Sunday, November 7, 2010

More Oblivion Observations

Still working with the CS.

My initial attempt at a standalone was a fairly resounding failure. I won't go into heavy detail about what all I was doing, but suffice to say that despite engine similarities, Oblivion and Fallout 3 are very different games where NPC behavior and interactions are concerned.

Doing my best to adapt and overcome, and am making headway.

I'm continually amused, however, by the constant contradictions I run across.

As I observed before, my primary issue has been in accessing the companion's inventory via dialog.

Reading around forums and dissecting other people's work had led me to believe that it was fairly involved - that the container need be moved to the cell you currently occupy, and some other considerations made.

Deciding to look elsewhere from CM, I opened up the esp from Montana's Sexy Companion II - which is hands-down one of if not the best companion ever made for Oblivion.

Montana's solution for the inventory was a simple call on the dialog: "pgchestcasual.activate player, 1"

The rest is handled within the OnActivate block of the chest's object script. This runs counter to what I had been able to divine from various readings. Ostensibly, after all, a container won't activate if it isn't in the same cell as the player. No activate == OnActivate block never fires.

That said, in near four years of use, Astrianna's inventory has never once failed to open for me.

It also turns out that amongst its many other companion flaws, Oblivion doesn't transport party members automatically when you fast travel. Different companions and systems handle this different ways, but all of them have had to add in extra functions to keep the companion(s) in question with you.

I'll confess I had always wondered a bit, but after doing it in reverse, I now understand why so many Oblivion modders had a hell of a time transitioning to FO3.

You NV modders seem to have lucked out.

12 comments:

  1. It seems the complaints were heard and acted on; too bad Bethesda won't likely back-port the fixes to Oblivion any time in the next two or three centuries...

    On that note, I had to buy Oblivion again; I somehow misplaced DVD 1 from the original copy I bought last year, so now I have 2 copies of DVD 2 and the maps. I also ran into a minor glitch with a few mods I installed but haven't bothered to track down the source of the incompatibility.

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  2. I'm not sure I'd say the complaints were fully acted on... most of the bugs and such are still there; they just made it less unfriendly to companion makers.

    And not that I advocate such things, but I'm sure there are cracked executables about that allow playing without the DVD in the drive...

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  3. One needs the game installed before such a thing will work...

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  4. BACKUPS! ALWAYS MAKE BACKUPS!

    Sorry if that seemed a bit over-zealous, but I learned that lesson the hard way by losing the entire contents of a hard drive, operating system and all, on more than one occasion. Since then I keep an external drive that I use for nothing but backups. I like the Nero Back-It-Up program, which allows you to make an image of an entire hard drive and save it to another drive or even burn it to DVDs that can be put away for safe keeping.

    But then, if you don't have the game installed in the backup that really doesn't help, does it?

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  5. "One needs the game installed before such a thing will work... "

    Terribly sorry, but I must now refer to you as a filthy heathen for having the game uninstalled for any purpose other than repairing a damaged install.

    UNCLEAN! And so forth.

    Do penance, SINNAH!

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  6. So running out of space and getting rid of the least used game to free up space doesn't count?

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  7. Well, it would... but we're talking about Oblivion being the least used game on your hard drive.

    Doesn't really help yer case much...

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  8. I did say I wasn't impressed with it at the time, didn't I?

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  9. She was playing World Of Warcraft...

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  10. I actually did try WoW at one time; color me unimpressed with it. I found most of the Fantasy MMOs booorrrrriiiiinnngggj the same is true with the more recent efforts from Cryptic Studios (haven't tried the Star Trek one, but Champions Online didn't have a cape in my color). Now, City of Heroes is a different story...

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  11. Eh. An MMO is an MMO. Putting the player in a spandex outfit and giving them a stupid name doesn't make it suck less.

    Kill enemies to get experience and loot to level up to be able to kill more powerful enemies to get more experience and better loot, et cetera.

    Made of suck and fail no matter how you slice it or what the gimmick is.

    Only two MMOs have had potential. Planetside - which was a sci-fi type, except with the hook that the three factions vied for control of the world, and control of everything outposts to entire continents was persistent and real-time. Log off for the evening, and you could come back the next day to find your side had lost the entire area you were in. Gives one something more tangible than delivering packages and bringing back eighteen piles of extra-ripe guano. Unfortunately, Planet was long ago mismanaged into the ground, and never saw it's potential realized.

    The other was WAR - Warhammer Online. Like WoW, but without the pandering to eight year olds. Dark and violent, and you actually had the chance to be a real evil character. Chaos chosen could've been such fun...

    Alas, it too has been run into the dirt, and is all but dead from what I hear.

    The upcoming World of Darkness MMO might be interesting, depending on how it's handled. Just hoping they don't let Troika near it... >_>

    Unfortunately, all MMOs have the same inherent flaw: the other players. As I've said before, if I was willing to deal with morons constantly, I'd be out in the real world, and not home on my computer.

    That, and I resent the hell out of having to drop $50 on a game, and then pay an additional $15 a month to get to play it.

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