And another bug : if you use a magic item to boost a magical skill by say 5 points and then level the skill up while it's boosted, you get a progression of 6 points instead of 1 (that is the 5 points from the magic item + the 1 normal point !). Apparently to fix it comment out this group of lines : player->setAlteration 1000 set skillFort to player->getAlteration set skillFort to skillFort - 1000 set skill to skill - skillFort player->setAlteration skill here for alteration, there is the same group of lines for each skill. I am not sure why the author did that in the 1st place, probably a limitation of the original morrowind engine. From my 1st tests commenting this works fine.
Also the fix for the messagebox mentioned in the other message is %.0f to replace %.0g and not %.2f.
Thank you for this. This seems to work at least for the time being. I thought at first the problem might've been NCGD because when I had Mantle of Woe on (50 increase to Conjuration) it had boosted me 5 levels when I leveled up Conjuration, but I noticed other skill boosts didn't have this effect, Marara's Ring and Acrobatics, for example.
With the above bug, it seems like the mod set my new normal to being 50 points higher in Conjuration than what it was and when I took Mantle of Woe off, it turned into a damaged skill (only fix is to reload). But I just tried again after fixing the above and it works. Let's hope something else wasn't broken in the process.
Hi, great mod but it seems Im having a bug: Ive created a custom spell that is composed of 1. Weakness to Magicka 2. Absorb Health. The custom spell is correctly labelled as a Mysticism spell, and its hit chance is associated to Mysticism, but when i cast it my Destruction experience increases! Any help would be apreciated!
Just a small issue to report : when leveling a magical skill I get message like "Restoration skill increased to 2e+1" in the message box at the bottom of the screen. The value is correct in the character stats, it's just the message box which is wrong so it's a very small issue. And for those who wonder, it works perfectly with ncgdmw lua version".
attention please, for future readers - THIS MOD DOES NOT WORK!
None of the "patches" intended to make it compatible will resolve the problem. Specifically, with this mod installed or with any patches even remotely related to it, your magic skills will not increase - ever. There are too many other bugs and problems related to it to even be bothering, but suffice to say that the entire mod simply is dead on arrival.
?And you need; 1. OpenMW!? 2. Better Sounds, by JEKA and TJ (do NOT include the plugin from this, use the patch) 3. Better Sounds 1.1 Patch 2, by Darklocq 4. Natural Character Growth and Decay OpenMW, by Greywander (Either regular or alt_start w the start potion) 5. Magicka Based Skill Progression - ncgdMW Compatility Version from this page 6. You need this MBSP-BS-NCGD-Class_Spec-Fixed Again from: https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/48955?tab=files
Ok recommended changes (apparently the mod is not maintained anymore, so you can do this by using openmw-cs, just run openmw-cs <complete path of your mod> and it will load everything, then menu mechanics / Scripts, click on Modified column to display the added ones 1st,)
hf_magickaskill : comment line 89 (just add a ; at the beginning of the line). The line which reads set fDiff to ( fDiff - refund ) the script gives you a refund in magicka each time you cast a spell based on your current skill, which is fine. But then this line ruins most of it by taking into account the refund when computing how much experience you get from the spell you just cast. So comment out the line, you should get experience from the real cost of the spell. Now you won't get an extraordinary improvement on the speed at which you gain experience. What made me do that is a spell which had a base cost of 80, so a big one. I had 49 in conjuration, and when I cast it I gained only 6 experience points from the book you get in your inventory for conjuration ! Commenting the line raises the amount to 10, which is not extraordinary, but more reasonable. If you want to make some global adjustments for the amount of experience, it's here to do that. fDiff was multiplied before by 1.25 for secondary skills, and 1.33 for primary skills. I didn't test it yet a lot with this line commented, but the skill progression still feels slow compared to other skills, especially fighting skills which accelerate a lot when you start to hit often. I am going to try 1.25 for a while I think...
If you want to fix the faulty number reported in the message box which appears for a very short time when you gain a level, you have to edit hf_magickaConjuration, hf_MagickaDestruction and so on for each school of magicka and change the %.0g in the messagebox line at the end of the script by %.2f, that's a C error actually.
openmw-cs is very well done for editing script, you don't need to compile anything, it's done in real time while you type, so just do a save in the end and that's all.
Even though I'm loading this mod after NCGD (as recommended to avoid this kind of issue), I've started running into a weird issue where Destruction is being leveled up in both the normal way and the way defined by this mod. No other magic skill seems to be leveling up twice in this way that I've noticed, only Destruction. I also don't think this has been happening the whole way through my game, it only happened after playing for ~10 hours, and I didn't add any new mods around when it started happening (or at all since I started playing this character). Once I noticed this I've started working around it by just resetting my Destruction in the console to the correct value when the duplicate level up happens, but any ideas what could be causing this? Has anyone seen anything similar?
I am really enjoying this mod and am glad it doesn't require the use of any sound mods as they tend to break my combat sounds and I don't understand why. I made a tweak and am going to see how I like it. I don't know much about script writing or modding in general, but here's what I did:
In short I replaced 15 with 5+(skill*skill/333.3333333). There is a little bit more to it than that, basically creating my own variable for "skill" because I didn't want to break the rest of the script by tinkering with things that I don't know what they do.
This change makes it so that the magicka required to gain 1 EXP goes up exponentially based on how high your skill is. At the lowest, you'll need to cast 5 magicka worth of spells to get 1 EXP, at 50 skill you'll need to cast 12.5 magicka, and at 100 skill you'll need to cast 35 magicka.
This grows over time and I'm not sure how much I'll like it late game yet, since Morrowind already has a kind of diminishing returns for what 1 EXP gets you. But I can't imagine it being that bad since higher magicka cost spells become ridiculously easy to cast later on. What I like already is that the early game feels less slow for sure where 15 is a decently hefty cost for 1 EXP on some characters. If you start at 15 skill, typical for a minor skill, you only need 5.675 magicka cost, but there will also likely be difficulty with just getting the cast off so it kind of balances itself out.
Will edit/reply to this post later with if I hate this or love it, but I thought I'd just put this out there that it's totally possible and probably worth considering making a varying magicka requirement for exp based on skill progression.
I did some personal tweaks to this mod to fit better to my own mods. I found that commenting out the line that subtracts the refunded magicka from the equation for awarded skill points makes the progression a lot more enjoyable in my opinion.
The mod uses the vanilla Morrowind formula for linear skill progression, but on top of that you have casting cost reduction, which causes player to get diminishing returns from spells as their skill grows, so there's this double smoothing going on, resulting in the player getting much less points than what would be expected, especially from the early game spells. This is actually a documented feature in the original mod by HotFusion4, although I can't really understand why it was designed that way, since no other skill does the same. Unmodified base experience gain for an axe swing stays the same the whole game, so why should magic be different?
Even as a pure mage, the early game is fought with low level spells and with default settings those give practically no experience at all. You could fight all fights between Seyda Neen and Balmora with magic only and see zero skill increases, while a warrior would have increased several skills.
I know you aren't the original author of the mod, just throwing out some general thoughts on how to improve on this.
EDIT:
I did some more testing and more importantly, changed the value of a single progress point (before other calculations) to be at 32 spent magicka. An Altmer Mage with a total magicka of 500 and 75 in all magic skills (using NCGD) can fire off a total of 12 spells costing 100 magicka each (cast reduction) before running out. So if you cast two 100 magicka spells from each magic school, you end up being at around 10-14% progress towards the next level for each skill. I did reinstate different skill rates for major and minor skills, so the values would be a bit less if not a dedicated mage. I'm going to start a new character and see how these values work in practice. Since magicka by default doesn't regenerate like fatigue does, it makes sense for spells to give out a bit more experience.
I too would love info on where you made these changes. I'm pretty the script HF_MAgickaSkill is where the magicka refund/skill points stuff gets hashed out as well as the single progress point note you made in your edit. I'm curious about what you did for the major/minor skill rates as well. And if I'm missing something important I'll probably figure it out, but it'd be great to have confirmation that I got the right stuff
To everyone that is looking for where to make these edits: I recommend using openmw-cs (I use the copy from the latest build of openmw I have, which is 0.46) to "edit existing addon", pick Morrowind.esm as the base game, and then checking the box next to this mod name. The easiest way to find the scripts that were added is to click edit->global search and clicking the little dropdown that defaults to "text" to "record state". Then change the type to "added". Have some patience while it searches. The script you will want to edit is HF_MAgickaSkill. On line 89 you will see "set fDiff to ( fDiff / 15 ) ;The 15 governs how much experience each point of Magicka is worth. Bigger numbers = less experience" or something along those lines. Turning that 15 into a lower number will give you more progress per cast, as the comment also tells you. If you want to change the calculation so that the cast cost reduction doesn't get factored into the progress calculation (ie a 100 cost spell will give you progression as if it cost 100 magicka, not as if it cost however much it was after cost reduction) then you can remove the line above it. It will say something like "set fDiff to ( fDiff - refund )".
Fell down a bit of a hole on this but I took a look at how exp is calculated in the version of the mod I had (from here: https://modding-openmw.com/mods/magicka-based-skill-progression-better-soundsncgdm/)
I made a spreadsheet for visualizing xp growth by way of how many spell-casts of a given spell-cost are needed to get a skill level. I only looked at destruction but I assume the others are the same. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-MieBm8LcHhtHB35Atvl77mTDm4_AW1iAouA_Uv4VVs/edit?usp=sharing
With the default settings of 15 fdiff multiplier and refund (67% at skilll 100) subtracted before calculating xp, you can learn some useful stats: * It would take casting the 5-magicka fireball starter skill 198 times to go from lvl 45 to 46. (I chose this as my main example because I played an altmer pure-mage and didnt see a skill increase in 7 hours of play) * It would take casting God's Fire (biggest purchasable fire spell in the game at 135 magicka) _7 times_ for that same 45->46 level up, which is a pretty ridiculous thing to imagine on my 275-magicka altmer travelling to balmora) * 6-to-10-cost spells one- or two-shot most early game enemies, of which you may encounter one every 5-20 minutes
So now we can toggle off the refund subtraction as you suggested in your comment: * The casts-per-level becomes a linear increase instead of a curve * 138 fireballs to go from 45 to 46, and 6 God's Fires
I'm going to spend some time thinking about improving on this system in a way that is more faithful to the original game while still preserving the idea of better growth through more powerful spells.
EDIT: After doing some more research and reading the original author's 2.1 readme, I understand the intent a far bit better now. The scaling is such that 15 magicka is the amount needed to get 1 XP worth of the old linear successfuly-cast-based system from vanilla. The problem I see here however is that vanilla hugely swings the XP needed for leveling based on major/minor and class-specialty, but all xp gains in this mod are treated as non-specialized minor skills, in other words no benefit no detrement. This means youre effectively leveling your major-specialized skills half a sast as you should be.,
EDIT EDIT: that functionality is totally here but commented out, wonder why
EDIT EDIT EDIT: theres some stuff here but a lot of it was wrong, so I imagine they just uleft it unfinished. I wonder if other versions of this plugin have the minor/misc/specialization implemented and if its correct. I have figured out the correct numbers and updated the above spreadsheet to allow you to toggle major/minor/specialization and see the differences. would take 83 fireball casts of a magic-specialized major skill to go from 46-56 (which is how many casts of any spell in that school it would require in old vanilla) I tihnk maybe 15 is a bit too high, 10 seems more right to me. SO what I plan to do is: * fix the scrpting in the existing mod to work correctly with major/minor/spec * allow taking the major/minor/spec quiz from the spellbook (it didnt fire at startup for me) Some possible further improvements: * Potentially allow 3 different speed options, 5/10/15 for magicka-per-xp * Play with the refund system to make it less huge and crazy, look at modelling it after skyrim's magicka cost reduction system
EDIT EDIT EDIT EDIT: Ok seeing Greywander's description it seems they removed the major/minor checking due to NCGD not caring about them. I think this was probably a mistake because the original mod was accurately replicating the game's experience growth model and really relies on that decision to matter. I would be interested to hear if NCGD affects the skill growth rate more than just the multi-earning past 100. hotfusion's 2.1 readme made it sound like there was very little to no scripting access to that stuff. (which would also mean that major/minor/special does still matter for skill growth speed, would be interested to hear if im wrong on this) Anyway I fixed all the numbers issues that were in the original code, re-enabled the major/minor quiz, made it accessible from the report, prettied up all the UI, and also added the ability to change the "Magicka-per-1XP" scalar from 15 to a handful of options. I've never modded anything in my life before but this was fun. Idk if its kosher for me to even f*** around with the code here in a 2-year old forum thread. If anyone reads this and wants a copy of my omwaddon pm me i think?
FINAL EDIT I SWEAR: Here's my upload of my version of the mod. It includes the better sounds fix and my above-described changes. I detailed my changes and research on the mod page: https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/47812/
I'd love a copy of your edited version. The permissions say you can do what you want with the mod as long as you give credit, so you could put it on nexus as its own mod. Way more people would be able to find it that way.
mmmk Ill figure out how to post a mod and do a full write up on the hows and whys of my changes OK Here's my version of this mod, it has the Better Sound Fix as well as all the options described above https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/47812/
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Apparently to fix it comment out this group of lines :
player->setAlteration 1000
set skillFort to player->getAlteration
set skillFort to skillFort - 1000
set skill to skill - skillFort
player->setAlteration skill
here for alteration, there is the same group of lines for each skill. I am not sure why the author did that in the 1st place, probably a limitation of the original morrowind engine. From my 1st tests commenting this works fine.
Also the fix for the messagebox mentioned in the other message is %.0f to replace %.0g and not %.2f.
With the above bug, it seems like the mod set my new normal to being 50 points higher in Conjuration than what it was and when I took Mantle of Woe off, it turned into a damaged skill (only fix is to reload). But I just tried again after fixing the above and it works. Let's hope something else wasn't broken in the process.
The custom spell is correctly labelled as a Mysticism spell, and its hit chance is associated to Mysticism, but when i cast it my Destruction experience increases! Any help would be apreciated!
And for those who wonder, it works perfectly with ncgdmw lua version".
Cheers!
None of the "patches" intended to make it compatible will resolve the problem. Specifically, with this mod installed or with any patches even remotely related to it, your magic skills will not increase - ever. There are too many other bugs and problems related to it to even be bothering, but suffice to say that the entire mod simply is dead on arrival.
?And you need;
1. OpenMW!?
2. Better Sounds, by JEKA and TJ (do NOT include the plugin from this, use the patch)
3. Better Sounds 1.1 Patch 2, by Darklocq
4. Natural Character Growth and Decay OpenMW, by Greywander (Either regular or alt_start w the start potion)
5. Magicka Based Skill Progression - ncgdMW Compatility Version from this page
6. You need this MBSP-BS-NCGD-Class_Spec-Fixed Again from:
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/48955?tab=files
I think this would be also the load order.
hf_magickaskill : comment line 89 (just add a ; at the beginning of the line). The line which reads
set fDiff to ( fDiff - refund )
the script gives you a refund in magicka each time you cast a spell based on your current skill, which is fine. But then this line ruins most of it by taking into account the refund when computing how much experience you get from the spell you just cast. So comment out the line, you should get experience from the real cost of the spell. Now you won't get an extraordinary improvement on the speed at which you gain experience.
What made me do that is a spell which had a base cost of 80, so a big one. I had 49 in conjuration, and when I cast it I gained only 6 experience points from the book you get in your inventory for conjuration !
Commenting the line raises the amount to 10, which is not extraordinary, but more reasonable.
If you want to make some global adjustments for the amount of experience, it's here to do that.
fDiff was multiplied before by 1.25 for secondary skills, and 1.33 for primary skills. I didn't test it yet a lot with this line commented, but the skill progression still feels slow compared to other skills, especially fighting skills which accelerate a lot when you start to hit often. I am going to try 1.25 for a while I think...
If you want to fix the faulty number reported in the message box which appears for a very short time when you gain a level, you have to edit
hf_magickaConjuration, hf_MagickaDestruction and so on for each school of magicka and change the %.0g in the messagebox line at the end of the script by %.2f, that's a C error actually.
openmw-cs is very well done for editing script, you don't need to compile anything, it's done in real time while you type, so just do a save in the end and that's all.
In short I replaced 15 with 5+(skill*skill/333.3333333). There is a little bit more to it than that, basically creating my own variable for "skill" because I didn't want to break the rest of the script by tinkering with things that I don't know what they do.
This change makes it so that the magicka required to gain 1 EXP goes up exponentially based on how high your skill is. At the lowest, you'll need to cast 5 magicka worth of spells to get 1 EXP, at 50 skill you'll need to cast 12.5 magicka, and at 100 skill you'll need to cast 35 magicka.
This grows over time and I'm not sure how much I'll like it late game yet, since Morrowind already has a kind of diminishing returns for what 1 EXP gets you. But I can't imagine it being that bad since higher magicka cost spells become ridiculously easy to cast later on. What I like already is that the early game feels less slow for sure where 15 is a decently hefty cost for 1 EXP on some characters. If you start at 15 skill, typical for a minor skill, you only need 5.675 magicka cost, but there will also likely be difficulty with just getting the cast off so it kind of balances itself out.
Will edit/reply to this post later with if I hate this or love it, but I thought I'd just put this out there that it's totally possible and probably worth considering making a varying magicka requirement for exp based on skill progression.
The mod uses the vanilla Morrowind formula for linear skill progression, but on top of that you have casting cost reduction, which causes player to get diminishing returns from spells as their skill grows, so there's this double smoothing going on, resulting in the player getting much less points than what would be expected, especially from the early game spells. This is actually a documented feature in the original mod by HotFusion4, although I can't really understand why it was designed that way, since no other skill does the same. Unmodified base experience gain for an axe swing stays the same the whole game, so why should magic be different?
Even as a pure mage, the early game is fought with low level spells and with default settings those give practically no experience at all. You could fight all fights between Seyda Neen and Balmora with magic only and see zero skill increases, while a warrior would have increased several skills.
I know you aren't the original author of the mod, just throwing out some general thoughts on how to improve on this.
EDIT:
I did some more testing and more importantly, changed the value of a single progress point (before other calculations) to be at 32 spent magicka. An Altmer Mage with a total magicka of 500 and 75 in all magic skills (using NCGD) can fire off a total of 12 spells costing 100 magicka each (cast reduction) before running out. So if you cast two 100 magicka spells from each magic school, you end up being at around 10-14% progress towards the next level for each skill. I did reinstate different skill rates for major and minor skills, so the values would be a bit less if not a dedicated mage. I'm going to start a new character and see how these values work in practice. Since magicka by default doesn't regenerate like fatigue does, it makes sense for spells to give out a bit more experience.
I made a spreadsheet for visualizing xp growth by way of how many spell-casts of a given spell-cost are needed to get a skill level. I only looked at destruction but I assume the others are the same. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-MieBm8LcHhtHB35Atvl77mTDm4_AW1iAouA_Uv4VVs/edit?usp=sharing
With the default settings of 15 fdiff multiplier and refund (67% at skilll 100) subtracted before calculating xp, you can learn some useful stats:
* It would take casting the 5-magicka fireball starter skill 198 times to go from lvl 45 to 46. (I chose this as my main example because I played an altmer pure-mage and didnt see a skill increase in 7 hours of play)
* It would take casting God's Fire (biggest purchasable fire spell in the game at 135 magicka) _7 times_ for that same 45->46 level up, which is a pretty ridiculous thing to imagine on my 275-magicka altmer travelling to balmora)
* 6-to-10-cost spells one- or two-shot most early game enemies, of which you may encounter one every 5-20 minutes
So now we can toggle off the refund subtraction as you suggested in your comment:
* The casts-per-level becomes a linear increase instead of a curve
* 138 fireballs to go from 45 to 46, and 6 God's Fires
I'm going to spend some time thinking about improving on this system in a way that is more faithful to the original game while still preserving the idea of better growth through more powerful spells.
EDIT: After doing some more research and reading the original author's 2.1 readme, I understand the intent a far bit better now. The scaling is such that 15 magicka is the amount needed to get 1 XP worth of the old linear successfuly-cast-based system from vanilla. The problem I see here however is that vanilla hugely swings the XP needed for leveling based on major/minor and class-specialty, but all xp gains in this mod are treated as non-specialized minor skills, in other words no benefit no detrement. This means youre effectively leveling your major-specialized skills half a sast as you should be.,
EDIT EDIT: that functionality is totally here but commented out, wonder why
EDIT EDIT EDIT: theres some stuff here but a lot of it was wrong, so I imagine they just uleft it unfinished. I wonder if other versions of this plugin have the minor/misc/specialization implemented and if its correct. I have figured out the correct numbers and updated the above spreadsheet to allow you to toggle major/minor/specialization and see the differences. would take 83 fireball casts of a magic-specialized major skill to go from 46-56 (which is how many casts of any spell in that school it would require in old vanilla) I tihnk maybe 15 is a bit too high, 10 seems more right to me.
SO what I plan to do is:
* fix the scrpting in the existing mod to work correctly with major/minor/spec
* allow taking the major/minor/spec quiz from the spellbook (it didnt fire at startup for me)
Some possible further improvements:
* Potentially allow 3 different speed options, 5/10/15 for magicka-per-xp
* Play with the refund system to make it less huge and crazy, look at modelling it after skyrim's magicka cost reduction system
EDIT EDIT EDIT EDIT:
Ok seeing Greywander's description it seems they removed the major/minor checking due to NCGD not caring about them. I think this was probably a mistake because the original mod was accurately replicating the game's experience growth model and really relies on that decision to matter. I would be interested to hear if NCGD affects the skill growth rate more than just the multi-earning past 100. hotfusion's 2.1 readme made it sound like there was very little to no scripting access to that stuff. (which would also mean that major/minor/special does still matter for skill growth speed, would be interested to hear if im wrong on this)
Anyway I fixed all the numbers issues that were in the original code, re-enabled the major/minor quiz, made it accessible from the report, prettied up all the UI, and also added the ability to change the "Magicka-per-1XP" scalar from 15 to a handful of options.
I've never modded anything in my life before but this was fun. Idk if its kosher for me to even f*** around with the code here in a 2-year old forum thread. If anyone reads this and wants a copy of my omwaddon pm me i think?
FINAL EDIT I SWEAR: Here's my upload of my version of the mod. It includes the better sounds fix and my above-described changes. I detailed my changes and research on the mod page: https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/47812/
OK Here's my version of this mod, it has the Better Sound Fix as well as all the options described above
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/47812/