Devious Followers - Continued

[Fulgrim_]

42 minutes ago, Lupine00 said:

Alas, no. Classic deals store a single value, which is the deal stage. So, any classic deal at level 3 always includes 1 and 2.

Max rank is a way of capping a classic deal to a lower stage, including zero, which disables the deal completely.

 

Ah, that's a pity. Thanks anyway.

 

And yeah, noticed the second part later after testing it myself.

[crococat]

As now DF is somehow integrated with Lola, would it be good to play this mods together with 2 different followers or better DF will be Lola Master as one person?

[ShalaxiHelbane]

31 minutes ago, crococat said:

As now DF is somehow integrated with Lola, would it be good to play this mods together with 2 different followers or better DF will be Lola Master as one person?

My understanding is that you can do the 2 follower option this with a follower framework.

[Herowynne]

13 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

Nobody has anything to say about 2.14.0, so I guess it's super-bug-free? ?

 

I downloaded it, converted it to SE, and installed it, but I haven't had enough play time yet to begin testing it. Don't worry, I will get to it. ?

[Herowynne]

4 hours ago, Fulgrim_ said:

I have a question about the deals (sorry if it has been asked before): is it possible to have only the 3rd stage without the previous 2 (e.g. I'd like to have the "be a whore deal", but am not a fan of plugs or the whore outfit), or would it break something?

 

3 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

Alas, no. Classic deals store a single value, which is the deal stage. So, any classic deal at level 3 always includes 1 and 2.

 

My biggest wish for this mod is to make each of the Classic deal stages into its own separate modular deal, and "flatten" the whole modular deal concept into a unified pool of modular deals that would allow individual enable/disable for every modular deal, without needing level 1,2,3 for modular deals.

 

Would also need to be able to turn off Classic deals entirely. Then DFC would behave more like SubLola in that the player could choose all the possible events and behaviors from the Devious Follower before recruiting them. That would be awesome! ❤️

[Anunya]

1 hour ago, Herowynne said:

 

I downloaded it, converted it to SE, and installed it, but I haven't had enough play time yet to begin testing it. Don't worry, I will get to it. ?

 

Would you be good enough to share your conversion? I'm pretty keen to give it a go, but I don't know how to do the conversion...

[Anunya]

2 hours ago, Herowynne said:

 

 

My biggest wish for this mod is to make each of the Classic deal stages into its own separate modular deal, and "flatten" the whole modular deal concept into a unified pool of modular deals that would allow individual enable/disable for every modular deal, without needing level 1,2,3 for modular deals.

 

Would also need to be able to turn off Classic deals entirely. Then DFC would behave more like SubLola in that the player could choose all the possible events and behaviors from the Devious Follower before recruiting them. That would be awesome! ❤️

 

Yeah, I'm completely with you on that one. Of course I'm not the one who has to do the work, but from my perspecitve it would be ideal.

[nomkaz]

On 4/26/2021 at 5:39 PM, HexBolt8 said:

It depends on which part of the name change that you want.  Simply changing the PC's name is a simple script command.  A mod could read the player's preferred changed name from a json file, or the MCM could read it from a pop-up text field.  But that only changes the PC's name, which you don't see much except for the character info screen and save file names.

 

If you want the follower to address you by the changed name, that doesn't work because text replacement in Skyrim does not apply to NPC speech (presumably because all NPC speech in vanilla Skyrim is voiced, but player speech is not).  Hence, in vanilla Skyrim you're called "Dragonborn", a fixed name.  If a mod only has a few lines that would use the new name, it could hard-wire a set of name choices and let the player choose from a drop-down list.  However, that's a fair amount of work for the mod author, and a fixed list is likely to disappoint many players.  So this kind of name change generally isn't practical unless players are okay with a single fixed name.

Even something generic like "pet" or "toy" just to not step on Submissive Lola's toes, would be a bit more immersive, as in RL BDSM relationships, a name change is a given most of the time.

[Lupine00]

3 hours ago, Herowynne said:

My biggest wish for this mod is to make each of the Classic deal stages into its own separate modular deal, and "flatten" the whole modular deal concept into a unified pool of modular deals that would allow individual enable/disable for every modular deal, without needing level 1,2,3 for modular deals.

 

Doing that requires completely removing the old classic deals and making new semi-modular deals that can take a defined deal-set at each stage.

I thought that was how modular deals should have worked when first implemented, but it's not how it is.

 

The problem with doing that, is it's a big heap of work that once again delivers no new content to players, and we've gone a long time without much new content addition.

Some deals have been added, and they do bring some new content, and the Jarl game, and some other scenes have been redone, so they are refreshed, but the mod needs genuine new stuff to keep some freshness for existing users.

 

In terms of tweaking what's there, I think the high value items now are aggressive deal-making by the follower, and personality-driven deal selection.

 

The first would mean low willpower would create an immediate risk of being pushed into deals if you are close to enough debt to justify a deal.

 

The second would give followers more of their own personality, but primarily it would address the issue of deal conflicts locking people out of the "story" they want.

 

Both of these are a lot less work that another overhaul of the core deal mechanics, and would make an obvious difference. Also they'd mitigate some of the problems with the classic deal conflicts.

 

 

However, adding some modular deal equivalents for classic deal stages that currently lack them is definitely worthwhile, as it would work with the personality system to get very close to the outcome people are looking for from an overhaul of the classic deals.

 

 

The next month, I plan to take a break from DFC - barring some urgent bug - and sort out SLAX issues that have been hanging around for over a year.

 

While I have plans for SLAX work extending through July - and that probably means it will take much longer - I don't plan to focus exclusively on it beyond the end of May. DFC development will resume in some form in June.

[Anunya]

I think the personality system development happened while I was away from Skyrim and LL. Would someone point me to any information on it? Because I'm pretty stoked about it

[Herowynne]

4 hours ago, Anunya said:

Would you be good enough to share your conversion?

 

@nomkaz has posted the official SE a conversion for 2.14.0 Devious Followers - Continued SE - Adult Mods - LoversLab

[Lupine00]

7 minutes ago, Herowynne said:

official

It's certainly appreciated, but it's not official. Anyone can make a conversion and I don't think that "official" is an appropriate term here. What would it even mean?

 

I intend to release my own SE version quite soon, and that may (or may not) be "official", depending on your point-of-view, but it will at least be supported in some sense, which is what matters, I think?

[Lupine00]

25 minutes ago, Anunya said:

I think the personality system development happened while I was away from Skyrim and LL.

It's mostly invisible to players at this point, but the stats are there on followers now.

There's more information in the API documentation in my blog.

 

Currently, the main thing using it is SLTR slavery durations and target submission.

There is some minor use of it in boredom and fatigue updates, and in some other "randomly" determined things that it can bias.

 

Going forward, there will be unique dialogs and the way of handing out deals based on personality - but that's definitely not in right now.

[Herowynne]

4 minutes ago, Lupine00 said:

It's certainly appreciated, but it's not official.

 

My bad. I will revise my description.

[Lupine00]

11 minutes ago, Herowynne said:

My bad. I will revise my description.

I just don't want to say that one conversion is better than another, because I really don't know - though probably they're all the same.

[Pinute]

21 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

It doesn't solve the basic issues with SE.

1) it's a whole new world and you have to invest massive time - maybe more time than in LE - to get to a good point.

2) unfinished CPU physics. In 2021.

 

You know, I dropped in to tell you I'd been re-encouraged about LE when you said you had just one reliable crash, a 90M blob of something. I also had one reliable crash that would hit every 5 minutes for days or not at all for hours on end. That's the one that drove me to SE and Lexy's build which took me at least 80+ hours spread over a month to complete and debug, then even more time culling what I didn't want and adding new. So yeah, it was a huge time investment. I run a slightly truncated version of her environment mod selection on a 2060 super [edit: and 9400F] (lesser trees and LOD) using Silent Horizons and the environment is 50fps+ gorgeous. I spent hours on the Lexy build just riding around looking looking for new viewpoints. It's now gussied up with Arthmoor and JK everything for a Legacy play through. I've promised myself one for years. But you're right also, some objects up close don't have near the sharpness and clarity that LE's ENBs offer and SMP is abandonware. I use it on just a few objects on screen at the same time.

 

Oh, and my LE build? I went back to basics, started over and tracked my last tooth grinding crash down to a footsteps mod I'd trusted and been using for years. Who'd a thunk. So now I have the worst of both worlds. Keep my head down in LE or my eyes on the horizon with SE ?

[Crota]

How often does the forced devious follower event occur? I have 0 willpower and am walking around town but no guards interact with me to pick a follower.

[Lupine00]

54 minutes ago, Crota said:

I have 0 willpower and am walking around town but no guards interact with me to pick a follower.

At that willpower, you need to at least be wearing a lockable device - but not already in heavy bondage as that blocks the guard's cuffs.

 

Usually it's the reverse, playing complaining that it happened  

 

If you meet the conditions, and your guards aren't being overridden by some other mod's rude high-priority quest, they should trigger on approach, or after a few second of standing around. It shouldn't take too long.

[Lupine00]

3 hours ago, PInute said:

But you're right also, some objects up close don't have near the sharpness and clarity that LE's ENBs offer

I'm still trying to figure out exactly how SE manages to be so different, or what it is that LE is doing that SE can't.

I'm aware that LE ENBs are customized - somewhat - for different object types, but my suspicion is that it matters most for skin.

The SE ENB (I believe) can't (usually) replace all the shaders for objects that it didn't render itself (like flares), and is limited to applying additional transforms on top of vanilla shaders - and I mean transforms in the very loosest sense here, but mainly color remapping and screen space light and shadow effects. 

 

The resulting differences in SE images are more pervasive than just skin though.

Spoiler

In situations where you have a heavy tint or color cast, SE and LE can start to look a lot more alike, to the point where you might not know one from another. It's like applying an image-damaging color-cast is the only thing that SE "volumetric lighting" is achieving, so if you deliberately apply an overwhelming color cast, SE's "damage" is masked.

 

It's visible in the comparison I posted above: SE tends to produce objects that have a monochromatic look. The orc skin looks like an old fashioned vertex color multiplier was applied to create it, filtering out every tone but green. The road is the same, but all yellow, and the grass is all tends towards the same hue of green. Cranking up a vibrancy filter mitigates it a little, but there's a limit to that.

 

That's a bit of an oversimplification, but it does look like there's something in the SE shaders that operates at the object level, so everything using the same material set in a given NIF ends up looking more similar than it should.

 

However, I believe that NLA ENB for SE decompiles the original shaders to modify at least some of them. But maybe I'm mistaken, as some of those SE images in my comparison are from NLA and it seems to have the same kinds of issue as every other LE ENB. Maybe a little less in some cases. If you pick stuff with heavy color casts, it looks very close to LE.

 

There are other icky features in SE ENBs that you can simply disable, such as the sharpening filter with unsharp mask, or the garish star and anamorphic lens flares that can work in a single carefully crafted screenshot image but are ridiculously intrusive in an actual game. LE ENBs have these things but usually have the sense to default them off.

 

Overall, LE seems to be richer and more colorful, and with better rendition of fog and mist effects. In LE they add depth to the image, in SE they just wash it out.

 

Maybe the answer is to give up and just play with weather/environment setup that puts an extreme color cast on everything? It doesn't all have to be the same cast...

 

If you have a nice SE ENB setup, could you post all the ENB files that are different from the base Silent Horizons install, along with info on weather, fog, sky LO, etc?

 

I think the Obsidian weathers that seem like the default chose for SE might be one of the weakest points in the typical SE appearance, which is why I'm going to look at NLA ENB and environment for SE.

 

There's a shortage of SE load order examples that are known non-buggy. There are guides, but they are rarely a specific load order. Just to be sure I have all the (latest) required bug-fix patches would be something.

 

That doesn't even touch on the awkward mess that things like Campfire/Frostfall seem to be in SE (multiple layers of fix mods). My MO produces warnings about them, though they seem to be working, maybe. Or maybe are causing nasty problems?

[bathoz]

The reason I use SE is pure laziness. I can grab a wabbajack layer, and modify from a decent starting point. There just aren't those "kick start" installs for LE.

[Lupine00]

1 hour ago, bathoz said:

I can grab a wabbajack layer, and modify from a decent starting point.

Strange, there's no reason there couldn't be.

[darkfender666]

Any way to install latest version in a run using 2.13.14 if i first remove clean the save?

[itami_no_hana]

I have a question about "Hardcore" option that locks the MCM. Is it really forever or just until you dismiss the follower? 

If it is really locking the MCM forever, will the future updates (say, adding some new sliders) unlock it?

Lupine00, have you considered adding an option to lock MCM only until the end of the contract? It would be more immersive and fun this way

[Anunya]

56 minutes ago, Herowynne said:

 

@nomkaz has posted the official SE a conversion for 2.14.0 Devious Followers - Continued SE - Adult Mods - LoversLab

 

Thank you!

[Lupine00]

2 hours ago, glebbus13 said:

If it is really locking the MCM forever, will the future updates (say, adding some new sliders) unlock it?

Lupine00, have you considered adding an option to lock MCM only until the end of the contract? It would be more immersive and fun this way

Haha. No. Yes. No. Erm... I made it impossible to turn off via the MCM a little bit as a joke.

Actually you can unlock it very easily via the console, but I think you should have to go through that if you are a UI-locker type of person, to remind you that you locked it and you shouldn't cheat yourself.