would you recommend to use this mod with BTB and BTBgised Tamriel Rebuild, if I use also More Exclusive Factions ?
I am asking if i will not level to slow or to fast ( as TR cca doubles content, but More exlusive factions also lowers it ( will propably play only 3 - 4 factions on one playthrough ) and BTB beside other things, changes vanilla xp values and many other GMST
EDIT: I just noticed you mentioned more exclusive factions. The later parts of this wall of text are less relevant in that case, you can probably be fine using the defaults or say 0.75X global XP, 0.5 might be a bit too harsh if you can't do intro quests for half the factions. I'd say SUS is hands down 100% fine for that kinda playthrough, worst case scenario you tweak the mod's settings a bit if you feel something's going too fast / too slow (in general or in any specific skill, you can tweak all of the skills covered independent of eachother if you want to, it's in the mod settings)
ANYWAYS enjoy wall of text:
I haven't personally played with BTB (anything that removes custom enchanting is a nono for me) BUT I don't think SUS would be a bad match for it.
SUS doesn't make the game "easier" by itself, all it does is make your character level better when playing to their strengths than to their weaknesses, unlike vanilla where often using your best weapon or spell drastically slows down your progress when compared to spamming low damage attacks/spells. In other words, SUS shifts XP from benefiting quantity, to benefiting quality of an action.
YES this does mean that you might feel you're leveling way faster if you're used to the glacial leveling speeds of say fully charged Warhammer attacks, but funnily enough it's not any faster than vanilla with dagger spam.
My advice is go to the mod settings and drag the global XP multiplier to 0.5, do a few quests and check whether you feel fine with it. I did a run with the current mod defaults and managed to become god-like in what felt to me like a reasonably vanilla time (that is after doing a good chunck of side quests and progressing the MQ to about 50-75% completion).. but keep in mind I used custom enchants, so with BTB I'd estimate you would probably be a demigod after say completing the MQ and one or two of the guild questlines. If what you want is to delay demigod status all the way past Vvardenfell content and well into TR, then I'd advice setting global XP to 0.5 like I said before, and going from there.
As a side note, keep in mind Morrowind is not balanced around very slow XP rates, so if you handicap yourself too much you'll be forced to do intro quests for many factions before actually being able to finish any of them. In other words, slow XP and high difficulty focuses challenge>storyline (as it encourages doing all the easy quests 1st because you flat out can't do the hard ones at lower levels) while more vanilla high XP low difficulty is the opposite, sacrificing any challenge after you've finished a couple questlines for the benefit of being able to focus said questlines one at a time in a more story-friendly manner. That's just my take on the matter of course, but I felt it worth sharing in case you hadn't considered the potential costs of being a bit too harsh on yerself.
SO I tried it with the latest version of NCGDMW and found no issues so far, everything seems to be okay as far as I can see (and I don't think NCGD lua should conflict with SUS since one affects skill XP gain and the other levelups / character stats, which are distinct)
What issue did you run into exactly, and what version of OpenMW are you running? Any and all info helps, so long as I can replicate the bug/issue, I'll probably be able to fix it (and if it's unfixable then I will update the mod description with "known incompatibilities")
I know I know, took a while but I'll look into it.
Currently about to upload a new version with some fixes I added a few days ago, better defaults, and three more settings options to enable people to better control how close/far the mod is from vanilla behaviour. If I find any problems with the Armor Offset setting I'll add a fix to the new version... and if I don't then it probably means a better description of what it does is in order.
I tested the "Armor Penalty Offset" setting with my current (rather minimal) modlist, and it seems to work as expected..
Did it straight up error out (you can check that via the F10 console), did it do nothing or did it not do what you expected? If in doubt, always do check out the "debug messages" settings at the bottom, they're very useful to quickly see how your XP and spell cost are being modified.
In case it was working but didn't do what you expected, here's what you should expect from that setting: it multiplies your armor weight for the purposes of calculating magic refund/penalty. It directly subtracts from your refund, potentially sending it into the negative (in which case spell cost is increased instead of decreased). Also note that I can't have Dynamic Cost show up directly in the magic menu. What you see in that menu is always the vanilla cost, and the refund/penalty is applied via script when you cast the spell. I'd love to have the ability to edit costs shown in the menu but currently it would mean re-doing the entire menu from scratch and that's waaaaaaaay beyond my means
For armors weighing <20 the penalty is rather minimal --you should notice your refund being reduced a bit.. for example testing it with default settings at [15 armor weight] and [45 skill] on a cheap spell I had refund go from [17% when unarmored] to [13% at 15 armor weight]. On the other extreme, equipping a full Daedric set at 45 skill can send your "refund" well into penalty territory, upwards of -80% (-80% refund = +80% cost)
For convenience, I opened this OpenMW Discord thread to discuss the mod, in case you prefer that platform :D
First and foremost do try out OpenMW if you ever feel like it! It's good out here, I promise :D
As for porting to vanilla/MWSE, provided it could be done I'd have nothing against it other than I won't spend my time on it. Anyone is free to edit and upload their version of any mod/code I upload (I won't complain so long as they credit me for making the original) so if someone wants to port SUS to MWSE they're free to do so
I personally happen to love OpenMW and part of what motivated me to mod was that my creations might nudge others toward trying it ^-^ I don't actually have anything against MWSE, but my time is limited and porting would take longer than I'm willing to consider
I would like to begin by stating that this looks extremely promising!
This being said, I've installed the latest dev build and tried out the mod on an existing mage character. When casting spells I don't gain any experience, regardless if they are cheap or expensive, nor does the mod seem to take into account if I wear armour or not.
Granted, I have a very big modlist, including the CORE (again for Openmw) - where I disabled the armour spellcasting penalties just in case, and BTBGI (which slows down skill increase and blocks mics skill increase). The mod is practically the last to load in my list (only Dynamic Music, the delta and the leveled lists are lower).
Any help would be appreciated.
(Edit: P.S: The debugger gives me a lua error, something about attempt to perform arithmetic).
I've tried to replicate the bug to no avail (albeit I did manage to find a different bug: settings save fine while in-game but get reset to default on game close.I'll upload a fix tonight) .. do you mind posting a screenshot of the lua error? I've only tested SUS along vanilla, as I currently don't have a large modlist installed, so any feedback I can get to make the mod as robust and compatible as possible is greatly appreciated
Also, if you could try toggling the debug option on (it's at the end of the settings page) and check whether the non-magic scalers are working (any of armor, weapons, security, athletics or acrobatics) that would help too
Many thanks for the quick reply. I tried again without the CORE mod, and I still get no magic XP. Also, the Unarmoured skill works like in vanilla (per hit, not, if I understood correctly, per dodge). I think Acrobatics works as intended, I'll test some more. After you upload the fix I will give it a try without any other mod which affects skills.
I can't get the screenshot to work, so I'll post the text here. This is when I cast a feather spell with a Breton mage (skill 45, magicka almost 200).
L@x1[scripts/omw/skillhandlers.lua]_onSkillUsefailed. Lua error: [string “scripts/Skill_Uses_Scaled/func.lua”]: 413:attempt to perform arithmetic on field ‘cost’ (a nil value) Stack traceback: [string “scripts/Skill_Uses_Scaled/func.lua”]: 413 in function ‘func’ [string “scripts/Skill_Uses_Scaled/core.lua”]: 22 in function <[string“scripts/Skill_Uses_Scaled/core.lua”]: 20> [string “scripts/omw/skillhandlers.lua”]: 107: in function ‘skillUsed’ [string “scripts/omw/skillhandlers.lua”]: 284: in function<[string “scripts/omw/skillhandlers.lua”]: 283>
I have turned debug messages on by default (albeit that may not affect you if you didn't run into the menu resetting bug, so be sure you have them on) and added an exception for magic scaling: it now skips scaling is spell cost is nil or zero. If some other mod adds or changes a spell to have no cost, then SUS will not be able to work properly anyways, and it now lets that other mod take control instead of breaking XP completely. When you get to testing it, look at the f10 console, you should see something in the lines of SUS - Held Spell\'s cost ([COST]) is not valid, returning vanilla XP [COST] will be one of "0", "false" or "nil".
As for the Unarmored thing: it's working as intended, I'll have to update the description so it's a bit clearer. Unarmored does give XP per hit (I have no way of tracking misses, so that's the only option), but that XP is heavily frontloaded toward the first few hits you take instead of being flat across the entire battle. With default settings you'll get 3x as much XP for the 1st hit you take, and further hits within those 30 seconds will rapidly reduce XP per hit all the way down to 0.1x --this is then multiplied with the rest of the formula, so you may not see a 3 or a 0.1 in the debug messages but you will see XP start high and go down as the hit counter increases. In practice, it means yes you still need to be hit to level up, but you can level up just fine while being hit only a handful of times per encounter, unlike vanilla where you need to be hit many many times to make actual progress in the skill. Likewise, you don't really benefit much from being utterly slammered as your XP rates will go down the drain in that case.
Also for the time being I can't track the actual damage you've taken with unarmored hits (I've been using armor duability to calculate it, and unarmored has.. well.. no armor). Whenever someone adds combat mechanics to the OpenMW Lua API, I'll make Unarmored scale with damage in addition to the hit counter, as that would make surviving a one-hit-death by a hair a much more rewarding eXPerience
You've built a very interesting system here, I'll test it out some more soon. (For clarification, I also had the reset bug in the previous version, so thanks for the update. Also, I tried different spell costs, from 5 magicka to 43, with the same result. But I will try the new version and another modlist and see what it does).
Edit: I confirm that the mod seems to work as intended on a near vanilla modlist (including BTBGI and BTBGISATION). I will test some more and see which mod made it incompatible on my original list.
Edit 2: I found the culprit, it seems to have been an openmw quick casting mod. (Just so you know, the Debug option is not turned on by default). I can live with the famed jazz hands if it means having your mod in my list. Endorsed.
Good to see it working, and glad to see you liked it as much!
I double checked and the defaults are fine, but will only apply once when installing the mod (or if you hit the [reset] button in an options group) due to how I went about fixing the settings reset problem. It's not ideal behaviour, but will do until I get to add the option to save and load settings presets
If you run into any other issues or have feedback on the defaults, I'm open to suggestions! I did my best to balance everything right, but there's no amount of theorycrafting that can replace hours of actual gameplay.
Edit: quick casting is now compatible, new version is up :D
You can get them in the main OpenMW page, on the "Development Builds" section. If you're running a large load order and don't want any issues, I'd advise staying on 0.48 though, at least until 0.49 gets an RC (Release Candidate) build.
Skill Uses Scaled will no longer need a dev build once 0.49 is released, as even the things I want to add in the future should be doable in the current version.
It can! Not only that, as a matter of fact you can use this alongside any .esp based XP rebalancing mod.. albeit I wouldn't recommend it much, since those were made with flat XP in mind. I know MBSP was in the process of moving to the new Lua interface (the one this mod uses), so if it's not there yet it'll be there eventually.
If you're using this alongside NCGD Magicka Based Skill Progression though, I'd advice you disable this mod's scaling for magic skills in the settings, so that you don't account for magic cost twice (it'll work just fine, but you'll get unbalanced XP values if you let both mods multiply eachother).
Also since there's individual toggles for all skills, you can do the same if you don't like how a specific skill has been scaled and/or you already have that skill covered by some other mod.
23 comments
I am asking if i will not level to slow or to fast ( as TR cca doubles content, but More exlusive factions also lowers it ( will propably play only 3 - 4 factions on one playthrough ) and BTB beside other things, changes vanilla xp values and many other GMST
I'd say SUS is hands down 100% fine for that kinda playthrough, worst case scenario you tweak the mod's settings a bit if you feel something's going too fast / too slow (in general or in any specific skill, you can tweak all of the skills covered independent of eachother if you want to, it's in the mod settings)
ANYWAYS enjoy wall of text:
I haven't personally played with BTB (anything that removes custom enchanting is a nono for me) BUT I don't think SUS would be a bad match for it.
SUS doesn't make the game "easier" by itself, all it does is make your character level better when playing to their strengths than to their weaknesses, unlike vanilla where often using your best weapon or spell drastically slows down your progress when compared to spamming low damage attacks/spells. In other words, SUS shifts XP from benefiting quantity, to benefiting quality of an action.
YES this does mean that you might feel you're leveling way faster if you're used to the glacial leveling speeds of say fully charged Warhammer attacks, but funnily enough it's not any faster than vanilla with dagger spam.
My advice is go to the mod settings and drag the global XP multiplier to 0.5, do a few quests and check whether you feel fine with it.
I did a run with the current mod defaults and managed to become god-like in what felt to me like a reasonably vanilla time (that is after doing a good chunck of side quests and progressing the MQ to about 50-75% completion).. but keep in mind I used custom enchants, so with BTB I'd estimate you would probably be a demigod after say completing the MQ and one or two of the guild questlines.
If what you want is to delay demigod status all the way past Vvardenfell content and well into TR, then I'd advice setting global XP to 0.5 like I said before, and going from there.
As a side note, keep in mind Morrowind is not balanced around very slow XP rates, so if you handicap yourself too much you'll be forced to do intro quests for many factions before actually being able to finish any of them. In other words, slow XP and high difficulty focuses challenge>storyline (as it encourages doing all the easy quests 1st because you flat out can't do the hard ones at lower levels) while more vanilla high XP low difficulty is the opposite, sacrificing any challenge after you've finished a couple questlines for the benefit of being able to focus said questlines one at a time in a more story-friendly manner.
That's just my take on the matter of course, but I felt it worth sharing in case you hadn't considered the potential costs of being a bit too harsh on yerself.
in the meanwhile i also added propably most vanilla friendly leveling mod Potential Character Progression (OpenMW) at Morrowind Nexus - mods and community to my mod list too to override BTB changes to leveling.
I tried it with the latest version of NCGDMW and found no issues so far, everything seems to be okay as far as I can see (and I don't think NCGD lua should conflict with SUS since one affects skill XP gain and the other levelups / character stats, which are distinct)
What issue did you run into exactly, and what version of OpenMW are you running?
Any and all info helps, so long as I can replicate the bug/issue, I'll probably be able to fix it (and if it's unfixable then I will update the mod description with "known incompatibilities")
Currently about to upload a new version with some fixes I added a few days ago, better defaults, and three more settings options to enable people to better control how close/far the mod is from vanilla behaviour.
If I find any problems with the Armor Offset setting I'll add a fix to the new version... and if I don't then it probably means a better description of what it does is in order.
Did it straight up error out (you can check that via the F10 console), did it do nothing or did it not do what you expected?
If in doubt, always do check out the "debug messages" settings at the bottom, they're very useful to quickly see how your XP and spell cost are being modified.
In case it was working but didn't do what you expected, here's what you should expect from that setting: it multiplies your armor weight for the purposes of calculating magic refund/penalty.
It directly subtracts from your refund, potentially sending it into the negative (in which case spell cost is increased instead of decreased).
Also note that I can't have Dynamic Cost show up directly in the magic menu. What you see in that menu is always the vanilla cost, and the refund/penalty is applied via script when you cast the spell.
I'd love to have the ability to edit costs shown in the menu but currently it would mean re-doing the entire menu from scratch and that's waaaaaaaay beyond my means
For armors weighing <20 the penalty is rather minimal --you should notice your refund being reduced a bit.. for example testing it with default settings at [15 armor weight] and [45 skill] on a cheap spell I had refund go from [17% when unarmored] to [13% at 15 armor weight].
On the other extreme, equipping a full Daedric set at 45 skill can send your "refund" well into penalty territory, upwards of -80% (-80% refund = +80% cost)
For convenience, I opened this OpenMW Discord thread to discuss the mod, in case you prefer that platform :D
As for porting to vanilla/MWSE, provided it could be done I'd have nothing against it other than I won't spend my time on it.
Anyone is free to edit and upload their version of any mod/code I upload (I won't complain so long as they credit me for making the original) so if someone wants to port SUS to MWSE they're free to do so
I personally happen to love OpenMW and part of what motivated me to mod was that my creations might nudge others toward trying it ^-^
I don't actually have anything against MWSE, but my time is limited and porting would take longer than I'm willing to consider
This being said, I've installed the latest dev build and tried out the mod on an existing mage character. When casting spells I don't gain any experience, regardless if they are cheap or expensive, nor does the mod seem to take into account if I wear armour or not.
Granted, I have a very big modlist, including the CORE (again for Openmw) - where I disabled the armour spellcasting penalties just in case, and BTBGI (which slows down skill increase and blocks mics skill increase). The mod is practically the last to load in my list (only Dynamic Music, the delta and the leveled lists are lower).
Any help would be appreciated.
(Edit: P.S: The debugger gives me a lua error, something about attempt to perform arithmetic).
.. do you mind posting a screenshot of the lua error?
I've only tested SUS along vanilla, as I currently don't have a large modlist installed, so any feedback I can get to make the mod as robust and compatible as possible is greatly appreciated
Also, if you could try toggling the debug option on (it's at the end of the settings page) and check whether the non-magic scalers are working (any of armor, weapons, security, athletics or acrobatics) that would help too
I can't get the screenshot to work, so I'll post the text here. This is when I cast a feather spell with a Breton mage (skill 45, magicka almost 200).
L@x1[scripts/omw/skillhandlers.lua]_onSkillUsefailed. Lua error: [string “scripts/Skill_Uses_Scaled/func.lua”]: 413:attempt to perform arithmetic on field ‘cost’ (a nil value)
Stack traceback:
[string
“scripts/Skill_Uses_Scaled/func.lua”]: 413 in function ‘func’
[string
“scripts/Skill_Uses_Scaled/core.lua”]: 22 in function <[string“scripts/Skill_Uses_Scaled/core.lua”]: 20>
[string
“scripts/omw/skillhandlers.lua”]: 107: in function ‘skillUsed’
[string
“scripts/omw/skillhandlers.lua”]: 284: in function<[string
“scripts/omw/skillhandlers.lua”]: 283>
I have turned debug messages on by default (albeit that may not affect you if you didn't run into the menu resetting bug, so be sure you have them on) and added an exception for magic scaling: it now skips scaling is spell cost is nil or zero. If some other mod adds or changes a spell to have no cost, then SUS will not be able to work properly anyways, and it now lets that other mod take control instead of breaking XP completely.
When you get to testing it, look at the f10 console, you should see something in the lines of
SUS - Held Spell\'s cost ([COST]) is not valid, returning vanilla XP
[COST] will be one of "0", "false" or "nil".As for the Unarmored thing: it's working as intended, I'll have to update the description so it's a bit clearer.
Unarmored does give XP per hit (I have no way of tracking misses, so that's the only option), but that XP is heavily frontloaded toward the first few hits you take instead of being flat across the entire battle.
With default settings you'll get 3x as much XP for the 1st hit you take, and further hits within those 30 seconds will rapidly reduce XP per hit all the way down to 0.1x --this is then multiplied with the rest of the formula, so you may not see a 3 or a 0.1 in the debug messages but you will see XP start high and go down as the hit counter increases.
In practice, it means yes you still need to be hit to level up, but you can level up just fine while being hit only a handful of times per encounter, unlike vanilla where you need to be hit many many times to make actual progress in the skill. Likewise, you don't really benefit much from being utterly slammered as your XP rates will go down the drain in that case.
Also for the time being I can't track the actual damage you've taken with unarmored hits (I've been using armor duability to calculate it, and unarmored has.. well.. no armor). Whenever someone adds combat mechanics to the OpenMW Lua API, I'll make Unarmored scale with damage in addition to the hit counter, as that would make surviving a one-hit-death by a hair a much more rewarding eXPerience
Edit: I confirm that the mod seems to work as intended on a near vanilla modlist (including BTBGI and BTBGISATION). I will test some more and see which mod made it incompatible on my original list.
Edit 2: I found the culprit, it seems to have been an openmw quick casting mod. (Just so you know, the Debug option is not turned on by default). I can live with the famed jazz hands if it means having your mod in my list. Endorsed.
I double checked and the defaults are fine, but will only apply once when installing the mod (or if you hit the [reset] button in an options group) due to how I went about fixing the settings reset problem. It's not ideal behaviour, but will do until I get to add the option to save and load settings presets
If you run into any other issues or have feedback on the defaults, I'm open to suggestions!
I did my best to balance everything right, but there's no amount of theorycrafting that can replace hours of actual gameplay.
Edit: quick casting is now compatible, new version is up :D
You can get them in the main OpenMW page, on the "Development Builds" section.
If you're running a large load order and don't want any issues, I'd advise staying on 0.48 though, at least until 0.49 gets an RC (Release Candidate) build.
Skill Uses Scaled will no longer need a dev build once 0.49 is released, as even the things I want to add in the future should be doable in the current version.
Not only that, as a matter of fact you can use this alongside any .esp based XP rebalancing mod.. albeit I wouldn't recommend it much, since those were made with flat XP in mind.
I know MBSP was in the process of moving to the new Lua interface (the one this mod uses), so if it's not there yet it'll be there eventually.
If you're using this alongside NCGD Magicka Based Skill Progression though, I'd advice you disable this mod's scaling for magic skills in the settings, so that you don't account for magic cost twice (it'll work just fine, but you'll get unbalanced XP values if you let both mods multiply eachother).
Also since there's individual toggles for all skills, you can do the same if you don't like how a specific skill has been scaled and/or you already have that skill covered by some other mod.