rape Tattoos from your mod. Most notably:

• RTC should be fully backwards compatible with Rape Tattoos - if your mod was making calls to the common Rape Tattoos functions (notably doTattooAction and doTattooActionFor) before - they should still be there, and if you were sending a RapeTattoos_addTattoo mod event - that still works too

• The doTattooActionFor function now has an optional second count argument, which allows you to specify the number of tattoos to add. This should allow you to add multiple tattoos in one go without having to go round the SlaveTats synchronization loop every time. RTC adds however many tattoos you want, then does one tidy synchronize to apply them.

• There is a new RapeTattoos_addTattooV2 mod event which allows you to specify the target of the tattoo(s) as well as the number of tattoos to add. This effectively means that you can do everything that you can with doTattooActionFor in a mod event instead. There is a usage example in the source, but, it's pretty standard stuff:

int handle = ModEvent.Create("RapeTattoos_addTattooV2")
if (handle)
	ModEvent.PushForm(handle, target) ; target should be an Actor reference
	ModEvent.PushInt(handle, count)
	ModEvent.Send(handle)
endIf

This may be necessary if you're using multiple mods that make use of NiOverride overlays (for example, if you're using YPS Immersive Fashion). By default, the maximum number of tattoos on each body part is set quite low. To increase this, you will need to modify the INI file located at <Data Directory>/SKSE/Plugins/skee.ini - specifically, you're looking for the following sections:
 

[Overlays/Body] ; "Body [Ovl#]" and "Body [SOvl#]"
; Determines how many body overlays there should be
iNumOverlays=6 ; Default[6]
iSpellOverlays=1 ; Default[1]

[Overlays/Hands] ; "Hands [Ovl#]" and "Hands [SOvl#]"
; Determines how many hand overlays there should be
iNumOverlays=3 ; Default[3]
iSpellOverlays=1 ; Default[1]

[Overlays/Feet] ; "Feet [Ovl#]" and "Feet [SOvl#]"
; Determines how many feet overlays there should be
iNumOverlays=3 ; Default[3]
iSpellOverlays=1 ; Default[1]

[Overlays/Face] ; "Face [Ovl#]" and "Face [SOvl#]"
; Determines how many face overlays there should be
iNumOverlays=3 ; Default[3]
iSpellOverlays=0 ; Default[1]

In each section, change iNumOverlays to the desired maximum number of overlays on each body part. I run my game with 30 set for the body overlays, and 10 for the others (but cranked the values up for some of the screenshots on this page). As far as I'm aware, there's no hard limit to what you can set these to, but be aware, that the higher you set them, the more of a performance impact it will have on SlaveTats - if your SlaveTats is taking ages to process tattoos on characters, consider reducing these values.

Rape Tattoos allows you to configure a "group" for each tattoo in order to try to preserve some coherence in your character's appearance when several tattoos have been added. You can configure these groups through the MCM (by hitting the "Load Tattoo Config Pages" button and waiting for the configuration pages to load), or by editing the configuration file at <Your home directory>/Documents/My Games/Skyrim Special Edition/JCUser/rTats/settings.json.

Rape Tattoos will never add more than one tattoo from the same configured group. So if you have multiple tattoos configured to the "left breast" group, Rape Tattoos will only ever apply one of those tattoos (until it fades out, at which point Rape Tattoos may apply another "left breast" tattoo). There are two exceptions to this rule:

The special "(unassigned)" group

There is no limit (aside from the associated overlay limit) to the number of tattoos that can be added if you have marked them as unassigned - multiple tattoos from this group can be added.

The special "(excluded)" group

This group indicates that the tattoo will never be applied by Rape Tattoos. Use this to mark tattoos which you may have installed, but never want Rape Tattoos to use.

For more details, see the configuration section on the original mod page.

If you select the "Custom" color modes in the Rape Tattoos MCM, Rape Tattoos will apply custom user-defined rules for colors (and glow) when applying tattoos. There is a detailed configuration guide for how to configure this over on my Github. The mod also comes with a couple of configuration presets that you can try - again, see the guide for details of how to use these.

I only build and test this mod against Skyrim SE, and therefore cannot guarantee compatibility with Skyrim LE. However, you may be able to use this with LE by doing the following:

• Install this mod as usual
• Copy the RapeTattoos.esp file only from the original Rape Tattoos mod, and overwrite this mod's ESP with it

In version 2.x.x, I've not changed any of the script names, so this should work - I can offer support on this, but I won't go too far out of my way to try to fix problems you're having if you try to run this in LE.

However, from version 3.0.0 onwards, the mod will explicitly not be compatible with LE (although you may create a backport if you're familiar with the necessary tools, but I won't be offering support if you try to do so).

I only build and test this mod against the official SlaveTats mod, so cannot guarantee compatibility with any mods which overwrite SlaveTats script files. The Sejra SlaveTats patch makes changes to public API functions of SlaveTats which Rape Tattoos relies on, and is therefore not compatible with Rape Tattoos Continued.

I'd recommend investigating whether you really need the patch - it's based on an old build of SlaveTats, and SlaveTats has received a number of official fixes since the patch was released. If your load order works without the patch, then I'd recommend not using it. If you included the patch to try to mitigate the load speed issues of the Rape Tattoos MCM, those issues should now largely be addressed in version 2.0.2 of RTC (with further improvements to come in future versions).

This mod already incorporates most of the changes made by Monoman's tweaked version of Rape Tattoos, and many substantial changes to the MCM have been made since the original Rape Tattoos 1.4. Therefore, overwriting this mod with Monoman's tweaked version will overwrite most of the changes and improvements made by this mod since the original version, and I can't guarantee things won't break.

In short, there should be no need to use this together with Monoman's tweaked version, and they are not compatible. You should either use Rape Tattoos Continued on its own, or if for whatever reason you'd prefer to use Monoman's tweaked version, use it with the original Rape Tattoos version 1.4, not Rape Tattoos Continued.

• An MCM lockout option if you have any tattoos applied
• Potentially, support for easily switching between multiple color configurations in the MCM
• The ability to configure the mod to permit more than one tattoo per group, for people that like the extra-messy look
• A tattoo enchantment/magic effect system (i.e. "cursed" tattoos). SlaveTats already has some support for "magic tattoos" (i.e. ones which dispatch events to other mods). I'm considering some kind of system that lets plugin mods register with RTC, to add various effects which could be applied to tattoos added by RTC. Still a lot to figure out before we get there though!
• More optimizations as I find them - I'm running a potato (it was high-end 10+ years ago ?), so every ounce of performance I can squeeze out of my load order is precious!

There are a handful of ways to trigger tattoo events from RTC: you can call functions directly by grabbing the rapeTattoos quest from RapeTattoos.esp ( 0x000D62 ), then calling:

• rapeTattoosQuest.doTattooAction() - This will add a single random tattoo to the player, respecting the MCM's color/lock/permanence settings
• rapeTattoosQuest.doTattooActionFor(target, count) - This will add tattoos to the provided target (an Actor). The count argument (an int) is optional. If you provide it, RTC will add that many tattoos to the target. If omitted, it will default to 1 tattoo.

Alternatively, you can also trigger tattoos via mod events:

You can trigger a simple single tattoo addition on the player using the RapeTattoos_addTattoo event which was present in the original mod:

SendModEvent("RapeTattoos_addTattoo")

Or you can trigger multiple tattoos on any target actor using the new RapeTattoos_addTattooV2 SKSE mod event:

int handle = ModEvent.Create("RapeTattoos_addTattooV2")
if (handle)
	ModEvent.PushForm(handle, target) ; target should be an Actor reference
	ModEvent.PushInt(handle, count) ; count should be an int - the number of tattoos to add
	ModEvent.Send(handle)
endIf

There are potentially a few reasons for this:

• The mod writes tattoo configuration to the following directory within your user home directory: Documents/My Games/Skyrim Special Edition/JCUser/rTats
  You will probably find files named settings.json and colorConfig.json in there.
  If these files, or any of the directories in the above path, are read-only, the mod will not be able to save tattoo configuration changes. Ensure that the permissions of all of the above directories and files have appropriate permissions.
• One user has mentioned that the settings.json inside their JCUser/rTats directory was in fact a directory rather than a file, which caused tattoo configuration not to be saved properly. I've not identified any ways in which this mod could create that directory, but if you find that you have a directory named settings.json, do the following:
  • Delete/move the directory
  • Start Skyrim
  • Enter the Rape Tattoos MCM
  • Exit the Rape Tattoos MCM
  • Wait a few seconds
  • Exit the game
  • Verify that you now have a file named settings.json in your JCUser/rTats directory