This is a general thread in which any mod-related pipe dreams may be gathered and discussed, hopefully to eventually be moved to another thread in which they would be made into reality. In the worst case this thread will be a useful place to save ideas over for later. In the best case, this thread will have a lot of discussions, both imaginative and ponderous, and will spawn many other threads.
Either way, enjoy.
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The idea I've been racking my mind about lately was introducing strategy to Morrowind. With vanilla scripting, no less. A few of you may remember Malgremor's adventures with his Emerald Guards, a large corps of elite soldiers under his character's command. Malgremor would often stage battles with his Emerald Guard against larger and more powerful forces. The battles were prepared in the CS, and generally the result was quite impressive. I want to be able to do that without the construction set, in-game, at the spur of the moment.
I already put some thought into how one could do formations, which is a subject I might try to pick up again later. (I came up with a lot of complex and incomplete ideas). Most recently, though, I put some thought into manoeuvres, and I think it wouldn't be as hard to do as one would think. (Though this is all only for the player, at the moment. Having AI use strategy would be a good deal harder).
My first and, in my opinion, most important idea was how to tell your troops to move to another location without having to personally go there and tell them to wait. The idea is actually really simple, unless I'm missing something: you know those cursed ingredients you find in shrines, which make Dremora appear behind the player? My idea employs the same command that makes the Dremora appear behind you. I actually wrote my ideas down on paint, accompanied by a graph:
Notice how my ideas get more difficult/impossible to implement as they go.
Actually, the bottom half can be safely ignored, as I just let my mind wander off there. You could call it incomplete brainstorming.
The player, by the way, is at the centre of the circles, if that wasn't clear. The green blob represents the companions while the orange blob is the foe and the red dots show the locations of the waypoints that would be used for the manoeuvre. The grey, blue and yellow lines wouldn't really exist, the grey circles representing the distances you can tell your troops to travel, the blue lines being the radii on which the waypoints sit and the yellow lines approximating the path along which the companions would travel.
The waypoint markers would probably extend very far upwards and downwards so that they can be seen despite any rough terrain. They should be clearly visible in the minimap so that the player can locate them in caves and such. One idea for the distances would be to use in-game feet and two windows. You can tell your companions to go up to 400 in-game feet (a little over a cell) away. In the first window, you can select the first digit, which can be 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4. The second window lets you change the second digit to any (obviously natural) number from 0 to 9. That's as much precision as will be needed, IMO. The command spells would always succeed and would take up no mana. They are simply a way of telling the script to start.
I'd need to look into the attack and hold fire commands. I'm not sure if they're possible or rather how well they can be implemented.
The aforementioned bottom half are my first spontaneous thoughts as to dividing companions into groups. The problem is that I'd like it if strategy could be used for any and all companions. I'm not sure how good scripts are at gathering information about NPCs, though, if the NPCs themselves don't have the scripts. Another problem is that I couldn't think of any really good way to separate the groups. I even came up with a complex idea which isn't all too bad but is unnecessarily complicated and probably impossible to implement:
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;this corresponds to the offensive/defensive/"guerilla" (oops) distinction above.
;the following calculation would be carried out for everyone following the player:
;here's the breakup of the attributes and what characteristic they correspond to
strength - offensive
intelligence - defensive
willpower - defensive
speed - guerrilla
agility - guerrilla
endurance - defensive
personality
luck
;here's how they're calculated
strength = o
(agility speed) / 2 = g
(intelligence willpower endurance) / 3 = d
;here's how the companions would be sorted
If 2o > g d
fighter is offensive
elseif 2g > o d
fighter is guerrilla
else
fighter is defensive ;this is also the catch-all category. Anyone who doesn't fit into the above scheme ends up here.
;here are some examples of the calculation at work:
Shady Smuggler:
strength - 45
intelligence - 42
willpower - 32
agility - 33
speed - 54
endurance - 42
(personality - 64)
(luck - 40)
o = 45
g = (33 54) / 2 = 44
d = (42 32 42) /3 = 39
Offensive ;this is a nice, straightforward example of how it should work.
Divayth Fyr:
strength - 150
intelligence - 150
willpower - 150
agility - 150
speed - 150
endurance - 150
(personality - 150)
(luck - 150)
o = 150
g = (150 150) / 2 = 150
d = (150 150 150) /3 = 150
Defensive ;as all of his attributes are equal he couldn't be sorted and was defaulted to defensive.
Therana:
strength - 83
intelligence - 100
willpower - 100
agility - 100
speed - 100
endurance - 56
(personality - 100)
(luck - 40)
o = 83
g = (100 100) / 2 = 100
d = (100 100 56) /3 = 85
Guerrilla ;a bit odd, here, but somehow it makes sense...
Baladas Demnevanni:
strength - 74
intelligence - 100
willpower - 100
agility - 77
speed - 87
endurance - 91
(personality - 61)
(luck - 40)
o = 74
g = (77 87) / 2 = 82
d = (100 100 91) /3 = 97
Defensive
Bolvyn Venim:
strength - 100
intelligence - 61
willpower - 66
agility - 100
speed - 100
endurance - 56
(personality - 100)
(luck - 40)
o = 100
g = (100 100) / 2 = 100
d = (61 66 56) /3 = 61
Offensive ;notice that, because offensive takes precedence over guerrilla, Bolvyn is sorted as offensive. If guerrilla were calculated first he would be sorted as guerrilla.
Habasi:
strength - 62
intelligence - 69
willpower - 44
agility - 100
speed - 90
endurance - 51
(personality - 62)
(luck - 40)
o = 62
g = (100 90) / 2 = 95
d = (69 44 51) /3 = 55
Guerrilla
A better and simpler, if more time consuming for the player, route would be to simply add a topic to anyone following the player. In that topic the player can sort the companion into one of a finite number of groups. Let's say ten groups. That would at once effectively and simply separates the companions and add a whole lot of modularity.
The regroup spell could actually function to put all of the members of one group into another group. To put it simply, there would actually be eleven groups: 1-10 would be the companion groups while 0 would be the player's default group. As with the other spells, upon casting the regroup spell a window would come up asking which group should be assimilated. It then asks which group that group should be assimilated into. To make things simpler, the assimilees wouldn't automatically walk over to the assimilators, as I wrote. Instead, the player has to actually give the group into which they were assimilated a movement/attack command. This would actually make coordinated attacks a lot easier than I had originally thought: just keep regrouping the attacking groups until they're all collected into one group and then tell that group to attack. They will stay in place until the final command is given, at which point they will all simultaneously charge.
Either way, most of the first paragraph of the third point still applies: when the player casts any of the command spells the first thing that will happen is that a list will pop up listing all of the groups, and the player has to pick which group, if not all, he wants to command. The fourth and last point is just an additional feature, and I'm not sure whether it's good or not. I just thought it would be an interesting feature.
Anyway, that's all I've got for now. (Quite a lot, eh?) Unless I'm very much mistaken, this doesn't really qualify for a pipe dream. In fact, I'm already working on a companion who will hopefully end up with these features. However, I'm not always too good at judging what is and isn't possible with Morrowind scripting, and knowing my approach to modding I won't complete anything anytime soon.
