Arachnophobia by Miss Leeches (OBSOLETE!)

[Kazyn]

Well so I've managed to get through that snag only to hit another. Moving the player to the cave (MoveTo) seems to want to cause it to fall through the floor, no matter where I place the marker. So that'll be fun to troubleshoot. Then there's the animation refusing to play for whatever reason. Not sure what's holding that up.

 

Apart from those two issues, everything else seems to be working fine. I'll continue updating as I make progress.

[bleeb]

ouch, that sucks, so it literally makes the player fall through the floor? or were you just describing the situation? good luck with these new issues, good to hear everything else is going good though

[Kazyn]

Yep, they fall through the floor and out of the world. Fun right?

[Princessity]

That sounds annoying! Humm... but I just got an idea! Have you tried moving the player with a little z axis offset? Like this:

PlayerRef.MoveTo(MarkerRef, afZOffset = 1.0)

There's also afYOffset and afXOffset for the other axis, mebe experimenting with them a little will help

[Kazyn]

That's actually what I'm looking at doing right now, adjusting the z offset, that is.

 

Also, maybe you can answer this, if not, oh well: If there is already a actor.playIdle(anim1) playing on an actor and I call actor.playIdle(anim2) later in the script, that should make the actor clear anim1 and start playing anim2, correct?

 

Telling it switch idle animations doesn't seem to be working for whatever reason.

[Princessity]

I think you may want to try SendAnimationEvent instead. Only in that case instead of referring to script properties you need to find the Anim Event name in idle manager.

 

Oooooooor you may have forgotten to fill your idle property in the script ^^ You probably didn't but I do it ALL the time and wonder why things don't work! So it's best to doublecheck just in case

[Kazyn]

All the properties were filled and I know that they work (because a different animation plays depending when the victim is first hit by the spider depending on how far apart they were from each other. it's just telling them to override one another. I'll try the SendAnimationEvent method instead.

 

As for the offsets, I went ahead just to see where in the cave the victim was being placed (freezing its appearance by having a message box pop up and freeze the game). I also called the MoveTo function during each struggle attempt just to see if it was that one time or if kept being called. There's a about a good six feet above the ground where the victim is placed and it falls right through the ground each and every time for whatever reason.

 

The victim is being moved to an XMarkerHeading specifically which I would think is among the best markers to use, but .... WTF? lol

[Princessity]

I think the answer is: skyrim ^^

 

Ooooor maybe it has to do something with the cave's pathing grid or stuffs like that but I don't know anything about those things, my experience with CK is kinda limited to scripting

 

I think xaz had the same problem with Prison Overhaul. I don't know if it was fixed but maybe you could ask him about it

[Kazyn]

Answer may indeed be Skyrim -.-

 

At least SendAnimationEvent fixed the animation problem. Now I just gotta go replace the old PlayIdles.

 

Only one thing left now: Fixing the falling-out-of-the-world problem.

[bleeb]

yeah, as far as I know PrisonOverhaul was fixed, I used it and never saw any glitches like that.

 

sounds great Kazyn! is that your last issue left for the time being? good luck with it

[Kazyn]

Where was that problem for PO happening originally? I'm actually in the .esp looking around in it right now. I never experienced the falling issue, myself.

 

As for this being my last issue, yeah it should be. If I can fix it then I can test the spider patrol/escape detection (and knowing my luck there'll be some problems there too).

 

Assuming I even get that far, THEN I can start changing things around a bit to have the player moved to different caves depending on where they're at at the time of capture.

[bleeb]

I'm not sure exactly, but I'd place my bet on the prison cells, as opposed to when you're "arrested"

 

sounds great, hopefully that works out without much trouble then. and oh? do you have multiple caves in mind now? for each hold?

[Kazyn]

Multiple caves became part of the plan awhile back but I can't, for the life of me, figure out what's causing the actor to fall through the world. It's starting to frustrate me.

[bleeb]

ah yeah, I remember the discussion on that now. and ouch =x that sucks, wish I could help you there, last I saw from Ms. Leeches on that note was asking Xaz I think.. but I'm not sure. hopefully you figure that out soon, like Ms. L, I wonder if it's to do with the pathing in the cave

[Kazyn]

Nah, Leeches suggested I should ask Xaz... but I'm too shy to, lol

 

In doing some tests, I set up an activator that does nothing BUT move the player to cave. Player managed to not fall through the ground this time, so that's something. I think it has something to do with the transition between cells because then, I had a spider wrap the player while already in the cave and it moved it to where it was supposed to be without falling through the floor.

 

Seems it might be trying to handle things a bit too quickly all at once, but I can't point at anything in particular yet.

 

Then there's the other issue... while there is a hanging animation in the pack, the player is still going to fall to the ground, which looks weird. I don't know how to suspend actors in mid air.

[bleeb]

hmm, sounds like you're figuring it out at least. could be.

 

and yeah, I think the animation itself suspends them, we'll see. I am eager to test this out keep up the good work

[Kazyn]

No the animation doesn't suspend them I'm afraid. May just have to make it a standing struggle or something. I don't know. I'm trying to put together the fade-to-black followed by death for the first stage and release it so that way this thread can stop getting spammed for something other than the original mod. This might mean progress might slow down though, so be advised of that.

[bleeb]

hmm, I guess it depends on what you mean by 'suspend' cause I've run the 'hanging' animations in game myself, and the characters do float above the ground while doing the animation, but there's nothing anchoring them anywhere to make it look like they're hanging. a standing struggle could work, there is an animation for that, and it's underused for sure, so it could work.

 

oh? up to you if you want to release that first, could be a good "appetizer" of sorts, to keep people interested, and to show some progress while you keep working towards the finallized version. ah, yeah I figured it might slow down eventually anyhow, I'm surprised you've worked on it so much already the way it is

[Stiltzkinator]

First of all: WOW, ton a of new progress on this mod. I can't test it at this moment, but I will soon and offer whatever feedback I can.

I just want to say now that while I do have a fair amount of experience with coding for games, I have none with Skyrim, so I'm going to try to not sound smarter than I am.

The cave capture system sounds great, but it seems like the whole 'can the spider detect you' idea could prove rather difficult. When I was reading through this thread, this was the idea that hit me: when you reach the 'blackout phase' while struggling in the wild, have it check to see if the player has any active followers (I know this is easy to do using the console, so I hope it's as easy using a script). If the player doesn't have anyone with them (playerfollowercount=0), it can be a blackout to death. If they do (playerfollowercount>0), use a script to move the player and at least 1 follower into a cave. Instead of watching the timing of a patrolling spider, it would be a command puzzle between the player and the follower.

For example, the follower is gagged, but can give you muffled advice ("mghh lfff hnng inn frhhh" = "My left hand is free"), to which the player can respond by choosing form a list of options. If the player selects the option that asks the follower to help free you with their free hand, you make progress toward escape, but if you choose the wrong option, either they, or you, or both, end up further entangled. Eventually, once you get through this puzzle without making too many mistakes, the player (and only the player) is freed.

But then what? The player has to manually free their follower. This could be another puzzle, but that would just be tedious. So how about when the player is freed, a special spider is spawned. This 'feeder' spider would not be able to web the player, because honestly, at this point it would be overkill. Instead, they just have a really strong poison (like 'normal' spiders in the game). The player has to decide whether they want to fend this powerful spider off alone, try to free their follower to help with the fight (this forces the player not to move for several seconds, while the spider is able to attack them freely), or do they do the unthinkable and leave their companion behind and run? Even if the player defeats this spider, the follower is not freed automatically, leaving you free to enjoy their peril, er, I mean, contemplate how best to free them.

The issue here is the one which you have not tackled yet, which is the general handling of followers. The biggest issue I can think of is that some people use several followers at a time. I think first and foremost you should decide, once you tackle followers in general, how many you want to deal with. Decide on a max you want to script for, dismiss the rest form the player's service (send them home), and if any are dismissed, load a message along the lines of "Some of your followers have presumed you dead and left your service". Those not dismissed would be scripted into the cave with you; a minimum of one 'primary' follower who will be next to your character and the one who helps free you. You could limit it to only this one, or allow for more that are placed elsewhere in the cavern, but of course each one requires extra 'if' scripting depending on how many followers the player has, and how many you want to deal with before dismissing them.

Speaking of followers, I think you could do some real interesting things with them before the cave part. Like making it especially difficult to break free of webbing in the wold unless a follower is within a certain range (not sure if this is possible to script). That way, if the spiders ignore you once webbed and start going after your followers (I believe you mentioned this as a problem before), it actually adds to the challenge of getting free. Ideally, you would have some way of making the spiders have priority on attacking/webbing followers, and once all of them are incapacitated, returning to the player and webbing them further. This would create a rather 'thrilling' scenario for a group of adventurers, especially if attacked by multiple spiders.

I realize many parts of this are likely difficult to implement, or perhaps clash with your vision, but if any of it is of use to you, I'll be glad if it helps.

I'm very excited to see where this goes from here.

Also, I think if you have the character(s) in the cave do a standing struggle animation near a wall with a web/web texture on it, it would be close enough for anyone who's interested.

[Kazyn]

The character will suspend a few feet off the ground when playing the hanging animation, yes. However, that's when you input the console command to play the animation. When the player is moved however, the game then applies gravity, and it probably would apply gravity as well if you were to move after the console command (except you'll revert to a walking animation so it's impossible to see this that way, that I know of anyway). So when the player is moved, their head ends up becoming their "feet" because the actor model will fall, and it ends up looking funny.

 

As for Stiltzkinator, I appreciate the input, but yeah, a lot of things you've mentioned there might be a bit outside of my current level of skill. They're good ideas, make no mistake, but I need to get actually get the player into the situation before I can experiment with the escape system. I'll certainly keep it in mind, though.

[WaxenFigure]

Useing SendAnimationEvent makes the whole thing a lot simpler.  You don't have to declare the animation in the CK (just to FNIS) and don't need it as a property for the script, you just need the name from FNIS.

 

 

[Stiltzkinator]

 

As for Stiltzkinator, I appreciate the input, but yeah, a lot of things you've mentioned there might be a bit outside of my current level of skill. They're good ideas, make no mistake, but I need to get actually get the player into the situation before I can experiment with the escape system. I'll certainly keep it in mind, though.

 

Fair enough. My main point was that trying to setup a mechanism reliant on a moving actor (a spider that may or may not 'detect' the player) is itself a huge hurdle. I fully understand that replacing the spider with a webbed follower is itself a challenge, but as far as I can tell, it's also a rather desirable feature.

 

The key to making all of this work is of course doing it in steps, and making sure each step works. The step you're on is getting the player in the cave without glitches. For the purpose of testing, just get them there, and have a simple dialogue option for release instead of any kind of struggling to make sure the player can go from captured to free and escape the cave without any crazy glithces. Since it sounds like you're going to be at least somewhat reliant on dialogue options anyway, this kind of debugging shouldn't be anything but helpful. To implement your escape system, you just change the 'release me now' prompt to your custom script of struggle options. As far as that goes, I say keep working on your current hurdle, as it's likely necessary no matter what option you take.

 

My thought process was that if you do later implement webbed followers in caves, a struggle dialogue tree to get free may reference your follower's presence, but it doesn't actually rely on them in any way. It's all implied in the text, and yet it should create a convincing scenario. From the moment you have the follower webbed in the cave, they will be set to have you start releasing them once you interact with them...the catch being that you have to free yourself first. But freeing yourself, even though the dialogue text implies your follower's cooperation, is purely a solo scripted trial. This should prevent any crazy variable things happening to your followers while trying to break free.

 

In other words, again for testing purposes, once you are able to get the player in the cave, and have them instantly break out of webbing without glitches, implement a basic struggle system that works on the assumption that the character is gradually breaking free on their own. The patrolling spider, as I mentioned before, is a neat concept, but it just seems way too likely to cause problems. Having a spider simply spawn in the area once you break free (since that's when it would most likely notice you) and attack you normally should be much easier to implement from what I understand. Heck, make it a high level spider with one piece of rare loot, something that is much easier to run from than fight, but can give some players an *incentive* to get captured multiple times. It kind of makes sense, even: the queen spider of the lair never ventures out on its own, but will try to prevent caught prey from leaving. Thus getting caught and then escaping is a way of luring it out. You could even make a special quest out of it: collect 6 vials of queen spider venom for a certain npc or something like that. If you decide to develop this mod to the max, I remember someone suggesting the ability to let the player use the power of webbing on npcs (granted, this would have to be more like the original mod, where it was mostly a timed effect without struggle options, but you may end up implementing this anyway if you want it to work on followers). Maybe you could have a special quest (like or unlike the one I mentioned just now) give them that power.

 

Like I mentioned before, I have basically no experience with writing scripts for skyrim, but I know my fair share of coding, so I'm trying to make suggestions that are sensible and will hopefully avoid anything too dicey. That said, you clearly do have some experience with skyrim, and you're in charge of the mod (as far as your customization of it at least), so by all means, take what you can or simply want to use, and don't feel bad for tossing whatever else out. You're doing wonderful work for further developing this mod, and I'm quite excited to see what will come of it.

 

EDIT: I had a chance to test your current mod in-depth, and I must say, it works by far the best in my personal experience. The animations works very well. As far as a spider 'spooling' animation, from what I saw, you may not even need one; often, once the player is webbed up, the spider will generally 'walk' into/toward them, which actually makes a fairly convincing animation on its own, especially if the spider approaches from the side. My only comments on this particular stage of the mod, apart from the ever-cursed camera lock which I already know you will fix if you find a way to do so, is that the character slides too easily if pushed. Is there any way to keep the character in one spot? Or is this part of the same issue you are facing with affixing a character model within the caves?

[Kazyn]

Yeah, I actually replaced all my playIdles with SendAnimationEvent. Was one of the best things I learned. Much easier, for sure. Less properties to manage.

 

Stiltzkinator (and everyone else that cares) I've got some programming experience under me but this happens to be my first attempt at making (or rather expanding) a mod, (apart from little gimmicks I wrote for myself) so I have some idea of how I'm going to approach it. You're right, and I've been taking it in steps. Like I said, I can't test or really do anything with the escape from the cave until I can actually get there to test it in the first place. It's quite amusing actually. Really what I have to familiarize myself is probably with the CK itself more than I need to do with scripting. As far as scripting is concerned I just have to learn the vocab and library.

 

But with CK... hoho, whole 'nother ball game I'm afraid. Like, quests... We hear the term quest and think a series of objectives that the player accomplishes to advance some plot point or side story and possibly get some form of reward at the end. But REALLY.... quests do a whole lot more than just that, for example, it runs the whole escape show and enables any actor to fill a role needed for a scenario. For custom races, a quest is used to simply initialize them somehow (I don't know exactly, I haven't looked into it)

 

I guess in this particular case I've got a quest (that isn't shown to the player) where the objective is to escape from their bind, deal with the big-bad-spider, and run.

 

But yep! One baby step at a time!

 

EDIT (In response to your edit): Glad to see you like the mod. As for the spider constantly pushing, I have fixed that in my fade-to-black insta-death version (which I'm postponing because I'd rather deliver a finished product). I just had to adjust the spider to want to be so close. Extend its follow radius out a little bit. I have it run an AIPackage that only becomes valid when the victim is affected by the web effect and it's not in combat (combat overrides packages anyway). Originally, the maximum radius was too low so it pushed the victim around. I just had to extend it out a little bit. I may have to give each size of spider its own package though as the original intent was to get the smaller spiders to stick close enough to the victim. But as you saw, the big ones are... well... bigger! So they like to get real intimate with the current, available, public release.

 

Oh and I don't know if there's a way to "root" the player in place.

 

EDIT 2: I think what I'm going to do is just make a new cave. This means the spider's lair will probably always be the same (though I could release more caves as I feel like it after release) but hey, you let yourself get into the situation. Death/defeat is meant to penalize in some form or another. Welcome to the cave... of spiders! If you can escape, then you get another shot at life, at the cost of being possibly being moved miles away from where you were originally going, but hey! It was meant to set you back anyway!

 

With this new cave (I'll try and make it look as believable as possible, plus I need the practice of level design in the CK anyway) expect it to be relatively small in comparison with other caves it'll have two chambers at maximum. The nice thing about this is that this cave is specifically designed to work with placing the player, the spider guarding the player, and making the attempt to escape (with followers if they make it in there). Hopefully it'll also make falling out the world not so annoying.

[bleeb]

heh, this topic just got quite the influx of lengthy comments eh? awesome to see it re-vitalized. and great to hear you've now gone with the new cave, I think that makes the most sense on all fronts and fits the best. it also sounds like it'll be the easiest for you to do. thanks for clarifying on how it will work too. but I'm curious: how many spiders will there be inside there?

[Kazyn]

To be determined, my friend... to be determined.