Arachnophobia

[Kazyn]

The test build is exactly what it is: A test build. Use at your own risk. I am aware of the issue occurring in the cave at this time and am working on possible solutions to fix it. Until then you may either want to hold off on using this mod, or revert to the old 0.10.1 version until I can remove 0.21 from its testing stages.

[Guest Ediros]

I know about that, this is why I give you my feedback this way the mod is going to develop. Still I will have to keep it on hold for now.

[Kazyn]

Ah ok. A lot of people got confused is all.

[Terra848]

Bug: spiders still attacking me even when i am cocooned 

[Terra848]

Also having few bugs with the spider lair  every time i try press WASD, my char moves into a sort of spasm state as if they can still move in the cocoon, idk if their supposed to be hanging from the ceiling or on the floor like in the previous version

[Kazyn]

in the test build the cave is buggy and I'm aware of it. Still trying to figure out why that is. Rest assured, it is a known problem.

[bleeb]

I haven't had the moving in the cocoon issue, or the attacking in the cocoon issue yet, though I should test for the latter with multiple spiders around, because that happened in the previous version, after I got cocooned

[Terra848]

For some reason my character seems to get cocooned after only getting hit once by a spray or bite attack instead of 2

[bleeb]

couldn't you combine those 3 comments into one post? seems a bit spammy as-is

[Terra848]

Couldn't be bothered

Edit: How was i harassing him? i was just asking whether there was any news?

 

EDIT: You should, see rule n°11. 

http://www.loverslab.com/topic/292-rules/

 

Grumpf.

[Terra848]

and my other 2 comments asking if there was any updates got deleted? hmm k

 

Wasn't meaning to spam but ooookkkk then people is this mod still going on or what?

[bleeb]

It's because filling up the thread with comment after comment is considered spam, they linked the forum rules for you there in the comment they left too.

[Stiltzkinator]

In fact, bleed had already suggested that you use the edit function to condense your messages, which you willfully ignored.

The only person who knows for sure whether or not this mod is still progressing is Kazyn, and I don't think harassing them is going to get you an answer or update any sooner.

[Kazyn]

Stiltz has the right of it, I'm afraid.

 

Speaking of which, I haven't had time to really work on this as I'm going through a move. I hate moving. I won't be in my new place with my desktop (which has things I use to mod with) until the middle of the month.

 

Meanwhile I've still be kicking around ideas. I slowed down on fixing the cave problem mainly because I'm simply not happy with it what so ever. I wish there were more designated spider dens scattered throughout Skyrim... there's like... two total, one of which is literally a cave with a single room (Animal Lair I think it was called), and the other is a cave filled with spiders but also shares room with vampires (Crovangr Cave, located in Eastmarch).

 

Then we have roaming spiders. You come across a spider in say, the Hjaalmarch area, I think the closest place you can go that makes a convincing spider den (rather than doesn't have a section of a dungeon that the player may or may not yet supposed to have access to) MIGHT be the spider den in Markarth that has you kill Nimhe. Again, you're not supposed to have access into there unless you're on the quest if I'm recalling this correctly.

 

This was part of the reason I made a separate dedicated cave myself in northern Whiterun hold. However, I am not willing to make several more caves for each hold or even just a handful more. It's a bit of a tedious process and I've come to dislike editing vanilla cells because I feel like it runs a greater risk of conflict.

 

With all of that said, there are some options I've been tossing around (incoming rant):

 

1) Removing the cave scenario

- This would more than likely upset the current state of the mod in that the victim has nothing to worry about when they get trapped in web. There is no time limit instated. One solution to this would be to have poison gradually ticking away at the victim's health until they died or escaped.

 

- This is a problem though, because even after escape, the poison effect should still persist, which is more than likely pretty darn potent. Secondly, for users of death altering mods (such as myself; I'm an avid Death Alternative fan) that too isn't exactly going to pan out well, so some sort of scenario would still have to be added, but this brings me to another option I've been kicking around:

 

2) Making this mod little more than a Death Alternative plugin

- I know I said that Death Alternative would only ever be optional, and for the most part, this has been true. It's still something I'd like to avoid, but the simplicity of it is looking quite friendly. Someone actually suggested to me that a spider is not going to instantaneously trap somebody in web and wrap them up unless it's an uber spider of some sort (which let's be honest, the Frostbite spiders are pretty darn big). So in most cases this is true. Most spiders subdue their prey first, then while they cannot fight back (or at least barely), the spider will wrap their prey, which also can take some time. However, realism isn't the entire goal here, and I'm reminded of movies like the Hobbit and the third Lord of the Rings where the prey was wrapped in a matter of seconds... It also makes combat more interesting, wouldn't you all agree?

 

So, this is not a likely scenario, but it was something I was kicking around. Is this option a cop-out? Absolutely, but working on this mod has been becoming less and less fun and I want to try modding other things in the near future.

 

3) Making the mod more quest-oriented

- I think I've come a long way in my ability to mod, in that I've made several of my own smaller mods (only one of which I released apart from this one) as an exercise. A few of these mods were me implementing custom characters into my game as NPCs, be they followers or something else. Meanwhile all of their assets (hair, body, eyes, textures, etc) are completely stand-alone. It's actually kind of cool seeing how that was done. So now I run around occasionally with a character from a past play-through at my side.

- Where am I going with this, you ask? Well as an exercise I thought of trying out some sort of NPC antagonist who thrives on having entangled victims brought to them, maybe for sinister magical experiments or something. Haven't really thought that far, meanwhile I could try my hand at random encounters of running into more humanoid NPCs that use their magic to capture victims. This is again, mainly more of a "can I do it?" kind of concept. Meanwhile it could hint at the possibility of a spell becoming available to players to use to entangle their own victims with (it would be reasonably balanced, of course) - as a few of you expressed some interest in.

- However, this sort of thing would probably show up in another mod, as that's not the original focus of this mod, so we'll see.

 

4) The list goes on...

- Okay, not really an option, but that's mainly because there's quite the wall of text going here (by my standards) and those two that I listed above were the ones picking at my brain. I think we can all agree that this isn't a mod you'd probably want in a regular play-through given it's unpredictable nature and overall poorly implemented.

 

 During all of this it got me to thinking about things that could improve and stabilize this mod.

 

One thing I'd really like to see that's beyond my power to do: Some sort of paired animation (maybe a SexLab animation?) where the spider plays a wrapping animation while the spool animation is applied to the victim. This might allow a bit more of a convincing scene rather than someone being rotated magically by a spider that just sits there looking at you. Surprisingly this is actually one of the things that I've come to loathe about this mod: You sit there, rolling in place, while the spider looks at you, or maybe to the left of you, and your web is also sitting there, occasionally instantly transitioning into the next or previous version of the cocoon. To me, it's immersion breaking and I'm ready for this to look a bit better to bring that back in line... or cease development on this work on more appealing mods........

[bleeb]

Great to hear from you again Kazyn! I hope your move goes as well as possible.

 

on the note of your mod status here: it's a shame to hear that you're losing interest in this mod, but I have to say, that's entirely understandable, seeing as you've worked on it for quite a while by now, and I did see that you started several other projects too (good luck on those btw). but I do hope that you leave up the versions that do have the cave scenario, if you get rid of them, even if you move forward into something that doesn't use them anymore, for those that prefer that.

 

that said, I like your idea about the antagonist that likes gathering wrapped up people, but wouldn't that imply he or she also has other npcs cocooned up in his or her lair? I'm no modder, so I'm not sure how difficult that is to implement.

 

for another idea: what about having the spider cocoon you and your follower if you have them with you, and placing you somewhere in the location it caught you in? not sure how that would be to implement though, just throwing ideas out here.

 

another thought: what about making some kind of thick forest grove filled with spider webs and such, as a spider lair, where you are taken to and hung in your cocoon, along with your follower, and any other npcs that may be there? the grove could be located somewhere outside in the vast area of Skyrim, and it seems like you'd have more room to place stuff there. just an idea I thought of, hope it can be of some use to you in some way.

 

and as a last note: are you done with the idea that was thought of ages ago about doing something with Wisp wrapping, and Draugr mummification? I know you released some screens of those ages ago, and I'd love to see something happen with those in a mod if you're up for it. but I bring it up as it seems like it's been dropped, as the references to it and the screens are now buried under many, many pages of comments by now, but I'm just curious.

 

also: oh yeah, I hear you on the note of the spider wrapping animation thing, it would be pretty cool if that could be implemented (a realistic spider wrapping animation), but that seems like that would take a lot of doing, what with all the legs and whatnot, and while that would still be awesome to see, I personally don't think that the way the mod is now really hurts the game any, but I'm not fixated on immersion myself. I mean, plenty of less involved mods, like things like metal bikinis break immersion readily too, but few people complain about those lol. and anyway, hey, it's a mod, not like you HAVE to download it, if you think the mod's not worth the fuss on the grounds of immersion.

 

again, thanks for the update!

[keeperrook]

Hi I was wondering if anyone could help me with a crash I have.  When I get cocooned the texture is a purple color and then when I am about to get carried away it goes to the loading screen and then it freezes and does not load (crashes)  If anyone has any help that would be great

 

also are there any mods that would interfere with this one? 

 

thanks for the help in advance

 

[Kazyn]

This mod modifies the spider's bite and spit attacks. Anything that modifies those spells might conflict accordingly. Meanwhile, the purple texture color is the result of a missing texture for the mesh responsible for the webbing. Check your installation of the ZaZ animation pack. It requires three separate downloads. One for meshes, one for textures, and one as a patch update. Check the downloads from their page and ensure you have the necessary files downloaded and activated in your load order.

[keeperrook]

So I have the textures fixed but the crashing right as the spider drags you back to the cave still happens.  The crash that happens is loading screen then does not respond. 

 

Help anyone?

 

 

NVM fixed I downloaded the old russian version and then uninstalled it and manualy installed your version then took out the files and installed it through NMM and it works now wtf manual install wrote the scripts it needed?

 

anyways anyone has a problem try what I did install it manually then if that does not work install it through a mod program 

 

Cannot believe this worked!

 

 

also great job on the mod love the cave!

[silvership2]

It could be interesting if you incorporated something like if you walk into a certain type of placed web from the mod, you might get slowed and a spider could appear.

[gilgameshmkii]

Good to hear from you, Kazyn. Even if you are not too optimistic.

 

The cavern issues sound indeed very problematic and I think bleeb has the right idea about forest kind of thing, hell it doesn't even have to be a forest. Even a single tree marked as a point of teleportation with spiders spawned around it could be viable, surely getting spawns around marked trees wouldn't be as painful as modyfying existing quest-related caverns which may cause some real issues or adding new caverns which may be silly seeing as skyrim is already a giant series of caverns.

The idea of a villain is very interesting, I had something similar in mind that would be based on the bounty hunter system where a special npc hunts you if your bounty is high enough. Named npc that would use restraining magic - be it a spider cocoon, tight latex or leather 'sleep bag' (could be a retextured cocoon model), some sort of plant vines or just anything devious that comes to mind. A quest could be initiated during dialog after capture where a player would become a part of 'collection' of the villain with other victims around.

Would love to see the wisp wrap and draugr mummyfication at some point but those would definetly be something of a Death Alternative plugin since those scenes probably have no use in combat itself, wouldn't be as hard to implement as the spiders since you could just fade out and let character remain on the spot because draugr and wisps are already in the proper enviroment to them.

The animation for spooling sounds cool but I think this would be hard to implement seeing how getting free from the cocoon is part of the gameplay and this would involve 2 actors in the animation (I don't remember any sex-lab animations working in a form of gameplay), unless they would be working as separate animations in sync with one another.

 

In any case, keep on doing the gods work chief, we believe in you!

 

[Storms of Superior]

Hey, Kayzn! I would like to say that I would love to have Arachnophobia in my load order along with my mod The Coming Black Empire. During the test of that mod, I was also using Arachnophobia, and I found that when the spiders attack in large numbers, it was great for harvesting Frostbite Venom, which, in my mod, can be refined at a cooking pot.

 

This isn't an attempt to promote myself, but hopefully some small encouragement can come out of this; that someone actually is building a mod that can really use it as a resource, even though the main thing about Arachnophobia is that it really is fun when it works.

 

Keep your chin up, people enjoy your mod.

[Kazyn]

Good to hear from you, Kazyn. Even if you are not too optimistic.

 

The cavern issues sound indeed very problematic and I think bleeb has the right idea about forest kind of thing, hell it doesn't even have to be a forest. Even a single tree marked as a point of teleportation with spiders spawned around it could be viable, surely getting spawns around marked trees wouldn't be as painful as modyfying existing quest-related caverns which may cause some real issues or adding new caverns which may be silly seeing as skyrim is already a giant series of caverns.

 

I'd have to go around marking various trees by hand, though I'm not sure I follow you entirely on how this sort of system would work. Feel free to elaborate more if you wish.

 

The idea of a villain is very interesting, I had something similar in mind that would be based on the bounty hunter system where a special npc hunts you if your bounty is high enough. Named npc that would use restraining magic - be it a spider cocoon, tight latex or leather 'sleep bag' (could be a retextured cocoon model), some sort of plant vines or just anything devious that comes to mind. A quest could be initiated during dialog after capture where a player would become a part of 'collection' of the villain with other victims around.

 

This is pretty much what I was after in some form or another, though certainly not quite as ambitious (yet) in implementing various forms of bondage (latex, sleep bag, etc).

 

Funny that you should mention plant vines, however. I would very much have liked to have done something more with the spriggans too (mainly in the form of a DA scenario) but there's little to no attention paid to Spriggans and "plant bondage" situations would therefore be extremely difficult to implement currently. The closest I've seen it get is something like SD, but that's already done and even then isn't quite the distressful scenario I want. Meanwhile, there's nothing out there that I'm aware of that could pass for a prisoner to a spriggan environment, be it binding vines or whatever.

 

Moving back to my original point though, this villain/antagonist quest would most definitely be a separate mod. One thing at a time I guess.

 

Would love to see the wisp wrap and draugr mummyfication at some point but those would definetly be something of a Death Alternative plugin since those scenes probably have no use in combat itself, wouldn't be as hard to implement as the spiders since you could just fade out and let character remain on the spot because draugr and wisps are already in the proper enviroment to them.

 

I had some basic functionality going for this for some time, but honestly it was just like escaping from a cocoon really. I need to get this mod in an acceptable working order before tackling other similar scenarios I'm afraid.

 

The animation for spooling sounds cool but I think this would be hard to implement seeing how getting free from the cocoon is part of the gameplay and this would involve 2 actors in the animation (I don't remember any sex-lab animations working in a form of gameplay), unless they would be working as separate animations in sync with one another.

 

I'm no animator, as I've said before, but from what I gather, it might one day be possible for this to utilize something like SexLab should it get a paired spider+victim "sex"lab animation. Basically, a SexLab animation is called, like any other sex-utilizing mod (there's even a sex with creatures pack, isn't there?), but the animation is more of a spider webbing a victim. Maybe it could be one of those "foreplay" animations or something I don't know. If it happens, great, but until then... well... from what I'm gathering: The combat portion with the spiders may very well go away mainly because there are no existing animations and it's bugging the snot out of me to see characters spin in place with webbing magically appearing on them, flashing to the next stage of wrapping periodically. So to combat this, I really feel like it's something that should happen once the victim loses consciousness or something, so as to allow the situation to be more believable. It's a personal issue of mine and if it disappoints some people, I'm sorry, but it's my mod. We'll see, though.

 

In any case, keep on doing the gods work chief, we believe in you!

 

In the grand scheme of things, the decision to start this mod may have very well been set up for failure at the beginning, given the significant lack of resources available to make this. This is not meant to sound unappreciative for anyone's work, mind you - I certainly couldn't make any of those meshes/animations/textures etc myself and from what I did use, I am very thankful to the talented artists who were willing to allow their work to be used in the first place.

 

Allow me a brief moment to go over the currently existing snags:

 

1) Resources, I already covered that, but not just modded resources, but pre-existing locations as well. Throughout Skyrim there are numerous locations with keywords such as "BanditCamp," "AnimalLair," etc that quest aliases can reference to find appropriate locations closest to where the player was defeated. However, there are no locations titled "SpiderDen" or anything of the sort. These would all have to manually be placed into the game which I did for a little bit. In fact the current version (not test) is using that system but as was said before, it could cause conflicts.

 

Meanwhile, creating new locations is time consuming, tedious and requires a lot of attention to detail that is just outright mentally exhausting. Even if I were to use just one or two different locations, Skyrim's a big place and to have every single spider that catches something bring their victim to that same spot some dozens of miles away... every single time.... *sigh* it's just not going to be believable enough for me.

 

I would love for the spiders to be able to just pick a spot and hang their victim up if they happened to be in the area and move on with escaping, but I don't believe the engine has in place a system that allows this to be dynamically chosen based on the location of the victim. If I could have a wandering spider choose the nearest tree or tall, overhanging rock, I'd be ok with this, but I don't know how to do this or how to make the game differentiate the tree from any other static mesh in the area.

 

2)  The struggle system. I'm still not happy with it. The test version's a bit more suited to quiet escapes rather than escaping on the spot in the heat of a fight. May not be a problem if I go with the DA-exclusive version. However, like all DA scenarios there needs to be a way of some manner of good fortune happening to the player that gets them back in the action if they can't get themselves free. Rescues are always an option but I'd rather not have to resort to that.

 

TO SUMMARIZE:

 

I want this mod to enable spiders to defeat the player, wrap them up somewhere nearby, then allow the player to escape somehow and move on with life.

 

This makes it so that the player is not too removed from the game for prolonged periods of time.

 

Hey, Kayzn! I would like to say that I would love to have Arachnophobia in my load order along with my mod The Coming Black Empire. During the test of that mod, I was also using Arachnophobia, and I found that when the spiders attack in large numbers, it was great for harvesting Frostbite Venom, which, in my mod, can be refined at a cooking pot.

 

This isn't an attempt to promote myself, but hopefully some small encouragement can come out of this; that someone actually is building a mod that can really use it as a resource, even though the main thing about Arachnophobia is that it really is fun when it works.

 

Keep your chin up, people enjoy your mod.

I appreciate the encouragement. Don't worry, I won't leave the mod hanging. It's more about how I can go about fixing it. Right now, it's like I'm throwing myself at a brick wall without giving it too much thought.

[Storms of Superior]

Maybe try moving the spider lairs outdoors to remote locations, possibly at the edges of the map. The PC can be cocoonedans hang from a tree or whatever just as easily as from a cave ceiling.

[bleeb]

Maybe try moving the spider lairs outdoors to remote locations, possibly at the edges of the map. The PC can be cocoonedans hang from a tree or whatever just as easily as from a cave ceiling.

 

the whole tree hanging thing is what I mentioned before, which kazyn just replied to.

 

I hear you though Kazyn, you're struggling with two things; bringing a kind of 'realism' to the mod, while working with what tools you do have. I understand how troublesome it is, though you've already done amazing work on this mod. I like the spriggan vine captive idea too, maybe it attaches them to a tree or plant?

 

[Kazyn]

Not saying you didn't mention anything. It's more a response to a collection of responses, yours included. Anyway, that's definitely something I'd like to do. It's simple and makes the most sense. However, the problem that persist are, in this order:

 

1) Getting the game to recognize a tree or other hangable nearby surface

2) Getting the game to find one of those qualified hangable surfaces that is near the player's location