[Search] a detailed combat log mod

[nilead]

Practicly, need a balancing tool. There is alot of effects that affect damage taken/dealt in modded skyrim. Wich is cool, giving all sort of things impact, gameplay meaning.

It also, unfrotunately, means that its very hard to balance. One thing that would greatly help would be a CRPG style combat log, but practicly - anything that would show exact damage calculation for a given hit.

[traison]

By a "given hit" do you mean you hit someone with a sword and it produces one log entry? That as far as I know does not exist as a concept in the game itself. What I mean by that is that say you have an enchanted sword and hit someone with it it will, to my knowledge, actually raise the OnHit even twice: once for the sword and once (or more) for the enchantment.

 

I had a quick look at the OnHit event in papyrus and it does not provide damage numbers. So that's pretty much out of the question. A mod that does however is Floating Damage, but its an SKSE plugin. Looking at the source suggests it is polling the health every frame (or every time Render is called). So depending on what you want, and what your definition of a hit is, this may work. It may also be very missleading as you may see for instance the flames spell doing 9 damage, when in reality what happened was 3 separate 3 damage hits that occured between 2 calls to Render.

 

Now, granted the Floating Numbers mod is not a log. It may work for your needs here, if not then the source code would need to be changed. I'd imagine shoving some file io into the ActorData::SetDamage function and writing down the UInt32 damage argument passed to it should be quite easy. Getting the source of the damage, if that is needed, in there is a different thing entirely however.

Edited September 13, 2022 by traison

[nilead]

4 hours ago, traison said:

By a "given hit" do you mean you hit someone with a sword and it produces one log entry? That as far as I know does not exist as a concept in the game itself. What I mean by that is that say you have an enchanted sword and hit someone with it it will, to my knowledge, actually raise the OnHit even twice: once for the sword and once (or more) for the enchantment.

  I hoped for something like a full damage breakdown, something akin to this:

Hit for 154: 21 base (weapon ID) * A (weapon skill multiplier) * B(Effect modfying your damage n1 ID), *C(Effect modfying your damage n2 ID) .... +EnchDmg (Ench ID) ...etc.

To see exact calculation behind a number, how different effects stack together - additive/multiplicative, sequence of their application and so on.

If i understand you correctly, such a tool, even hypotetical, is not possible due to how basic hit function works.

  Wich is a bit disappointing, meaning its back to trial and error number tweaking. Nevertheless, thank you very much for an exhaustive answer.

[belegost]

If you would like to know the formulas behind damage calculations, you can find them on uesp.net in Skyrim:Weapons category.

[nilead]

6 hours ago, belegost said:

you can find them on uesp.net in Skyrim:Weapons category.

 Thanks, that actually helps. It still leaves the question of exactly how different mod modifires are catergorized, and if they follow the formula or applied post-factum to final number. But at least provides a proper picture of how basis works.