I'm working on giving a more diverse look to groups of creatures - the Flaming Fist, Blacktalons, ogres and others - in line with their concept and what I think would be reasonable equipment for them. Those changes will override creatures' default looks. But there are still going to be many other groups and countless stand-alone NPC in the game who wear identical leather armor, carry standard swords and never decorate their helmets or bows. Take the Friendly Arm Inn. Here we have a guards "faction" and the guards are just men in leather with long swords. There is no sense to editing them in any special way, but there should still be some variety of shades and metal types in the Sword Coast, even if most of the metal is smelted from the same ore and pigs are of the same breed. Plus, modders keep adding NPC of their own, there is no way to catch them all with particular edits.
What I could do is edit the basic armors (and robes) and weapons to be diverse automatically. The basic leather armor 10000 creatures wear is LEAT01.ITM. If I edit it to have a Create Item in Slot effect, it could replace itself automatically with an armor from a random table as soon as it were put on. Those secondary armors would be without this special property. In this way LEAT01.ITM would become a placeholder for "Let's see your leather armor selection" instead of a particular suit, and so on for other equipment. When a leather suit is bought, it exists only as an icon - the player has yet to see what it looks like on the paperdoll. If the armor replaced itself immediately after being put on, there would be no suspension of disbelief. It's the same with other items - somemight have nice blue-steel blades, others may be dull or rusty (with gameplay effects or not). Party members would be able to buy another item to try their luck again at this roulette, if they cared very much for looks. NPC would obviously be stuck with what they'd gotten at spawning. And because this is an item effect, later special changes for groups, done as effects in CRE files, would come in later and overwrite it.
What do you think?
A problem with this concept is that Create Item in Slot crashes the game if it's done from the inventory - the armor tries to replace itself under the eyes of the player. This sort of thing is not a problem for NPC, who never go to their inventories. Equipping happens from the outside with them, but it is a problem for the party. The crash can be bypassed if the opcode is delayed by 1 second. Time doesn't run in Inventory, so the change happens upon returning to the main screen. It's not quite natural to equip one armor on the paperdoll and see another the next time you go to the inventory, though, but may be a negligible issue... For NPC the delay is out of the question, they must spawn already colored, but here I could probably apply a filter - with Use EFF File. Instant change for non-PC, delayed change for PC. Or even no change for PC. That would definitely solve it, but it's be nicer to provide variety to the party as well.
Long text... Or how about this: for PC, replace the item not on equipping it but on acquiring it? They do receive it in the inventory before they can equip it. So if Player 1 has LEAT01.ITM, Apply Spell RES to Remove/Create Inventory item at percentages. Separate the function for PC and NPC, as it were. Replacement with opcodes doesn't even produce the "Lost Item/Gained Item" messages. But do the "on the ground" slots count as having something in one's inventory?
Edited by temnix, 10 April 2017 - 09:06 AM.
