Deviously Cursed Loot LE 9.0 (2021-03-09)

[Cole745]

13 hours ago, donorbr1 said:

Unfortunately, I had to give up on this mod.  I installed it after updating all the Devious Devices as instructed, started a new game and had all kinds of issues.  Re-installed everything, got it to run then ran into every bug reported here, plus for some reason it would not let me pick up potions?

 

Princess quest (which I love the idea of), and removed all devices with keys from the noble, except my gag would not come off.  Blacksmith - nope.  Free me - nope.  tried every other button on DCL and DD to no avail.  Finally, the potion thing was literally killing me (Dark Elf wizard) so attempted to re-install.

 

Uninstalled DCL and tried re-installing.  Now I cannot get it to install.  Fails at 50% every time.  Tried deactivating virus scan, but same result.  Re-downloaded with same result.  I cannot get it to load at all now.

If you're using Nexus Mod Manager, try reinstalling the manager. It fixed it for me. Try that.

[njhar9]

16 hours ago, Comrade Laura 'Lokomootje' said:

I meant this one:

thanks for the help. it wasn't working yesterday. i think my connection is laggy yesterday.

[OlBenny]

13 hours ago, donorbr1 said:

I unfortunately don't have an old copy in my recycle bin.  Anyone got an older version?  I want DCL back.

If you mean 5.8, yep, I still have it.  We'll see if this works due to size limitation.  *fingers crossed*

Deviously_Cursed_Loot_5.8.rar

[magnet7]

On 29/12/2017 at 1:51 AM, Lupine00 said:

Note: this works for fixing pretty much any NPC you like, not just Leah. For example, you could use it to find a missing Claudius.

 

First, go to wherever you want to put Leah. Let's say, the Bannered Mare, though she should be fine in other places too, like Breezehome, or Leon's house, your fancy hall in Markarth, or your creepy custom slave-house loaded with Zap 8 furniture.

 

Next, you need to find the RefID of your Leah ... assuming she exists (which perhaps she does not).

This is easier said than done.

The base ID of Leah is easy to find: 'help Leah 4' in the console will tell you that, right away, but it's not the ID you need to move an existing Leah.

 

To get the RefID you need, go into the console and dump out all your RefIDs with:

save funclist 1

 

This will open a (large) file for you - unless you are using MO, in which case it will fail to find the file path because it's in the virtual tree.

With MO you have to go into the <MO-directory>\profiles\<profilename>\saves folder and open the text file manually.

 

Once you have the file open, search for "Leah", you will find a couple that are not the Leah you are looking for, they will be on lines that look (something) like this:

32095612    60/83    00000208  74 Leah                                    - AI Data(20)              NPC Skills(52) 

 

But you want a line that looks like this:

  320950AF   527/904   8A000C23  74 Leah                                    - Low(769)                 Flags(6)                 Moved(27)                Inventory(53)            Life State(0)            Package Data Extra(1)    Promoted(40)             Leveled Inventory(53)    Game Only

 

And in this case, the RefID of my Leah was 320950AF.

You will know you have the right one because when you type...

prid 320950AF

(substitute whatever your ID is) it will work, instead of complaining about the ID.

If it has worked "right", an info box for Leah should immediately pop up, with all her details, as if you'd selected an NPC by clicking on them.

 

With Leah still selected, you can now type:

moveto player

to teleport her to your location.

 

If trying to move Leah fails, she might not exist. She's marked essential, but even so, it can happen.

In that case, try:

help Leah 4

Note the ID you see for the Leah actor that ends in 094B48 (assuming DCUR 6.1) - that's the ID you need to type this time (you'll see two IDs, the other one is the LeahClone).

 

Enter into the console:

player.placeatme XX094B48 1 (basically, the entire ID you just found using help as above, where the XX is the ID of your DCUR mod. Mine is 32, yours probably isn't).

 

The above makes a new Leah, which might be bad if there already is one, and possibly may not function correctly due to some scripting quirk in DCUR, but will probably work fine, in the event that Leah has gone poof somehow.

 

If you are on DCUR 6.2, the ID above may be different (but probably isn't), just use whatever you found via help. The first Leah listed will probably be the 'proper' one.

 

For more help on the commands see: http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Console_Commands_(Skyrim)/Characters

 thanks for the help you solved my issue

[Wonko486]

14 hours ago, Rynnes Master said:

Can't help with #2, but the Dollmaker is in a home on the north-eastern edge of Dawnstar's harbor, near the boat transport.  If you have ETaC's Dawnstar you may not be able to see her house - the two locations conflict.

Ooohhh. That might explains some of the... ridiculous instability I was getting when playing. I love starting in dawnstar if I can, and it was freezing and crashing ridiculously when I was there. Granted, it was doing that for most cities too, but here we are. I've already uninstalled it, so I guess I can reinstall captured dreams now. I had narrowed down my problems to those two.

[Ytheria]

What do you guys think about the way arousal modifies the chance of a DCL event?

 

Currently we have

Quote

basechance = ((1 - dcumenu.arousalweight) * basechance) + (dcumenu.arousalweight * playerarousal * dcumenu.arousalmodifier) As Float

After which a further modifier is applied for container type.

 

One difficulty I have with this is that it doesn't respect the refined options.  I also have the feeling that arousal should be more significant at high values (i.e. the contribution from arousal should be faster than linear).

 

I was thinking of amending to something like:

Quote

float playerarousal2 = playerarousal as float / 100 ; for simplicity convert arousal to a float between 0 and 1
    
basechance *= 1 + playerarousal2 * dcumenu.arousalweight * 2.5 ; multiply the risk by an arousal factor (up to 3.5 if arousalweight is 1)

 

basechance += pow(playerarousal2, 5) * dcumenu.arousalmodifier * 80 ; add a term going as the fifth power of arousal - with arousalmodifier 1 this will add 80% at max arousal but only 2.5% at half arousal

Obviously arousalweight and arousalmodifier are no longer doing what the MCM says they do.

 

I have in mind that the first effect will dominate at modest arousals but the second effect will dominate for very high arousals.  Obviously either effect could be turned off entirely by setting the weight/modifier to 0.

 

For instance, with refined probabilities city 1%, wilderness 3%, dungeon 5% and with arousalweight 0.6, arousalmodifier 0.3, we would get:

• At 0 arousal, city 1%, wilderness 3%, dungeon 5%
• At 50 arousal, city 2.5%, wilderness 6%, dungeon 9.5% (everywhere is now a bit more dangerous, but the relative danger of diferent locations is similar)
• At 100 arousal, city 26.5%, wilderness 31.5%, dungeon 36.5% (where we're this aroused, nowhere is safe).

Container modifiers would be applied afterwards, as currently.

 

What do you think?  This is just a bit of fun, of course.  I'm not suggesting Kimy implements it in the release version: that would just confuse people, and we wouldn't want that.

[crococat]

Something is wrong for me with 6.2. Every time i enable it in game or start new game with it i recieve crash saves. Sometimes resaver cleaning helps, sometimes not. Must return to old version, dont know would it work with dd4. Anyone try? Kimy please add previous version to downloads, it is hard now to find it.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

thanks for help

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

i was wrong, it is all ok with 6.2. i was install my game from zero with all old approved mods, but dont mind that many of them was upgraded. crashes begin on DCUR and i think on it. but now after some exreriments i check that 6.2 is working good after disabling some other last time upgraded mods.

[RuslanRX]

Just now, crococat said:

 Kimy please add previous version to downloads, it is hard now to find it.

DCL v6.1

https://mega.nz/#!EVh02SjI!csUWqC1AGf7ZoA9dGQfNYv0Y26AJsmTExmZ_SsiOtXQ

[Jappa123]

I have one problem with dd/dcl had this before with old version and now again  So basically after some time of playing everything related to dd starts to work really slowly/laggy - equipping/removing devices, mcm everything is very delayed like there is some kind of script lag not sure if its DCL or DDi guess its dcl because DDi MCM is ok, any idea how to fix it ? Thanks!

[Android1815]

On 12/28/2017 at 1:12 PM, OlBenny said:

Looking over your log, something is wrong with Zaz Animation Pack.  It's causing a host of problems, including for other mods such as SD and DD.  Did you recently update it or something?  It might something as simple as improper installation or updating.  If it's that, I would recommend uninstalling all mods that require ZAP and ZAP itself.  On a new game (this is critically important), install ZAP and ensure it installs properly.  If you weren't already, I would definitely recommend doing all this with a mod manager.  See if at that point then you can replicate your issue and see if this fixes it.  After doing so, then install all the other mods that you want to use that require ZAP.

Did what you said. The game worked. I reinstalled all my mods one by one. Found out the culprit. Captured dreams. For some reason unknown to me it crashes my game even with the newest version. All my mods work. Then when I install CD it crashes on load and I get the same zaz errors in my log even though I'm using the latest version.

[Lupine00]

5 hours ago, Ytheria said:

What do you guys think about the way arousal modifies the chance of a DCL event?.

 

What's important for any system is predictability; that can easily understand it and get outcomes they want without trial and error.

Maybe your idea is a little ... complicated? It's full of magic numbers, and there's a power function.

No normal person can look at that and intuit what changing the parameters will do.

Nor is it necessarily desirable for chances to go "off the charts" as arousal gets into the top few percent.

 

Spoiler

 

In practice, arousal swings rapidly between 0 and 100.

The way the system is set up, it quickly accelerates the character to an exposure of 99.9999etc, due to frequency of sex, and from then on, you'll never see exposure drop below 98%.

 

This results in rapid fluctuations of actual arousal between 0 and 100, taking only a few (real) minutes to get back from 0 to 100, even without plugs or a belt.

Once plugs or a belt are in the mix, you can get to 100 in seconds.

 

Personally, I feel the arousal system is broken, and mostly useless because it hits hard limits very easily.

I would argue the underlying conceptual model is perfectly plausible, but timing values seem poorly tuned, limits poorly chosen, it's unstable, and possibly the entire system isn't actually the best way to get fun game-play.

 

You can change the decay, but it hardly matters because the system is inherently unstable. Fixing this would require a serious rethink of what we think arousal is FOR. I don't think it was every thought through very carefully, but instead attacked from a naive simulationist approach. Simulationist thinking rarely leads to great gameplay. You can't make a fun game by creating a flawed mirror of reality. How you might make a fun game is rather a large topic, beyond the scope of this aside unfortunately.

 

In any event, the rapid transition of arousal from one hard limit to another makes any system that bases itself on nuances of arousal value, broken.

Player  arousal ends up being like a switch, and it's only NPCs that show intermediate values for more than a minute or two. And non-follower NPCs at that. Sasha has the same problem as the PC, she's either just had sex and it's 0, or she is at 100.

 

This is not a big problem for DCL, as it's basically throwing a "vulnerability switch", and if your character doesn't spend much time sitting between 20 and 65 arousal, it doesn't pose any problem, but it makes any revised system trying to get subtle behaviour, largely pointless.

 

If you try and play a game where you worry about, and control arousal, and try to keep it down, eventually the process of getting rid of it leads to ever increasing arousal rate, so that path is basically screwed...

 

...unless of course, your game is so unstable that you never play more than a dozen hours on a character before you start another new game. But otherwise, DCL itself, or any kind of slavery mod, is going to result in rapid arousal exposure increase until exposure hits the limit, and then it will never go down, leading to aforementioned rapid arousal fluctuations.

 

And if you have plugs, you don't even need a high exposure to create the same scenario. If you have DCL in your LO, chances are you are going to end up plugged pretty quickly. Add belt scaling, and arousal simply catapults to 100 and sits there, unless the plugs can give you an orgasm, in which case it will be zero for a few seconds and the next plug event will catapult it again.

 

These instabilities were designed in, but they weren't designed well. Arousal is being asked to do several jobs, and its an overloaded value.

 

For modders who simply wanted something to make some NPCs easier to solicit than others, it does the job. As a tool for controlling how the player is punished for being in a belt of plug, it's mostly useless.

 

As a tool for controlling whether the player should be punished with DCL events because they didn't have sex recently, it's extremely crude, and eventually breaks.

 

Generally, DCL doesn't need to complicate any of these percentage systems, they are already very configurable, and as your formulae show, relatively complex already.

 

Here's an example of how complexity in configuration causes problems/confusion:

For ages, I was frustrated that I seemed to be getting cursed loot events when I had them turned off.

I had the detailed percentages enabled, and had dungeon set to 0, town 30, and wilderness 2.

I was still getting events in dungeons!

I wondered if it was a bug...

 

But then I realised it was all working as intended, because the chance for arousal can still trigger an event even if the area percentage is zero.

It depends on the arousal weight, as you show in your code snippet. Actually, it's annoying, if you want to disable events in dungeons but allow them elsewhere, you can't do it and still have arousal in the mix.

 

When I was setting those area percentages, I'd forgotten about arousal weights entirely. The only way I can get the behaviour I want is to turn arousal weight to zero.

 

I think the way the configuration is presented in DCL leads to this kind of simple user error all over the place, and not just for event percentages.

 

 

There are a lot of options in DCL, and they aren't always organised so that things that go together ARE together.

 

For example, it's extremely non-obvious how to disable the "Smoking Hot" dialogues (as opposed to misogyny).

Or more pertinently, arousal weight ought to be the TOP slider for events, because everything else you set is subordinate to that, but instead detailed vs basic checkbox is the top item, with the area percentages following. But if arousal weight is 100%, none of those options do a thing! Similar issues apply to pivotal sliders and checkboxes scattered through the Rape sub-menu.

 

Tiny details of MCM layout make a big difference, look at:

• How many times somebody in this forum asks how to turn on or off the misogyny feature?
• How many times somebody asks why their character isn't getting raped?

Recently, I read the entire forum, end to end, over a period of a couple of weeks, and I could not miss that those questions come up over, and over, and over, and over.

In fact, if you took those, plus questions about Leon's quest, the final phase of Bound Queen, and being stuck in Damsel in Distress, it's probably about half of all posts. (Just guessing, but it's a lot).

 

There are some MCM items that take me ages to find, even when I know exactly what I'm looking for, even when I know what sub-menu to look in, because there are just so many options.

 

So, DCL doesn't need systems to be more complicated or quirky, or oriented towards a specific outcome that only a few want.

Are most people really wondering about the distribution curve of event probabilities based on arousal?

As you see above, I had to turn my arousal weight to zero anyway, and what's more, it doesn't matter. I know my character's arousal is going to be 100 most of the time, so it's effectively a constant anyway.

 

Instead, most players could get more satisfactory outcomes from the DCL configuration process if the MCM were reorganized a bit, so the exact same options that already exist are presented in a way gives the important ones priority and makes them easier to find.

 

But event percentages are already hard for players to work out at first, when they're learning the mod. Putting a power function in there is going to make is highly-non-intuitive. Humans are extremely bad at intuiting how exponential curves work, which is why all kinds of phenomena take them off guard. Your new formula is filled with arbitrary magic numbers, and what happens when you change this would be as unintuitive as what that formula actually does. Just looking at it, I have to ask, why 3.5 as a limit? It feels quite arbitrary. And so on.

 

Now, what could have been done, which is even simpler than the current system, is this:

 

chanceOfEvent = regionalBaseChance + (arousalModifierScale * arousal)

 

Absolutely anyone can understand this formula, I hope.

 

Spoiler

That said, the way DCL is implemented as cyclomatic spaghetti, with nested ifs and flags all over the place, handling details like "is this a plant?", "is this a door?", "is this a locked door?", etc... make it hard for a player to tell what will happen from reading the MCM. How is the modifier for common containers figured in? And so on. Without pouring over the source you can't figure out what's going on with all those IFs and BUTs and MODIFIED IFs. So it's hard for an end user to get what they want without a lot of trial and error.

 

That's the price we pay for choices.

 

So if you want a lower regional base chance, you just set the chance lower, and arousal weight simply turns the arousal part on or off.

 

But people are used to the existing system, and it already exists, so there isn't really any benefit to changing at this point, even to simplify. Or am I wrong about that?

 

 

 

[LazyBoot]

25 minutes ago, Lupine00 said:

Spoiler

What's important for any system is predictability; that can easily understand it and get outcomes they want without trial and error.

Maybe your idea is a little ... complicated? It's full of magic numbers, and there's a power function.

No normal person can look at that and intuit what changing the parameters will do.

Nor is it necessarily desirable for chances to go "off the charts" as arousal gets into the top few percent.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

In practice, arousal swings rapidly between 0 and 100.

The way the system is set up, it quickly accelerates the character to an exposure of 99.9999etc, due to frequency of sex, and from then on, you'll never see exposure drop below 98%.

 

This results in rapid fluctuations of exposure between 0 and 100, taking only a few (real) minutes to get back from 0 to 100, even without plugs or a belt.

Once plugs or a belt are in the mix, you can get to 100 in seconds.

 

Personally, I feel the arousal system is broken, and mostly useless because it his hard limits very easily.

I would argue the underlying conceptual model is perfectly reasonable, but timing values seem poorly tuned, limits poorly chosen, and possibly the entire system isn't actually the best way to get fun game-play.

 

In any event, the rapid movement or arousal from one hard limit to another makes any system that bases itself on nuances of arousal value, broken.

Arousal ends up being more like a switch, and it's only NPCs that show intermediate values for more than a minute or two.

 

This is no problem for DCL, as it's basically throwing a "vulnerability switch", and if your character doesn't spend a lot of time between 25 and 65 arousal, it doesn't pose any problem, but it makes any revised system trying to get subtle behaviour, largely pointless.

 

If you try and play a game where you worry about, and control arousal, and try to keep it down, eventually the process of getting rid of it leads to ever increasing arousal rate, so that path is basically screwed.

 

Unless of course, your game is so unstable that you never play more than a dozen hours on a character before you start another new game. But otherwise, DCL itself, or any kind of slavery mod, is going to result in rapid arousal exposure increase until it hits the limit, and then it will never go down, leading to aforementioned rapid arousal fluctuations.

 

And if you have plugs, you don't even need a high exposure to create the same scenario. If you have DCL in your LO, chances are you are going to end up plugged pretty quickly.

 

 

Generally, DCL doesn't need to complicate any of these percentage systems, they are already very configurable, and as your formulae show, relatively complex already.

 

Here's an example of how complexity in configuration causes problems/confusion:

For ages, I was frustrated that I seemed to be getting cursed loot events when I had them turned off.

I had the detailed percentages enabled, and had dungeon set to 0, town 30, and wilderness 2.

I was still getting events in dungeons!

I wondered if it was a bug...

 

But then I realised it was all working as intended, because the chance for arousal can still trigger an event even if the area percentage is zero.

It depends on the arousal weight, as you show in your code snippet. Actually, it's annoying, if you want to disable events in dungeons but allow them elsewhere, you can't do it and still have arousal in the mix.

 

When I was setting those area percentages, I'd forgotten about arousal weights entirely. The only way I can get the behaviour I want is to turn arousal weight to zero.

 

I think the way the configuration is presented in DCL leads to this kind of simple user error all over the place, and not just for event percentages.

 

 

There are a lot of options in DCL, and they aren't always organised so that things that go together ARE together.

 

For example, it's extremely non-obvious how to disable the "Smoking Hot" dialogues (as opposed to misogyny).

Or more pertinently, arousal weight ought to be the TOP slider for events, because everything else you set is subordinate to that, but instead detailed vs basic checkbox is the top item, with the area percentages following. But if arousal weight is 100%, none of those options do a thing! Similar issues apply to pivotal sliders and checkboxes scattered through the Rape sub-menu.

 

Tiny details of MCM layout make a big difference, look at:

• How many times somebody in this forum asks how to turn on or off the misogyny feature?
• How many times somebody asks why their character isn't getting raped?

Recently, I read the entire forum, end to end, over a period of a couple of weeks, and I could not miss that those questions come up over, and over, and over, and over.

In fact, if you took those, plus questions about Leon's quest, the final phase of Bound Queen, and being stuck in Damsel in Distress, it's probably about half of all posts. (Just guessing, but it's a lot).

 

There are some MCM items that take me ages to find, even when I know exactly what I'm looking for, even when I know what sub-menu to look in, because there are just so many options.

 

So, DCL doesn't need systems to be more complicated or quirky, or oriented towards a specific outcome that only a few want.

Are most people really wondering about the distribution curve of event probabilities based on arousal?

As you see above, I had to turn my arousal weight to zero anyway, and what's more, it doesn't matter. I know my character's arousal is going to be 100 most of the time, so it's effectively a constant anyway.

 

Instead, most players could get more satisfactory outcomes from the DCL configuration process if the MCM were reorganized a bit, so the exact same options that already exist are presented in a way gives the important ones priority and makes them easier to find.

 

But event percentages are already hard for players to work out at first, when they're learning the mod. Putting a power function in there is going to make is highly-non-intuitive. Humans are extremely bad at intuiting how exponential curves work, which is why all kinds of phenomena take them off guard. Your new formula is filled with arbitrary magic numbers, and what happens when you change this would be as unintuitive as what that formula actually does. Just looking at it, I have to ask, why 3.5 as a limit? It feels quite arbitrary. And so on.

 

Now, what could have been done, which is even simpler than the current system, is this:

 

chanceOfEvent = regionalBaseChance + (arousalModifierScale * arousal)

 

Absolutely anyone can understand this formula, I hope.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

That said, the way DCL is implemented as cyclomatic spaghetti, with nested ifs and flags all over the place, handling details like "is this a plant?", "is this a door?", "is this a locked door?", etc... make it hard for a player to tell what will happen from reading the MCM. How is the modifier for common containers figured in? And so on. Without pouring over the source you can't figure out what's going on with all those IFs and BUTs and MODIFIED IFs. So it's hard for an end user to get what they want without a lot of trial and error.

 

That's the price we pay for choices.

 

So if you want a lower regional base chance, you just set the chance lower, and arousal weight simply turns the arousal part on or off.

 

But people are used to the existing system, and it already exists, so there isn't really any benefit to changing at this point, even to simplify. Or am I wrong about that?

 

 

 

 

 

Another option with a hidden feature that's hard to notice: Bondage Lover

Did you know that with the "Bondage Lover" option on...

Spoiler

Your character will gain arousal for each worn device, with bonuses for certain types, every (in-game) hour.

If I counted right, it's possible to get more than 20 arousal every hour from this. And that's before counting sexlab aroused exposure-rate modifier.

 

[Clea Strange]

I have bondage lover always on so I can get high arousal, plus I have it such a way that without even without being bound in some form which is rare my characters arousal will always be high around 100 arousal all the time. Cause I want my character to always be bound 24/7 in some form or another, its possible to do quests etc but can be difficult. 

 

 

[Reesewow]

2 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

As you see above, I had to turn my arousal weight to zero anyway, and what's more, it doesn't matter. I know my character's arousal is going to be 100 most of the time, so it's effectively a constant anyway.

Just something I'd thought I'd mention - there are certainly gameplay and mod-based ways to make arousal as a stat not something that is stuck at 0 or 100 at all times.  Personally I find that the way arousal interacts with trap chance is probably the single best gameplay aspect of DCL. 

 

During normal gameplay I mostly float around 10-40 arousal unless my character is somewhere particularly sexy (aka lots of naked NPCs) or my character is stuck in a DCL-triggered chastity device.  If it gets above that, I make sure to "relieve" my character before engaging in much looting or risk getting into trouble.  I personally enjoy the dynamic because it means I have reasons to run other gameplay-based Sexlab mods other than just to see animations.  Once trapped in a DCL chastity device or special collar obviously all bets are off.

 

I'm going to assume by your description that your biggest issue has been the time arousal getting sky-high, which means having sex is mostly pointless as arousal will rapidly cap again afterwards.  For me, this is avoided by the use of a separate mod - Sexlab Eager NPCs.  That mod offers many features, but for the purposes of controlling arousal the most important feature for me has been the fact it lets priestesses of Dibella sell "Cure Sex Addition" potions.  These potions are expensive (unless you are an Agent of Dibella), but they function as an in-game way to reset the time rate for arousal to default levels.  Basically, if I ever find my arousal seems to be getting out of control, I use one of them to "reset" that part of arousal and return the rate of growth to sane levels.  I find I only really need to do this after some of the heaviest sex-scene items are removed, like the rubber doll suit.

 

 

If you don't want to use a mod to control arousal, you could always just manually modify the values in SLA yourself.  Simply setting the time rate change value to 0 I believe should remove the "going sexmad" effect completely.

 

 

[Ytheria]

5 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

 

What's important for any system is predictability; that can easily understand it and get outcomes they want without trial and error.

Disagree.  That's not how DCL works.  The outcomes should be unpredictable to a typical user.  For instance, the MCM allows the user to determine whether arousal has an effect on device comments/reactions, but gives no indication what this effect will be.

5 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

Maybe your idea is a little ... complicated? It's full of magic numbers, and there's a power function.

No normal person can look at that and intuit what changing the parameters will do.

Nor is it necessarily desirable for chances to go "off the charts" as arousal gets into the top few percent.

As I say this is just a bit of fun.  We have two parameters, so I figured I might as well use them both.  In all honesty, if designing the system from scratch, I would just have a single parameter for how much effect arousal has on event outcomes.  Then I would have a complicated formula, but all the user needs to understand is that the higher the parameter, the bigger the effect.

5 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

In practice, arousal swings rapidly between 0 and 100.

The way the system is set up, it quickly accelerates the character to an exposure of 99.9999etc, due to frequency of sex, and from then on, you'll never see exposure drop below 98%.

 

This results in rapid fluctuations of actual arousal between 0 and 100, taking only a few (real) minutes to get back from 0 to 100, even without plugs or a belt.

Once plugs or a belt are in the mix, you can get to 100 in seconds.

 

Personally, I feel the arousal system is broken, and mostly useless because it hits hard limits very easily.

I would argue the underlying conceptual model is perfectly plausible, but timing values seem poorly tuned, limits poorly chosen, it's unstable, and possibly the entire system isn't actually the best way to get fun game-play.

 

You can change the decay, but it hardly matters because the system is inherently unstable. Fixing this would require a serious rethink of what we think arousal is FOR. I don't think it was every thought through very carefully, but instead attacked from a naive simulationist approach. Simulationist thinking rarely leads to great gameplay. You can't make a fun game by creating a flawed mirror of reality. How you might make a fun game is rather a large topic, beyond the scope of this aside unfortunately.

 

In any event, the rapid transition of arousal from one hard limit to another makes any system that bases itself on nuances of arousal value, broken.

Player  arousal ends up being like a switch, and it's only NPCs that show intermediate values for more than a minute or two. And non-follower NPCs at that. Sasha has the same problem as the PC, she's either just had sex and it's 0, or she is at 100.

 

This is not a big problem for DCL, as it's basically throwing a "vulnerability switch", and if your character doesn't spend much time sitting between 20 and 65 arousal, it doesn't pose any problem, but it makes any revised system trying to get subtle behaviour, largely pointless.

 

If you try and play a game where you worry about, and control arousal, and try to keep it down, eventually the process of getting rid of it leads to ever increasing arousal rate, so that path is basically screwed...

 

...unless of course, your game is so unstable that you never play more than a dozen hours on a character before you start another new game. But otherwise, DCL itself, or any kind of slavery mod, is going to result in rapid arousal exposure increase until exposure hits the limit, and then it will never go down, leading to aforementioned rapid arousal fluctuations.

 

And if you have plugs, you don't even need a high exposure to create the same scenario. If you have DCL in your LO, chances are you are going to end up plugged pretty quickly. Add belt scaling, and arousal simply catapults to 100 and sits there, unless the plugs can give you an orgasm, in which case it will be zero for a few seconds and the next plug event will catapult it again.

 

These instabilities were designed in, but they weren't designed well. Arousal is being asked to do several jobs, and its an overloaded value.

 

For modders who simply wanted something to make some NPCs easier to solicit than others, it does the job. As a tool for controlling how the player is punished for being in a belt of plug, it's mostly useless.

 

As a tool for controlling whether the player should be punished with DCL events because they didn't have sex recently, it's extremely crude, and eventually breaks.

 

Generally, DCL doesn't need to complicate any of these percentage systems, they are already very configurable, and as your formulae show, relatively complex already.

 

Here's an example of how complexity in configuration causes problems/confusion:

For ages, I was frustrated that I seemed to be getting cursed loot events when I had them turned off.

I had the detailed percentages enabled, and had dungeon set to 0, town 30, and wilderness 2.

I was still getting events in dungeons!

I wondered if it was a bug...

 

But then I realised it was all working as intended, because the chance for arousal can still trigger an event even if the area percentage is zero.

It depends on the arousal weight, as you show in your code snippet. Actually, it's annoying, if you want to disable events in dungeons but allow them elsewhere, you can't do it and still have arousal in the mix.

But that's exactly the problem my revision is addressing!  If you set arousalmodifier to 0, you can play with arousalweight as much as you like (whether you want a big or a small effect from arousal) and your dungeon percentage will always be zero.

5 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

 

When I was setting those area percentages, I'd forgotten about arousal weights entirely. The only way I can get the behaviour I want is to turn arousal weight to zero.

 

I think the way the configuration is presented in DCL leads to this kind of simple user error all over the place, and not just for event percentages.

There is no doubt that DCL does not have a well designed UI.  This is an inevitable outcome of the ad hoc way that features are added.  I doubt that the mod will ever reach a final form.  But it doesn't matter that much, because the experience is supposed to be confusing and frustrating to the player.  Think of the MCM as a multi-lock device you're trying to manipulate in mittens.  I for one would rather have a mod bursting with creativity than one with an impecable UI.

5 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

 

As you see above, I had to turn my arousal weight to zero anyway, and what's more, it doesn't matter. I know my character's arousal is going to be 100 most of the time, so it's effectively a constant anyway.

From my point of view, arousal management is an important part of the gameplay.  If your character's arousal is always 100, why even include it?  I would never enter a dungeon with arousal over 50.  I want the PC to be heavily penalised for very high arousals (over 80) so that the system has some bite.

5 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

But event percentages are already hard for players to work out at first, when they're learning the mod. Putting a power function in there is going to make is highly-non-intuitive. Humans are extremely bad at intuiting how exponential curves work, which is why all kinds of phenomena take them off guard. Your new formula is filled with arbitrary magic numbers, and what happens when you change this would be as unintuitive as what that formula actually does. Just looking at it, I have to ask, why 3.5 as a limit? It feels quite arbitrary. And so on.

It's supposed to take them off guard.

 

3.5 is chosen simply because arousalweight scales from 0 to 1 in increments of 0.1.  I want each increment to add 25% (relative) at max arousal.  So 10 increments adds 250%, which is 3.5.  It's just a feature of reusing the UI which is already there.  But also, I doubt that anyone would want it to be higher than that.

5 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

Now, what could have been done, which is even simpler than the current system, is this:

 

chanceOfEvent = regionalBaseChance + (arousalModifierScale * arousal)

That would be an improvement on the current system, because the base chance applies at arousal 0, which is what one expects.  But it still has the undesirable feature that you get events triggering in places intended to be safe.  (Although I would be in favour of secretly adding a 0.1% chance, because I don't think the player should ever be *completely* safe.)

 

[Ytheria]

2 hours ago, Reesewow said:

I'm going to assume by your description that your biggest issue has been the time arousal getting sky-high, which means having sex is mostly pointless as arousal will rapidly cap again afterwards.  For me, this is avoided by the use of a separate mod - Sexlab Eager NPCs.  That mod offers many features, but for the purposes of controlling arousal the most important feature for me has been the fact it lets priestesses of Dibella sell "Cure Sex Addition" potions.  These potions are expensive (unless you are an Agent of Dibella), but they function as an in-game way to reset the time rate for arousal to default levels.  Basically, if I ever find my arousal seems to be getting out of control, I use one of them to "reset" that part of arousal and return the rate of growth to sane levels.  I find I only really need to do this after some of the heaviest sex-scene items are removed, like the rubber doll suit.

 

I don't get it.  At time arousal 100, it takes a whole day for your character's arousal to get back to 100 (and by then your time arousal will have fallen to 82, so it will actually take a bit longer).  I really like the way that things like the rubber doll suit have an ongoing effect.

[Ytheria]

I missed Lupine00's long comment about arousal because it was hidden.  Trust me, my game's stable, and I've played for 100s of hours with my character's arousal nearly always remaining in the range 20 to 65.  It's worth noting that as far as possible I've eliminated chastity belts from my game (or set to a very short duration in the case of the belt of shame).

 

The arousal system's not the one I would design, but it works well enough for me.  The bigger problem is that some mods fail to interact with it correctly.

[Camuel Moonwall]

i am giving up getting this to work...i made a second Nexus Mod Manager profile and JUST installed the mods required to run Cursed Loot but same problem as before. When i use alternate life and go for captured princess the latex hobble dress thing gets equipped on me but then my body goes invisible. Hands, feet and head are there, other accessories like the armbinder is there....just the dress isnt showing at all

[LatexLuger]

14 minutes ago, Camuel Moonwall said:

i am giving up getting this to work...i made a second Nexus Mod Manager profile and JUST installed the mods required to run Cursed Loot but same problem as before. When i use alternate life and go for captured princess the latex hobble dress thing gets equipped on me but then my body goes invisible. Hands, feet and head are there, other accessories like the armbinder is there....just the dress isnt showing at all

That's not a problem with DCL, you need to run BodySlide on Devious Devices. The invisible dress means that mesh can't be found. Might have to go in and tell BodySlide to run on that model specifically, sometimes the batch build misses a few.

[Silenceyoursword]

9 hours ago, Android1815 said:

Did what you said. The game worked. I reinstalled all my mods one by one. Found out the culprit. Captured dreams. For some reason unknown to me it crashes my game even with the newest version. All my mods work. Then when I install CD it crashes on load and I get the same zaz errors in my log even though I'm using the latest version.

Yeah, Captured Dreams was horrendously buggy when I last used it a couple of months ago - it got to the point where just coming into sight of the shop would cause a CTD.

[Statick16]

Is DD 4.0's straitjacket supposed to not be used by cursed loot at this point in time?

if so, are there any plans on doing so in the future?

[Camuel Moonwall]

Does anyone of you have discord and can help me with shared screens to find a solution? ive run bodyslide now with both the CBBE slim and curvy one and i think i manually clicked every DD item....

[Laura]

40 minutes ago, Statick16 said:

Is DD 4.0's straitjacket supposed to not be used by cursed loot at this point in time?

if so, are there any plans on doing so in the future?

The update is a compatibility patch for DD4 in a way.

But it doesn't have the new items as drops yet.

I don't know when though.

[Camuel Moonwall]

also i just use the CBBE Slim and Curvy Preset to build the Outfit/Body and for the Preset i have 3 htings since i guess DDX is devious devices....DDX-CBBE.Zipsuit, DDX-CBBE-MXW-Catsuit and the same catsuit with TBBP at the end

[mcgorien]

9 hours ago, Camuel Moonwall said:

also i just use the CBBE Slim and Curvy Preset to build the Outfit/Body and for the Preset i have 3 htings since i guess DDX is devious devices....DDX-CBBE.Zipsuit, DDX-CBBE-MXW-Catsuit and the same catsuit with TBBP at the end

ddx is devious devices expansion, dda is devious devices assets and dcl is cursed loot.