[WIP] Lovers Personality and Relationships

[arelim]

I love the idea of the loversvoicessp mod and loversadultplayplus setup ... but I always had some things I didn't like about it. Particularly I didn't like how personalities worked, how relationships work, and the 'animation viewer' feel of loversadultplayplus ...

 

So, about 8 months ago I started modifying my copy of loversadultplayplus and adjusting things more to my liking ... while there are more features I want to add, I recently looked at my code and how sloppy it was and thought maybe I should redo the mod now that I'm more experienced ... so I also thought maybe I should make it into a real mod for people here on loverslab.... to that end, I've got a couple of questions for the more experienced modders and for the community in general.

 

- My intention for such a mod is to be a replacer for adultplayplus and loversvoice ... is there any particular reason I should do it as a separate plugin and not just a heavily modified adultplayplus? Even if I did it as something separate, it would probably heavily conflict or have really weird results if you used adultplayplus with it ... so to my thinking it would just be easier to modify adultplayplus... but maybe you guys know better.

 

- My current modified adultplayplus is integrated with Companion Share & Recruit ... when redoing the mod to be something I release, does anyone think this will be a huge detriment for people in the lovers community? Since several lovers mods create companions but aren't using a system like CSR or CM Partners ... it seems the community doesn't like those systems ... so I'm considering not integrating CSR ... but I'll have to rethink how I do several things if CSR isn't integrated...

 

- Please look at the features I'm including or plan to include in the list below and let me know your thoughts and if the community thinks there is any interest. I'm still going to make the mod as something I like and primarily for me ... but I would like to hear from people who might have a better idea or can give me a good reason for not doing something I'm planning.

 

The list of features included are/will be :

 

1 Right now NPC's have different personalities based on their race, responsibility, and confidence. I want to make it more complex and base it on their class, race, faction, stats, skills, responsibility, aggression, and confidence. Haven't figured out the best approach for that yet though.

 

2 NPC's have different dialogue during 'sex' based on their personality. This will be expanded to include their relationships, their sexual history, sexual orientation, and the act that's being performed.

 

3 NPC's will have different greetings and attitudes towards the player depending on their personalities, their relationship, and their sexual history.

 

4 An NPC's personality and sexual experiences affect their willingness to have sex. i.e. a virgin is less willing to have sex than a npc who has had sex a dozen times.

 

5 NPC's are more selective about what they do sexually. Depending on their personality, they may or may not be willing to do oral or anal or rough sex or... others may actually prefer such sex options.

 

6 The sex options will be changed. In my current version, I abandoned the base options that use groups and did new options using direct animation calls so NPC's 'like' specific animations for a given position. So 'on top' with one NPC might use one of the ontop animations, but another npc will use a different one, giving them more realistic individuality and personality.

 

This does 'remove' some functionality of the basic lovers system ... but I feel it helps get it away from an animation viewer and more into more roleplaying setup ... where different sex partners are actually different ... it doesn't affect mods like lovershooker that use the built in base xpos dialogue topics.

 

7. Many NPC's may not be interested in casual sex. Being famous (or infamous), completing certain quests, or having a high personality/speechcraft will have a big impact on peoples willingness to have casual sex.

 

8. Which brings us to the relationship portion of the mod. In my current version you can be someone's friend, someone's lover, or someone's master/mistress. I want to expand it so people can get married and/or a sub/slave can be collared.

 

9. Different relationships offer different things. For instance, its easier to get a friend to have sex with you than it is a stranger, and friends might let you look in their inventory if they like you enough. This will be expanded to include having someone be willing to do something sexual with you as a lover that they wouldn't do with you as a friend or stranger, depending on their personality.

 

10. You can give friends gifts (uses CSR functionality right now) which helps make them like you more and be interested in sex or becoming your lover.

 

11. I want to add going on a date in there as a way to get someone to like you more, but I'm not sure how I want to do it yet.

 

12. Right now NPC's are ignorant of multiple relationships. I eventually want to include knowledge of other relationships and either jealousy, npc's breaking up with you, or polyamoury/harems depending on the NPC's personality.

 

13. I want sexual orientation will be a factor in casual sex and becoming lovers. Some NPC's will be asexual (abstaining), bisexual, some heterosexual, and some will even be homosexual depending on their personality. This is not something I've figured out yet... but I'm sure I will.

 

14. Adds new conversation topics with npc's that will be affected by their disposition, their relationship with you, and their personality. Things you can talk about include their sexuality, your relationship, how they feel about you, them (people like it when you ask about them). I want to add in the ability to ask about their sexual orientation, their sexual experience, flirting, as well as come up with other things to talk about and possibly the ability to talk them into things.

 

15. Right now I've got whether or not someone is your slave or not dependent on the existing slave flag... and it requires mods like rapeslave to get someone to have the flag. Eventually, I want to add the ability for you to make SOME npc's get the slave flag through dialogue/other relationship activity.

 

16. If someone refuses sex with you, instead of just exiting dialogue it gives you the dialogue which allows you to respond. Right now the rebuttle dialogue just lets you rape them if you want ... but I want to include coersion, begging, and being slutty (for lack of a better way of putting it) ... each with different npc reactions and consequences.

 

17. Different reactions to your NPC being naked based on personality and relationship.

 

18. Willingness to be in a romantic relationship is affected by personality and the PC's status. Some people value strength, some value beauty (personality), others want athletics, or infamy/crime (or are turned off by it), or for you to have a certain amount of wealth, etc. This isn't implemented in my current mod, but its on my list to put into the redo.

 

19. The players sex dialogue/personality is based on their class, race, etc. Rather than a spell as in loversvoice.

 

So thats it. That's my plan here. Obviously some significant stuff to redo and new stuff to be added ... and I've been working on it for 8 months already ... so not something thats going to be out any time soon... but since I'm going to be redoing it for myself anyway ... I thought I'd bring it up as a possible mod for release to the community and give the community an opportunity to weigh in. If there is no interest, no big deal. Saves me the hassel of trying to make it release friendly.

[tomfoolery]

This sounds absolutely fantastic!

 

My thoughts:

 

Regarding Companion Share/Recruit: I use it as well, but I'd say that having your mod be independent of it would probably be best. Less dependencies will reduce the amount of conflicts and bugs. Plus, not everyone uses it.

 

Regarding the features, I'll just comment on the ones I have thoughts on. The others, well I just find them pretty sweet and don't have much to add to them:

 

1: Some of those you could probably cut out/merge together as they're rather redundant. For example, skills and stats could be merged. You wouldn't need to factor in classes to factions, since obviously fighters guild members will be warrior classes, mages guild mages, and so on. Maybe give them a bit of flavor lines to differentiate 'em a bit?

 

6: This one sounds good, but be mindful of the various animation packs. I'd suggest waiting until this animation resource is all done and then us that for your animation calls. Otherwise an animation you'd want to play would be completely different for someone who has a different animation pack.

 

8: A suggestion for getting married/becoming mistress/master/collaring a slave, would be sweet if we got access to that NPC's house and stuff. Assuming you didn't already have that planned

 

11: There's a mod called Romancing of Eyja that has a "date" mission. Might help with ideas.

 

13: Could make it random and then manually adjust the NPC's you feel are a certain orientation.

 

19:Eh, ,any here use custom races, so this would be very, very hard to do if not impossible. I'd suggest letting us pick our primary personality through a spell, and let us augment it with certain dialog choices. So for example say you're rude, give us varying rude dialog options and let us pick how rude we are.

 

And those are my thoughts. Hope it helps. I feel this would be a fantastic thing for everyone to have, and hope you do decide to release it for everyone to use. I'd certainly appreciate it

[GMac2021]

If you're going to make your mod dependant on a companion mod, I have to ask you to take a look at MCS

 

I've used CSR, CMPartners (and I have a few other companion mods archived, as well), but nothing works as seamlessly with Lovers as MCS.

 

Just my opinion. YMMV.

[Guest]

This sounds awesome! This will surely add more realism to lovers and the game itself! I wish you luck on your quest

 

@garcemac, I agree. It's less buggy and has more features than CSR and CM.

[Sparlimb]

Mighty ambitious! I applaud your efforts and will definitely be in line for downloading when released.

[ger4]

You might find these mod useful for ideas as well http://oblivion.nexusmods.com/mods/31576/

[Guest ThatOne]

This sounds like it would be a great addition. Here's my two cents:

 

-About CSR: I wouldn't mind, as I can always adapt my companions to whatever system you implement.

 

#1 - I think you should keep it simple for starters. Too many variables can really mess things up, especially since you'll need dialog lines for these conditions.

 

#3 - Well, you'll have to remove the generic greetings, otherwise people will still get "You have the hands of a smith" from their lovers. Awkward.

 

#6 - Animation packs will be the death of this, unfortunately. Perhaps with the animation collection it will be better, but I still think you should not limit it (because some players may delete certain positions entirely, or swap them out).

 

#19 - Not a good idea at all. There are LOTS of players who use custom classes, and nearly all custom races. You can't cover all options and a generic dialog will just feel over-used.

 

You can, however, give all players multiple dialog lines to choose from and let them pick whichever one fits their character the most.

 

 

And lastly, #12 - just a few random ideas:

 

Assuming the player character has high personality and speechcraft, and the npc's disposition to the pc is very high:

 

-High confidence, speechcraft and personality npcs should try to win the pc over with a romantic date (possibly with a marriage proposal at the end)

 

-Low confidence npcs could beg the player to be theirs alone. Upon rejection, they could suicide IF their disposition the player was at 100. A suicide note could be placed in their inventory, which will vary depending on their personality, race etc

Care should be taken with quest npcs, of course.

 

-High aggression and low responsibility npcs could try to repeatedly rape the player character into submission. Perhaps the player could have the option to tell the guards to arrest the npc if she\he refuses

 

-Wealthy npcs could try to buy the pc's affection (EX: gifts) on the condition she\he will be theirs alone. If the pc still refuses, they could try to hire thugs

 

-High responsibility npcs could try to talk with the player to find why she\he cheated on them. Reasons could be impotence, lack of time spent with the pc, wealth etc. Each reason should be countered by the npc - based on their confidence.

 

 

I do NOT expect to see all of these. I don't expect to see even one of these - they are merely ideas for you to consider and perhaps pick something out of if you like them.

I realize that each of these will take a LOT of time to implement, especially since any of them could be expanded on and on depending on how many conditions you place. Though they will add a lot of personality to the npcs, I doubt it will be time-efficient for you.

 

-TO

[arelim]

Thank you everyone for your comments so far. Lots of good things to consider.

 

 

On some of the main points:

 

1. NPC personalities ... originally, I was going to create 8 personality types using factions and then assign them to each npc manually ... but of course, that wouldn't do for npcs from mods. What I'm THINKING now, is when a cell loads, it will check all the npcs in the cell and if they aren't in one of the personality factions it will assign them to a personality faction based on the stats I mentioned (each stat weighting it).

 

Then have choice stats effect behavior under certain circumstances. I.e. People with a high personality might be harder to get to go out with you, or someone with a high responsibility wont be interested in a PC with a high infamy.

 

6. Animations ... This is a tough situation. I realize that different people will have different animations and can retool the groups ... but ... I also don't want to be held hostage by the poorly organized animation groups of xpos01 through xpos09 ...

 

Lots of different groups of what is mostly vaginal positions, and then two or three groups that hold lots of different acts in the same groups, from mutual masterbation to foreplay to oral to tit fucking to rough sex to anal. All of those wonderful animations that could and should have their own dialogue topic, but don't because they are lumped into groups together. Not to mention the fact that, at least my system seems to be very fond of ALWAYS starting with the same animations in a given group ... so if I ever want to see something different, I have to cycle through ... which really breaks the immersion factor and makes it feel like a dialogue based animation viewer.

 

Then there is the issue with dialogue during sex. If I base blow job dialogue on the 'blow job' group ... there are a lot of animations in that group that are not really blow jobs. What about a girl going down on a girl? Or titfucking and foreplay (which I believe is in the blowjob group). You don't want someone talking about how good they suck cock while no cock sucking is going on!

 

My idea for handling it comes from TrueCrime, which calls specific animations rather than animation groups. This is also done in lovershooker for a couple options. So anyone who uses truecrime or lovershooker is in the same boat as far as animations not matching up.

 

Selecting the animation that is displayed based on someone's personality was just an idea I came up with as an aside. I'm okay with dropping that part ... but still, I don't want to be forced to stick with the existing bad xpose dialogue options.

 

So, if someone can come up with a better way of solving these problems, I'm all ears. I racked my brain long and hard trying to come up with a way to use the groups that exist ... because of the exact problems you mentioned ... but I ultimately decided that the benefit outweighed the cost. And I'll probably do it that way, even if it means no one wants to use this mod ... but I would be more than happy to listen to alternative solutions than mine.

 

19. PLAYER PERSONALITY ... this is a hard one. I did NOT like the setting of your personality based on a spell. In one part, I want how you play your character to have consequences. I also feel like there needs to be a normal in game way of doing that stuff... everything done through menus and spells breaks immersion ...

 

If the faction based personalities for NPC's works out, maybe I'll do the same thing with the PC ... perhaps either a spell to change your personality faction (guh) or a way to change your personality faction by talking to the right npcs ... or possibly each time you level a script is run that evaluates your stats and determines which personality faction you should be in. It will most likely start with an NPC you can talk to to switch your personality faction.

 

 

On the question of the companion system ... CSR or MCS or whatever. this again is a hard one. I remember I tried out MCS a year or so ago and didn't like it, but I don't remember why ... so I'll check it out again.

 

Mostly the reason I integrated my current version with CSR in the first place is ...

 

1. I already use CSR and having the 'friend...' dialogue thats part of CSR and the 'friend' dialogue from my mod thats in the dialogue options for EVERY npc I was friends with was really irritating ... so it was either stop using csr or integrate them.

 

2. CSR has simple dialogue based inventory and gift giving options already in place that I can just plug into dialogue for my various 'relationships' without having to write that stuff myself. So if I dump CSR, either I have to dump those features too or do that stuff myself.

 

I have considered doing gifts differently anyway ... possibly have it so different personality types like different gifts ... and have it entirely dialogue based ... i.e. you click on the 'I have a gift for you' dialogue option and they say something like "Oh, what is it?" ... and if you have a gift in your inventory the npc likes, then you have the option of giving it to them ... otherwise it gives you the option of 'nevermind, I was just fooling' ... and they get pissed. (this would encourage you to ask them what kind of gifts they like first)

[Guest ThatOne]

Well, I agree on #1, and #6 is completely your choice (yeah, I use truecrime and tweaked it a little).

 

#19 sounds like the thing that would be both most difficult, and most likely to go bad. To me, dialog options are somewhat like a mental checklist of responses - you consider, then pick one.

That's why I like having as many options as possible available to me.

 

This is, of course, my personal preference, and it's up to you to make your mod however you want. I am only suggesting.

 

About the gift system - I can't really think of any other effective way to implement a gift system, but you might want to give the option of "I was just fooling" even if the player does have an acceptable gift in his\her inventory. Players can easily tweak it later to add items from mods if they like, which is also a plus.

 

-TO

[arelim]

On the issue of player personality ... I'm not really talking about having different dialogue choices for different player personalities.

 

Honestly, in the oblivion dialogue system, this would be a gigantic pain in the butt. Oblivion dialogue was never really meant for players to have different choices/personalities like in Fallout or Skyrim, so the functionality to support it just isn't there.

 

It was done to a limited degree in loversvoice ... but the code for it was monsterous ... it MIGHT be implemented if I get other things done and get bored. But it would essentially require me to make duplicate conversation topics for each player personality... for each topic ... guh.

 

Mostly player personalities will govern what they say during sex and how NPC's act towards them. i.e. something like a player who is controlling isn't going to interest a strong independent npc, or a sluty player isn't going to interest a prudish npc.

 

My current plan for that is to have one "Would you like to date?" topic and then if the npc doesn't like the player because of their personality have them say something like "I don't like how you treat people. So no." or "I don't date trashy sluts."

 

There will probably be other dialogue options that affect personalities... but I'm not that far into the new version, so one thing at a time.

 

I'm going to get the base elements in place for the new version, and then expand.

 

So stage one is establishing how npc personalities work and then basic dialogue for those personalities.

 

I'm not going to worry about gift giving, companion systems, animations, or any of the other stuff right away.

[ger4]

How's progress, this looks like it has a lot of potential

[arelim]

I've been mired in real life ... I was in the hospital for a while and then holidays ... I'm hoping to get some more work done soon. My early attempts at assigning personality types to NPC's dynamically has been somewhat of an issue ... it keeps overtaxing my system and causing a CTD ... so I've got to come up with a new approach. I don't really want to assign personalities manually, because then npcs added by mods wont have personalities... also, it might create conflicts with any mod that modifies all the NPC's in the game... we'll see.

[ger4]

I've been mired in real life ... I was in the hospital for a while and then holidays ... I'm hoping to get some more work done soon. My early attempts at assigning personality types to NPC's dynamically has been somewhat of an issue ... it keeps overtaxing my system and causing a CTD ... so I've got to come up with a new approach. I don't really want to assign personalities manually' date=' because then npcs added by mods wont have personalities... also, it might create conflicts with any mod that modifies all the NPC's in the game... we'll see.

[/quote']

 

Thanks