quest The Trappings of Fate

[Mister X]

2 hours ago, zarantha said:

And now we have SkyClimb! Just a small reminder that the EVG stuff would be great with this mod, and we'd love to see it!   

 

That reminds me of the climbing mechanics of PUBG ^^

[Frayed]

On 7/27/2023 at 9:09 AM, jet41 said:

Wow, what a beautiful little DD gem i have been missing. Absolutely loved it.

 

Had a few crashes after activating bed and loading, but it is most likely somethig on my end. Otherwise it just worked.

Also, my survival girl went in half hungry already and struggled a bit. Maybe add bedroll and interactable sweetroll? Captor said our fun-time will last for days after all.

 

Impressive use of skyrim engine. Captor is actualy quite hot, despite being mostly vanilla elf, CG. On the other hand, daedra guy is boring default, maybe make him ghost or something to spice it up?

And Generated voice is great, sounds like a real thing and fits nicely.

So many amazing details, had blast with it. Thank you

 

Very much looking toward next update. Do you know if I'll be able to continue where i left of or new save will be required?

 

Thanks! I answered the new save question earlier here with a "Yes, new save is needed" for technical reasons, but I've thought about it a bit since then and I suspect it's not actually a hard requirement. It's still a bad idea to upgrade if you're in the middle of part 1, but if you've finished A Snare to Loosen already, part 2 is mostly additions so it should work properly.

 

I'll add some basic food & drink and a bedroll for the survival people, yeah. Good suggestion.

 

On 8/1/2023 at 5:41 AM, zarantha said:

And now we have SkyClimb! Just a small reminder that the EVG stuff would be great with this mod, and we'd love to see it!   

 

Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm still kind of confused which part about a mod where the PC is tied up and takes place in three small rooms makes you think a movement animation mod is such a good fit ? But for what it's worth, part 2 has some spots where it might fit, so I am considering it. I just don't want to make it a hard requirement, since it'd break LE compatibility and I want to keep this mod's requirements light. I could make it an optional patch, or I could make some scripts that detect whether the mod is installed and place the appropriate EVG markers with PlaceAtMe... I'll think about it.

 

SkyClimb is a sequence breaking nightmare, though ? Great mod, but the whole "you can't climb this ledge so you must go around" thing is everywhere in Skyrim, and it's used a lot to make sure players can only go one way. I bet climbing previously unclimbable ledges can mess up a number of quests... It's a great, fun, and dangerous thing to give players more mobility!

[recroid366]

Just want to say this is by far the best quest mod I have played, very very eager to play the 2nd chapter, I do hope it is longer than the first chapter 

 

[zarantha]

11 hours ago, Frayed said:

Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm still kind of confused which part about a mod where the PC is tied up and takes place in three small rooms makes you think a movement animation mod is such a good fit

 

Lol, I was actually thinkin the bit where you have to jump in part 1. I've actually jumped on top of the wardrobes indoors, and it worked out pretty well. so it's possible indoors. And it's a fair point about the sequence breaking, so some self restraint will be needed. Up to you though, and if you can't include it, that's fine too. I was just excited for the potential.  
 

Spoiler

i.e, using the skyclimb mod to jump/vault to the top of the cart instead of hoping you're lined up right and jump just right to get to the top of it to do the next jump. 
 

 

Edited August 3, 2023 by zarantha

[Zaflis]

1 hour ago, zarantha said:

 

Lol, I was actually thinkin the bit where you have to jump in part 1. I've actually jumped on top of the wardrobes indoors, and it worked out pretty well. so it's possible indoors. And it's a fair point about the sequence breaking, so some self restraint will be needed. Up to you though, and if you can't include it, that's fine too. I was just excited for the potential.  
 

  Reveal hidden contents

i.e, using the skyclimb mod to jump/vault to the top of the cart instead of hoping you're lined up right and jump just right to get to the top of it to do the next jump. 
 

 

Is the climbing mod DD aware though, and what would it take to make a patch? It would be responsibility of DD framework, not this mod i presume. We don't want every mod implement their own.

[Frayed]

15 hours ago, zarantha said:

Lol, I was actually thinkin the bit where you have to jump in part 1. I've actually jumped on top of the wardrobes indoors, and it worked out pretty well. so it's possible indoors. And it's a fair point about the sequence breaking, so some self restraint will be needed. Up to you though, and if you can't include it, that's fine too. I was just excited for the potential.  
 

  Reveal hidden contents

i.e, using the skyclimb mod to jump/vault to the top of the cart instead of hoping you're lined up right and jump just right to get to the top of it to do the next jump. 
 

Ahh, that makes sense. Yeah, that bit would benefit from a nice interactable marker, true. I might mess around with it once part 2 is done. If I can add it as an completely optional auto-detect I'll probably add it. But later ?

 

14 hours ago, Zaflis said:

Is the climbing mod DD aware though, and what would it take to make a patch? It would be responsibility of DD framework, not this mod i presume. We don't want every mod implement their own.

Neither EVG Animated Traversal (EVGAT) nor Skyclimb (which seems to use EVG's markers & animations) are DD-aware at the moment from what I can tell, and most animations have arm movement so they don't play nice with e.g. armbinders. However, it doesn't look too difficult to patch. EVGAT basically just adds furniture markers with animations. The animations could be replaced dynamically by DD-appropriate ones via a DAR/OAR patch, and I think you could probably find a way to block e.g. high ledge furniture from being interactable when certain devices are worn. I think something like that is already done in DD for e.g. alchemy tables, though I don't know how that's done and if it's extendable to other furniture. Skyclimb seems to do the ledge detection via a DLL, but its handling of the actual climbing is done by spawning one of EVGAT's markers and some simple papyrus scripting, so possibly patching EVGAT would patch Skyclimb, too.

 

Definitely would be something for an optional patch of DD itself though, yes!

[Lance88]

just finished (part 1?) and i must say it was fantastic experience, from the way the hints were implemented to the general setup and story. Great mod, looking forward to the next part.

[Lilith Bloodmoor]

Hi there,

I finally had the time to play this mod and I just wanted to thank you for your work. I really enjoyed it.

Also from it seems very well made as I hadn't any bugs what so ever. Everything worked like a charm.

 

Keep up the good work. Can't wait for part 2.

[Zaflis]

On 8/3/2023 at 11:06 PM, Frayed said:

most animations have arm movement so they don't play nice with e.g. armbinders.

It's not about animations, but that one cannot climb with heavy bondage or probably not with hobble dresses or ankle chains either. No new animations are needed. Maybe chance to fall with blindfold, gloves or mittens.

Edited August 9, 2023 by Zaflis

[TikiWikiTam]

Just finished this quest and absolutely loved it. Thank you! Can't wait to play your future mods. 

[arfrr]

Any chance of getting the beta test version of the second part this month?

[Frayed]

On 8/9/2023 at 10:45 PM, Zaflis said:

It's not about animations, but that one cannot climb with heavy bondage or probably not with hobble dresses or ankle chains either. No new animations are needed. Maybe chance to fall with blindfold, gloves or mittens.

There's nothing in either EVG Traversal or Skyclimb at the moment that checks for it. Both mods do I think have some Papyrus scripts that could be patched / hooked into. For instance, EVG Traversal has activators for all of its objects, which call the script EVGActivateAnim:

Scriptname EVGActivateAnim extends ObjectReference

Event OnActivate(ObjectReference akActivator)
	Self.GetLinkedRef().Activate(akActivator)
EndEvent

Probably you/I/we/your cat could just add some checks for DD keywords here and only activate the linked ref if it's DD-allowed. Adding falling and such would be harder, I think. I don't think it's possible to interrupt a furniture animation once it's started, but I'm not sure.

 

On 8/10/2023 at 3:48 AM, TikiWikiTam said:

Just finished this quest and absolutely loved it. Thank you! Can't wait to play your future mods. 

Thanks ?

 

4 hours ago, arfrr said:

Any chance of getting the beta test version of the second part this month?

Low. Still lots of stuff to do. I've been grinding away at it and I'm still making decent progress, but as I've said before, I'm not going to burn myself out on it. Nobody would benefit from that. I know y'all want part 2 ASAP, but I also think y'all would actually prefer part 2 to be good. ?

 

I can give y'all another teaser image, though. And I suppose I can start referring to part 2 by the name of the quest that comprises it: The Gordian Bind.

Spoiler

I've been playing through the Dragonborn DLC again to get some inspiration and scout for some useful assets/scripts/ideas to use, and I actually found myself quite impressed at the Apocrypha dungeons in that DLC. They all have some unique gimmicks and most are pretty fun, and there is some seriously great lighting design in some places. I also really love the confusing visuals of the moving, extending and contracting hallways. Anyway, there will not be a full-blown apocrypha dungeon in The Gordian Bind, but I did get to make use of a lot of stuff from the Dragonborn DLC. Make of that what you will ?

Edited August 11, 2023 by Frayed

[Viri1]

3 hours ago, Frayed said:

The Gordian Bind.

 

The name suggests that the linear way to escape is laborious or outright impossible, but that there will be an out-of-the-box solution if one explores or thinks long enough. Sounds promising.

[isee]

6 hours ago, Frayed said:

I've been playing through the Dragonborn DLC again to get some inspiration and scout for some useful assets/scripts/ideas to use, and I actually found myself quite impressed at the Apocrypha dungeons in that DLC

I always thought those where really cool dungeons, although they did have the effect of making me not want to complete the DLC fully ever again. Though that was mainly the fault of it being the last DLC for Skyrim. It reminded me of the old Oblivion dungeons where sometimes the correct path was a small strip of land surrounded by lava.

 

The optical illusions and moving platforms where something I honestly didn't think Gamebryo could pull off, whoever designed those pieces was a wizard, and I was even more surprised at how little mod makers did with the new assets. They seemed like a proof of concept that one dev put together, and then was never really used for anything.

 

Although I suppose Starfield might be using some of those perspective tricks for the 'space flights.'

 

6 hours ago, Frayed said:

...but I did get to make use of a lot of stuff from the Dragonborn DLC.

To be fair a jumping puzzle while in an armbinder or something similar sounds fun, particularly if the platforms are moving. Add in a blindfold to reduce visibility...Well actually in Apocrypha the blindfold might be a safety feature, protecting your fragile mind from knowledge best left unknown. The armbinder too so that you don't accidently check out a book from the library. Maybe a tight dress and some heels so that you don't wander too far from the exit...I mean really she's just concerned for your safety while you are in the realm of the omniscient mass of tentacles and eyes.

 

Takes a short portal through the realm of Apocrypha while tightly bound, and strung up for display. Dozens of pieces of 'literature' are created from thin air as you pass through. Probably for the best that you don't see all of the new smut written about yourself.

 

The literature then 'travels' back in time to the mage who then gets 'inspired' to make it happen.

[Burtchin]

Apocrypha is an insanely good art design, and one that is very exciting to me. It's almost a dream come true to use these assets and this theme in a DD setting. Thank you so much! Looking forward to it.

 

And yes despite all the excitement being shared here, I'm sure we'd all rather wait for a more polished result

 

PS. I hope you'll make some use some of the Apocrypha sounds. They're very stirring.

Edited August 14, 2023 by Burtchin

[ypX3A]

Hi when i am about to start the pillory fun, i have a message that an animation is missing. 

But i can t tell which one. I get quick message DDc missing.

And the deadra just stays there 

Thanks

[Zaflis]

17 hours ago, ypX3A said:

Hi when i am about to start the pillory fun, i have a message that an animation is missing. 

But i can t tell which one. I get quick message DDc missing.

And the deadra just stays there 

Thanks

DD-Contraptions and all the rest is included in the DD 5.2 All-In-One download. You might have installed some old DD files.

[ypX3A]

4 minutes ago, Zaflis said:

DD-Contraptions and all the rest is included in the DD 5.2 All-In-One download. You might have installed some old DD files.

Thanks it sorted was missing ZAZ animation to registered. 

[Frayed]

Figured I'd post another teaser & progress update: I think I've got about 35% of The Gordian Bind in it's near-final state, another 50% mostly complete but in need of various amounts of polish, and some 15% (the finale) still to make. Most of the work left is getting a bunch of rough puzzle prototypes from a "working" state to a "working robustly and fun" state, and writing and re-writing a bunch of dialogue until it makes sense.

 

Honestly, getting the dialogue right is kicking my ass at the moment and is the main reason progress is slow. If I make any more story mods in the future, I'm gonna stick to simpler stories ? .

 

Getting the quest to balance the right level of player and character consent is also an interesting challenge. Inherently, a story that has you getting abducted and tied up is going to have elements of non-consent, but I've seen from people's feedback on A Snare to Loosen that there's various levels of what people - players, not characters - are okay with (which makes total sense). So I'm also thinking about ways to account for a player's preferences (which may not necessarily be their character's preferences!). I stumbled across one of @Lupine00 blog posts that has some discussions on a similar topic about player vs character punishment and reward. I'll save the rest of my thoughts about the topic for a future post, preferably closer to or after The Gordian Bind hits beta, but I figure I'd link the post since it's interesting.

 

Below is this post's teaser, in which you'll see an area hiding a puzzle that I'm rather pleased with.

 

Spoiler

 

[calcolo]

On 9/4/2023 at 11:29 PM, Frayed said:

Figured I'd post another teaser & progress update: I think I've got about 35% of The Gordian Bind in it's near-final state, another 50% mostly complete but in need of various amounts of polish, and some 15% (the finale) still to make. Most of the work left is getting a bunch of rough puzzle prototypes from a "working" state to a "working robustly and fun" state, and writing and re-writing a bunch of dialogue until it makes sense.

 

Honestly, getting the dialogue right is kicking my ass at the moment and is the main reason progress is slow. If I make any more story mods in the future, I'm gonna stick to simpler stories ? .

 

Getting the quest to balance the right level of player and character consent is also an interesting challenge. Inherently, a story that has you getting abducted and tied up is going to have elements of non-consent, but I've seen from people's feedback on A Snare to Loosen that there's various levels of what people - players, not characters - are okay with (which makes total sense). So I'm also thinking about ways to account for a player's preferences (which may not necessarily be their character's preferences!). I stumbled across one of @Lupine00 blog posts that has some discussions on a similar topic about player vs character punishment and reward. I'll save the rest of my thoughts about the topic for a future post, preferably closer to or after The Gordian Bind hits beta, but I figure I'd link the post since it's interesting.

 

Below is this post's teaser, in which you'll see an area hiding a puzzle that I'm rather pleased with.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Hi there, love the mod, incredible work, can't wait for the next part!

 

Given your problems with dialogue, have you maybe tried using AI to review and improve it? It usually does a decent job if you give them the base to work on, and it can cut down your time investment by acting as an assistant. Feel free to dismiss my advice if you don't like it of course.

[Frayed]

On 9/6/2023 at 9:20 AM, calcolo said:

Hi there, love the mod, incredible work, can't wait for the next part!

 

Given your problems with dialogue, have you maybe tried using AI to review and improve it? It usually does a decent job if you give them the base to work on, and it can cut down your time investment by acting as an assistant. Feel free to dismiss my advice if you don't like it of course.

 

Thanks for the compliments & suggestion ? It's not so much the sentence-to-sentence of the dialogue that gives me trouble as much as it is getting the dialogue to reflect the characters, to fit the tone of the story that I'm going for, to give just enough information to unfold the story organically and to hint but not spoil any puzzle elements. I think AI is by now very good at the former, but I would be impressed if it could help me much with the latter. But who knows? It is pretty good at rewriting sentences to fit a certain style, so it might be worth a try, hmm.

[myhouseatl]

I'm not sure if script lag is causing this or if something else is interfering.  (I have added a couple SL mods since I first played this. Which, the first time worked perfectly.) Now, after teleporting to the bondage room, I'm laying on the ground and suddenly pop up to chains.  No other gear is given or equipped. Trying to escape sends a message that I don't have any gear to escape. (Actually, I think I am hitting the Devious Lore hotkey for the mini escape.  I used that before just fine. The Devious Device hot key doesn't do anything. Edit:  Actually it does work.  Just had to wait a couple min.  Still no gear though.)  I am hanging from the ceiling and get all message boxes, but not in black screen.  I started the mod with 1.2.0.  Never updated. Any idea what I can do to trouble shoot the issue?

 

Edit: I also noticed that after drinking the wine in the Inn that the game...Pauses?  Hitting tab returns it back to the game.  Just a weird observation.

Edit2:  I think it's Public Whore.  Does anyone have that and this installed?

Edited September 16, 2023 by myhouseatl
Added more info

[Zaflis]

4 hours ago, myhouseatl said:

 

If the character is hanging from chains, that's a DD Contraption event. Only way you should get out of that is with Interact key, should be "E" i guess. It is really the only key you are allowed to press, doing something else could glitch it badly in worst case.

 

Kind of similar weirdness can happen with ZAP furnitures when you press movement keys while in them.

Edited September 16, 2023 by Zaflis

[Frayed]

7 hours ago, myhouseatl said:

I'm not sure if script lag is causing this or if something else is interfering.  (I have added a couple SL mods since I first played this. Which, the first time worked perfectly.) Now, after teleporting to the bondage room, I'm laying on the ground and suddenly pop up to chains.  No other gear is given or equipped. Trying to escape sends a message that I don't have any gear to escape. (Actually, I think I am hitting the Devious Lore hotkey for the mini escape.  I used that before just fine. The Devious Device hot key doesn't do anything. Edit:  Actually it does work.  Just had to wait a couple min.  Still no gear though.)  I am hanging from the ceiling and get all message boxes, but not in black screen.  I started the mod with 1.2.0.  Never updated. Any idea what I can do to trouble shoot the issue?

 

Edit: I also noticed that after drinking the wine in the Inn that the game...Pauses?  Hitting tab returns it back to the game.  Just a weird observation.

Edit2:  I think it's Public Whore.  Does anyone have that and this installed?

 

Curious. The order of events in that intro sequence is that it first tries to equip devices, then locks the player into the contraptions, then shows the messages and fades in. So if you're seeing the messages and at some point getting into the contraption, then at least we know the setup sequence wasn't stopped by anything. That means something is probably interfering with the device equip calls. Since things seem to take quite a while for you, I think looking at your papyrus log is probably a good idea. You can post one here and I can have a look, or you can search for the keyword "Fray" in there, see if there's any error messages that contain it and post those.

 

I did change some things about the intro sequence in 1.2.0, and it seems I accidentally removed the FadeOutGame calls. It's still using a fadeout via an ImageSpaceModifier, but for you probably have an ENB that disables those (which I've ranted about before). I'll add it back in next patch. I also seem to have introduced a bug where the intro scene only starts after you hit any button or open and close the menu once after you get teleported. I'm still scratching my head on that one, but I'll try to fix it for v2.

 

The wine thing is probably a result of the fact that drinking it tries to close your inventory screen. Might be that with certain UI mods it doesn't work the same and it keeps you paused. Should be harmless.

Edited September 16, 2023 by Frayed

[myhouseatl]

56 minutes ago, Frayed said:

 

Curious. The order of events in that intro sequence is that it first tries to equip devices, then locks the player into the contraptions, then shows the messages and fades in. So if you're seeing the messages and at some point getting into the contraption, then at least we know the setup sequence wasn't stopped by anything. That means something is probably interfering with the device equip calls. Since things seem to take quite a while for you, I think looking at your papyrus log is probably a good idea. You can post one here and I can have a look, or you can search for the keyword "Fray" in there, see if there's any error messages that contain it and post those.

 

I did change some things about the intro sequence in 1.2.0, and it seems I accidentally removed the FadeOutGame calls. It's still using a fadeout via an ImageSpaceModifier, but for you probably have an ENB that disables those (which I've ranted about before). I'll add it back in next patch. I also seem to have introduced a bug where the intro scene only starts after you hit any button or open and close the menu once after you get teleported. I'm still scratching my head on that one, but I'll try to fix it for v2.

 

The wine thing is probably a result of the fact that drinking it tries to close your inventory screen. Might be that with certain UI mods it doesn't work the same and it keeps you paused. Should be harmless.

I'm not sure what fixed it but, I found some patches here that I added.  OAR patch, DD XML's, DD Gag NPC Fix and ZadExpressionNativeLibs.  Tried again and it started working. 

 

One other thing. Probably out of the scope of your mod; I have 3BBB and CBPC.  When trying to select 3bbb, I get a message that I need to change the slot for 3BBB.  Selecting the DD compatible slot, or any other slot will still give me the same message.  It will tell me what item is on that slot.  Mittens or some other item blocks it.

Edited September 16, 2023 by myhouseatl