Devious Followers - Continued

[Lupine00]

1 hour ago, aspirine2 said:

game is working without the mod ..DF 2.11 working fine ...i ill try again ..

None of the major dialog records has changed, nor any of the start up code; there's no logical reason for 2.12.2 to fail where 2.11 works.

[aspirine2]

9 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

None of the major dialog records has changed, nor any of the start up code; there's no logical reason for 2.12.2 to fail where 2.11 works.

i think it's working now ..may i know where did you know that black screen with sound after loading is a skeleton issue !??

[donttouchmethere]

16 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

NMM

the new excuse for all mod bugs and glitches ?

[Lupine00]

51 minutes ago, donttouchmethere said:

the new excuse for all mod bugs and glitches

Honestly, quoting one word is nonsense.

 

You could also have quoted this:

17 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

I have no problem using it to install mods on my dev machine.

 

[Lupine00]

4 hours ago, aspirine2 said:

may i know where did you know that black screen with sound after loading is a skeleton issue

When I had CTD and other hard-crash issues, I looked for information.

 

The suggestion was that skeleton issues are often the cause of CTD. I found this reported in many places, by many users, some quoting direct experience, others not really explaining how they knew.

 

It is easy to get bad skeleton overwrites if you install old mods, and I had that.

After fixing my skeleton setup, I was able to start my game.

So, the advice seemed useful.

 

Having often repeated this experience of fixing a hard-CTD, or black screen (behind which is usually a SKSE pop-up with a crash report in it), I am confident that it's true that a skeleton problem can definitely cause CTD or failure to start. In fact, apart from one other problem, I have never seen anything else cause those issues.

 

My first thought now, after installing new mods, or making a new setup, and getting a CTD or black-screen, is that somehow a skeleton is overwritten or an old stale animation has been introduced. I think it's the case that if you have animations that cannot match bone-names to the skeleton you have in place, it can crash hard.

 

The one other problem was something ... strange ... in an add-on for Maria Eden, one of the clubs.

That ESP reliably caused CTD for me on start-up, and I never isolated the precise cause.

 

So, other things can cause CTD, but skeleton is easiest to produce.

[jfraser]

I've tried MO and Vortex and didn't care for either. I still use NMM and I've never had any issues with it. Well, except the one time I tried messing with its profiles. Don't use NMM if you want separate profiles. Other than that, I think it works great and I've never understood the hate for it.

[Lupine00]

42 minutes ago, jfraser said:

I've never understood the hate for it.

The problems with NMM are real, but not a big deal for everyone:

• It's very slow to install or uninstall.
• Profiles are unworkably slow and unreliable. Swaps crash, leaving you with little recourse but full reinstall of Skyrim. Fine if you don't use profiles.
• It's sometimes hard to make decisions about file overwrites during an install and any mistake on file overwrites require you to redo the very slow process.
• You can't safely drag and drop files into your installation, but it creates the impression this is safe. Players have to learn the hard way.
• Drag and dropping can result in lingering script files after uninstall that may require a full script delete and reinstall to clean up.

 

So for players wise to the pitfalls, and who don't change their mods a lot, it's effective, and avoids a lot of the pain that MO brings with the ridiculous design of the overwrite folder.

Spoiler

 

I'd guess that almost everyone who has troubles with MO at first has them with generated files, from FNIS, or Requiem, or just about any other mod that writes files.

It's only later that you start to have problems with MO due to the sheer number of mods you have in there, and trying to get some coherency between right and left panes, but to be fair to MO, the issues with overwrites in NMM are far harder to manage.

 

The deeper flaw with MO is the basic rules of the overwrite folder are a horrible hack.

There's only one overwrite folder but multiple profiles.

And it allows file open/modify operations to maintain the file in-place instead of immediately creating an overwrite duplicate, as it should have done.

For years, this caused FNIS issues, with many player unaware that FNIS was performing unwanted updates on its own base files that made FNIS installations non-shareable between profiles.

 

Allowing modify-in-place at all, undermines the concept of separate profiles. Mixing this with a single shared overwrite folder only compounds the problem of cross-profile contamination. Modify in place shouldn't be an option at all, in the sense that all written or modified files should go to specially designated folders that are not shared between profiles unless you explicitly choose to share them. The files in an actual mod installation folder should be frozen, and read only. MO2 sort of delivers this, but keeps the shared overwrite folder, which is incredibly annoying.

 

Overall, the idea of a single-overwrite folder is a poor choice, and it should always have been configurable where a file went on a per-mod and per-profile basis, but I guess MO (1) was never finished. The problem now is that the position taken in MO2 is probably worse and has been dictated by tweaks to a bad design that MO* users have often come to accept as normal, or simply don't understand or care about because they don't write mods and don't deal with file writes all the time.

 

 

[Lupine00]

I've updated the DF development roadmap again.

 

I have simplified the new deals, which will allow them to be done sooner. I'm already working on them - instead of SLAX, sort of.

I don't think any of those new deals were a good enough set to justify a full three stage deal, so they've been split into individual modular deals.

The "classic" deal stacks for the Pet deal and Maid deal still look promising.

 

The introductory deal is also gone as a result, and the clothes deal will come after the others (though it will come).

 

Introductory deals will still be a "thing" but will be done differently.

Introductory deals, assuming you enable them, will be reset on a per-follower basis. New follower means you can restart that process.

 

When you get a new follower, you will be offered the introductory deals before any other deals get offered, but just that once.

Once you've taken (or refused) an introductory deal, it will act exactly like any other deal.

The set of introductory deals will be larger overall, and you will simply tick the ones you want to enable as introductory.

Don't tick any to avoid using introductory rules. Only tier 1/2 modular deals will be available as introductory options, and not all of those.

 

Modular deals will be updated so you know what the deal is before you accept or refuse, though possibly not until after the new deals have been released.

 

 

I'm still thinking about the "lock in" deals idea. Do people like it? Not care? Is it a waste of effort?

I'm thinking it works from "the bottom up", each lock-in on a deal locks the lowest unlocked stage, and the reverse if you want to clear them.

 

Why do I think the lock-in option offers any value? What's the motivation?

The intent is to provide a choice for handling massive debt.

When things are getting out of hand, you can lock-in a bearable deal to get a big cash break.

You've traded difficulty later for immediate relief. You probably shouldn't lock in a harsh deal.

 

 

Gold control has (already) been tweaked so that it's more generous for high willpower characters and harsher for low ones, also simpler and more progressive overall.

It will now determine the gold amount on a curve with a "normal" distribution rather than linearly, so you are much more likely to get an amount somewhere in the middle between min-gold and max-gold than to get an extreme value. That's not quite true for low willpower characters who will still be likely to get min-gold, possibly even more likely than before.

I haven't changed gold control "decay" yet, but I may, as it's overly convoluted.

 

I expect to release the SLAX update before finishing this deal work on DF, but I expect to have a prototype working for myself before I finish SLAX, so they're both happening at once now.

[Xiaron]

The roadmap looks great and I'm looking forward to the new deals! Lock-in looks interesting, though I'm not sure about the addition of a cost other than gold. I think it'll really depend on the scarcity of whatever that request is to see how it works in game. Still sounds fun to test! 

 

I do have a feature request for both the games you're looking at adding in the future and the existing ones. Can you add the ability to toggle off individual games? Currently the only way to avoid them is literally avoid situations triggering them, but that can mean either seriously inconveniencing play, or in some cases pausing DF entirely for long periods. Either because something just isn't my kink, or actually causes game problems. As an example, triggering the Jarl game in Windhelm before I've been there at least once causes lasting problems for me or hangs about 50% of the time since Ulfric is walking all over in a scripted scene. There's no bug or anything, since it works fine after that but it is trouble if I forget to pause DF initially and meet requirements to trigger the game. Whiterun is much the same, though less walking/more conversation. So being able to disable just that game until I've done all the quest related Jarl forcegreets and scenes would be great.

[Xarius]

Ran into some issues:

 

I have 2 followers right now, one of which I wanted to be under the DF umbrella and the other not.  I wanted to get rid of the DF one, so I cleared debt.  However, the other one then immediately became a DF follower.  I bought out that debt, but then it flipped back to the first one.  I managed to dismiss one so this wasn't looping forever.  This auto-swap is undesired, how do I prevent it in the future?

 

I had a problem with dropping this mod in on an existing game (it wins all esp and file conflicts).  The only follower management mod I have is EFF.  The recruitment dialogue wasn't working (the one where you don't have enough gold up front did work).  Normal recruitment worked on a new game that I did to test, so there's probably some conflict somewhere but not really worth the effort to debug unless you already know the fix.  Edit: I dismissed all followers and reset EFF/DF and it works with normal recruitment now on the existing save.

[SkyAddiction]

16 minutes ago, Xarius said:

Ran into some issues:

 

I have 2 followers right now, one of which I wanted to be under the DF umbrella and the other not.  I wanted to get rid of the DF one, so I cleared debt.  However, the other one then immediately became a DF follower.  I bought out that debt, but then it flipped back to the first one.  I managed to dismiss one so this wasn't looping forever.  This auto-swap is undesired, how do I prevent it in the future?

 

I had a problem with dropping this mod in on an existing game (it wins all esp and file conflicts).  The only follower management mod I have is EFF.  The recruitment dialogue wasn't working (the one where you don't have enough gold up front did work).  Normal recruitment worked on a new game that I did to test, so there's probably some conflict somewhere but not really worth the effort to debug unless you already know the fix.

 

There's an MCM option to make a follower never devious. I can't remember, but I think it's in the cheat section? It works based on proximity to the PC, so have your devious follower wait, move a bit away, and use it on your intended non-devious follower. You can also use it before you acquire your intended non-devious follower in the first place. I've no idea what happens if you use it in a crowd or with a devious follower in close proximity though - I've only used it a couple times to set up narratives.

[Xarius]

The popup when using that debug function says it's permanent so I was hoping for a more elegant option.  Looking through the script it adds it to a faction (_DFDisable) so it should be reversible through the console if I change my mind later so that will at least get the desired behavior.

[SkyAddiction]

2 hours ago, Xarius said:

The popup when using that debug function says it's permanent so I was hoping for a more elegant option.  Looking through the script it adds it to a faction (_DFDisable) so it should be reversible through the console if I change my mind later so that will at least get the desired behavior.

 

I don't think that's possible just now, but @Lupine00 might be able to clarify.

[Lupine00]

12 hours ago, Xiaron said:

Can you add the ability to toggle off individual games?

Perhaps a feature for pausing all games will suffice?

The easter-egg nature of the games is at least partially intended, and a toggle for each one would end that.

 

7 hours ago, Xarius said:

when using that debug function says it's permanent so I was hoping for a more elegant option.  Looking through the script it adds it to a faction (_DFDisable) so it should be reversible through the console if I change my mind later so that will at least get the desired behavior.

Yes, it's a faction, it's completely reversible, it's just that there is no MCM capability to do so.

As noted, you can do it via the console using the faction ID.

 

I would like to change it to follower under cursor rather than nearest one day, as the nearest NPC thing is quite clunky and unreliable.

It could say who the NPC is in the MCM too; the existing implementation is pretty eccentric.

Having some kind of list, and allowing you to remove NPCs would be ... nice ... but also take time for something you can do from the console anyway.

 

[Elgate]

Hello. I love this mod. Thought I'd let you know ?

 

On the longer version, this mod for me is amazing. One of my biggest problem is that I do not play skyrim for the DD experience. I like my DD experience to integrate itself in skyrim. That's one of the reason I always had a hard time with DCL, it takes you mid dungeon and tell you "go fuck yourself, now you go back, crawling on all four and do nothing for the next hour".

Your mod seamlessly integrate itself in skyrim, adding an extra mechanic, adding to the experience rather than taking away. Even better, I usually rush the content of these mods, as I want to discover what they're about, but it usually end up becoming repetitive. Fortunately, this one has managed to hit where it work: Optimization. This mod does not reward going fast in it, It reward going slow and steady. Taking deals when you accumulate debt. You can get all the deal right from the start. But then you'd waste the money. "Player will optimize the fun out of the game", but here, optimizing is the game. A beautiful balance.

 

I do have a few gripe with the mod, but very minor. One of which can be fixed with other mods, I'm just not yet sure which one I should use (open to suggestions).

First problem: Waste. I would like to be able to have a very slight negative debt. Not much, just so that you can take a debt when your follower get bored before you get one too many tick of increased debt without wasting money.

Second: the debt become too steep to be able to catch up with merchants. Not "It's too much I can't make enough money" but rather "it's too much, the merchants can't refill their money fast enough". That one can be solved with richer merchants. I'm still looking for a mod for that. not sure which one I can take without causing troubles with Ordinator.

 

Thanks for the amazing work ?

 

[UnEvenSteven]

The Lock-In Deal idea seems interesting and I like the idea of it requiring a high amount of gold plus valuable items to buy out of it.

 

If I'm reading it correctly could Lock-In deals be used to eliminate or significantly reduce daily debt? For example if your debt is 400 gold every 24 hours and a Lock-In deal removes 300 gold then your daily debt would only be 100 gold? If that's the case then Lock-In deals could be use to bring runaway debt under control or just keep debt low so the gold that was saved can be used elsewhere. You just pay (heavily) to remove the deal later.

 

[Rolgar]

11 minutes ago, Elgate said:

Hello. I love this mod. Thought I'd let you know ?

 

On the longer version, this mod for me is amazing. One of my biggest problem is that I do not play skyrim for the DD experience. I like my DD experience to integrate itself in skyrim. That's one of the reason I always had a hard time with DCL, it takes you mid dungeon and tell you "go fuck yourself, now you go back, crawling on all four and do nothing for the next hour".

Your mod seamlessly integrate itself in skyrim, adding an extra mechanic, adding to the experience rather than taking away. Even better, I usually rush the content of these mods, as I want to discover what they're about, but it usually end up becoming repetitive. Fortunately, this one has managed to hit where it work: Optimization. This mod does not reward going fast in it, It reward going slow and steady. Taking deals when you accumulate debt. You can get all the deal right from the start. But then you'd waste the money. "Player will optimize the fun out of the game", but here, optimizing is the game. A beautiful balance.

 

I do have a few gripe with the mod, but very minor. One of which can be fixed with other mods, I'm just not yet sure which one I should use (open to suggestions).

First problem: Waste. I would like to be able to have a very slight negative debt. Not much, just so that you can take a debt when your follower get bored before you get one too many tick of increased debt without wasting money.

Second: the debt become too steep to be able to catch up with merchants. Not "It's too much I can't make enough money" but rather "it's too much, the merchants can't refill their money fast enough". That one can be solved with richer merchants. I'm still looking for a mod for that. not sure which one I can take without causing troubles with Ordinator.

 

Thanks for the amazing work ?

 

I had the same issue which was sort of escalated by my lazyness to run to 5 different merchants in the same town in order to get rid of all of the items my char just found, created or enchanted. I did install Rich Skyrim Merchants, since I wanted a really basic mod that only changed the merchants but nothing else. This works pretty good for me, though DF needs to be adjusted in order to match the income you now make. You can find the mod at Nexus https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/85337/

[HexBolt8]

I use Trade and Barter for merchant gold and adjusting trade prices.  With it you can make bartering easier or harder, and adjust it mid-game if gold is coming in too easily.  Beyond that, I like the specific adjustments for specific cities, and bonuses for friend or same-faction status.  It's another tool for tuning player gold income, to balance against DF daily debt. 

[valcon767]

3 hours ago, Elgate said:

I do have a few gripe with the mod, but very minor. One of which can be fixed with other mods, I'm just not yet sure which one I should use (open to suggestions).

First problem: Waste. I would like to be able to have a very slight negative debt. Not much, just so that you can take a debt when your follower get bored before you get one too many tick of increased debt without wasting money.

Second: the debt become too steep to be able to catch up with merchants. Not "It's too much I can't make enough money" but rather "it's too much, the merchants can't refill their money fast enough". That one can be solved with richer merchants. I'm still looking for a mod for that. not sure which one I can take without causing troubles with Ordinator.

 

Thanks for the amazing work ?

 

as Hexbolt8 does i also use Trade & Barter.

it allows mid game changes, allows you to adjust barter rates, merchant gold levels, you can use easy generic settings or custom (city specific) settings.

with it you can adjust the merchants gold, have it so thane/favors help pricing, adjust the master trader perk amount, cost to invest and how much

investing raises the merchants gold supply. it does have and MCM (its not big) and is really easy to use.  in a long term game you will probably end 

up adjusting it about every 20-30 levels or so (after initial adjustments), or at least that has been the way it has worked out for me,

 

side note to help with having merchants be able to buy enough stuff off you you might want to do the Thieves Guild questline, at least partially as that 

can add an additional 4 merchants to RIften (not to mention the Fences around Skyrim).

 

[donttouchmethere]

If all post trade mods here I have to promote one too ?

Spoiler

 

 

[Corsec]

Does anyone know what could be causing this error? It happens shortly after I put the PC into DFC slavery.

 

There are other reports of the same DDi error message for different keywords, but they were due to overwrites of DDi. My version of DDi is not being overwritten by anything.

 

I think it's got something to do with the punishing iron slave boots that are equipped during DFC slavery.

 

Error shown in pic in spoilers below-

Spoiler

 

[Lupine00]

13 hours ago, Elgate said:

I would like to be able to have a very slight negative debt.

You can have up to 200 credit; or to put it another way, negative debt is capped at -200.

That seems like it fits the definition of "very slight".

It does not scale along with everything else, but that seems acceptable.

13 hours ago, Elgate said:

...just so that you can take a debt when your follower get bored before you get one too many tick of increased debt without wasting money.

That could potentially (depending on your deal value) be a large amount of credit.

 

 

There is also a way to maintain a huge credit balance with the follower and not lose money when you buy deals early, but it has its own drawback.

Voluntarily enter gold control. Your follower will not let you accumulate substantial credit.

 

 

13 hours ago, Elgate said:

the debt become too steep to be able to catch up with merchants. Not "It's too much I can't make enough money" but rather "it's too much, the merchants can't refill their money fast enough".

It is well understood that in most games the merchants are the bottleneck to obtaining cash.

You can offset this by travelling to different cities.

Sell in Whiterun, then travel to Riften, do a dungeon on the way, sell there, then head to Windhelm, sell again, then to Solitude, and so on.

 

Another way is simply to factor in that limitation when you set your difficulty curve or high-level debt-per-day.

It was certainly considered when setting the defaults, but it's inevitable that the defaults will work flawlessly for very few games.

All modded games are different.

If it's too hard, simply turn the difficulty down or reduce the debt-per-day by adjusting the other controls you have to play with.

Don't forget that you can reduce the level 1 debt per day, as well as the level 101 debt per day, and at low to medium levels it will make more difference.

 

There are mods that alter how merchants refill their cash, but if you buy speech, and invest, the merchant problem is reduced through normal effort, so I'm not sure they're really needed. In any case, you can come at this a lot of ways. You can also reduce the amount and value of loot you get, so merchants are easily able to buy it. Again, you'd have to adjust daily rate in DF.

 

The tools for adjusting DF should be better now, so you can usually play a game, bear the consequences (good or ill) of the costs set in it, then adjust for a new game, and get an interesting experience.

 

Another way to solve cost issues, and I highly recommend it, is to use Chaos Mode.

It was difficult to get good results with Chaos in the past, but now it's easy, and it adds a certain unpredictability that makes things more exciting.

Should you save that money for a nasty incident with devices, or buy that new spell you want?

 

A bit of Chaos adds spice to any game.

[Tempy]

Unable to find in the tread here, but is the Spanking always voluntary in this version?

 

When the follower boredom is high, the Spank game shows in the dialog but is there a trigger via like a ”force greet” regarding this as well or is it only via voluntary dialog?

[Lupine00]

32 minutes ago, Tempy said:

is the Spanking always voluntary in this version?

Yes. You must ask to be spanked.

 

Even when I add the spanking deal it will still only be on request, but if you don't request often enough, you'll be fined.

 

This way, it will never break your quests, wreck your scenes, or happen at a stupid time.

Other things will still be able to break it of course, but it won't be DF's fault.

 

 

It's not that it's hard to make it forcegreet, or fire off a hello, or even simply use a blocking dialog so you have to do it eventually, it's just that the mechanics that already use those things tend to be more fragile because of it. Because the spanking is something you may actually want to trigger, it seems reasonable that you ask for it.

 

In the next version you will probably be able to thank the follower after being spanked, to gain bonus boredom removal and, of course, resistance loss.

[slicksly]

With 2.12, my DF often fails to provide devices, when taking deals, asking for devices, and using the debug menu to reequip. I am also running Devious Lore lore-patch which renames devices. Is this the probable cause? Is there a workaround, or will any mod changing names mess with device allocation from DF?