Mod Idea: Enhanced Bodyguards

[Precipice]

Enhance. Enhance. Enhance.

Problem: You know the four bodyguards in the game and what their problem is? They're not very effective, they're all essentially the same, and they're very limited. Good & Strong. Good & Weak. Bad & Strong. Bad & Weak. You can't put anything else in there as a bodyguard because to make it work, you basically have to turn them into bodyguards. And you can't have more than two because of a hardcoded limit. I see that Keshire has a fix but it requires unpacking and editing the executable which the average end user is not capable of doing.

Solution: Get rid of the bodyguard system. Instead, revamp the follower system. Raise the cap on followers and place custom "aggressive villagers*" which can serve as bodyguards. They'll follow you, if they like you, and they'll fight your enemies. Basically modeling the idea off of Skyrim followers. Because they're custom, you can build them from the ground up mixing and matching to your taste, so none will have to be the same. And you don't pay them, although giving them gifts might keep them happy.

I'll be using this thread as a sort of journal documenting progress on this idea, problems I run into and solutions I come up with, as well as screenshots and a download for the finished product(s). For example of how this would work:

First problem I ran into is that villagers following the hero run away from danger, hardly the qualities one wants in a bodyguard. So gotta make them aggressive, copying some details from enemies like bandits and giving them weapons to use.

 

[Dark Drakan]

Very interesting idea and I look forward to seeing what solutions you come up with for this.

 

[Precipice]

While trying to build an npc in my body part chop shop I couldn't help but notice that no matter what combination of arms, legs, faces and hair, non-unique npcs are all pretty much the same. I've got some plans underway to go about making unique non-uniques making them very easy to identify. Some textures will be redone, but I'd like to add "accessories." Things like backpacks, hats, decorations of some kind, things that make them different. I started out with the more technically challenging part of this, making mismatched eye colors. I was disheartened when I saw a veteran modder on the modding site say that this was not possible... but I thought, why not?

Problem: Npcs can only be assigned one eye mesh, limiting the eye colors to 1.
Solution: Don't assign an eye mesh. While only the hero wears clothes, technically, I've seen people screwing around making npcs wear the hero's clothes. So, make a new mesh and a new clothing item for the npc to wear. Assign the "eyes" clothing item in the CCreatureDef. As a bonus, because it is a clothing item, I can set up texture swapping so I won't need to make a dozen of these, just the one, and I can pick which eye textures to use on which eye.

The only thing here is that the eyes won't use the helpers in the face model, which allow the normally assigned eyes to turn. But the helpers do that because they're weighted to bones, so I weighted my eyes to the same bones and they should, in theory, work. The concept is sound, but it's not tested.

Tell me if anyone's seen an npc with this pair of eyes.

 

[Precipice]

I have to find another image host besides imgur. I go there to upload a lame picture and I just stare at front page stuff for two hours.

Was going through old, old Fable concept art, stuff from back before it was called Fable, and noticed very different depictions of all the heroes, as well as another called Bloody Piper. I don't think I can recreate that in any way that would do it justice, but it gave me the idea to create a story, characters. Even if I can't implement these story elements in the game as quests, giving myself a better idea of exactly what I'm creating, what kind of personality these people will have, what kind of style they have, all that stuff, it'll make figuring out how to produce them easier. Plus it gives me something to do when I have nothing to do.

Queen of Roses wears a hat. I think it's a nice hat. I can't wait to see what kinds of weapons she uses.

I'm somewhat tempted to make spiky shaded goggles, rifle, victorian era steel toe steampunk kneehigh boots, and an airship, but one project at a time.

 

[Precipice]

Quick update. No show and tell this time, just boring walls of text. Sorry about that.

Spoiler

Working on the abstract, trying to figure out the AI. I got to thinking about companions in other games and their shortcomings. As it always comes down to, some Skyrim comparisons would be Lydia charging a giant and then trying her hand at skydiving. Or Serana sending an undead goat to your aid while she sweeps the floor or some ****.

Unfortunately, tweaking the AI in Fable is not so straightforward. There are no AI packages like in Skyrim. And all things pertaining to AI is not all in one place. Combat stuff is scattered everywhere, but the aptly named Brain entries do offer some insight. I've been working on a spreadsheet with all brain entries and have found over a hundred unique behaviors. I haven't quite figured out how the prioritizing works yet though, or if they all can be used by anything. And because of how it is set up, it is very unlikely that I can create my own behaviors, but with what's there I should just be able to do some clever stuff to get what I want out of it.

Less technical stuff. What's taking me so long to get anywhere on the mod is, simply put, lack of knowledge. A lot of this stuff isn't well-charted territory. There's a lot of good posts here and on the modding site that's just dense with useful info, but there isn't a "how to build a companion AI for Fable" yet. Maybe once I get it all sorted out, I'll write one up.

 

[Dark Drakan]

Glad you are persevering and learning new things daily too.

 

[Precipice]

boring boring boring

Spoiler

Brushing aside the AI for now. It is probably the worst example of AI handling I've ever seen. I have seen some that were too centralized and difficult to extend, but this one is all but centralized and impossible to extend; even when I figure it out, I'll still only be limited to what's there to work with. So I'm moving on to other things that will yield a higher reward for the effort. That it's tied to combat makes it worse. Combat is an extremely important mechanic and desperately needs retooling in Fable, but I can't significantly tweak it until I solve the AI.

Names.

In Skyrim, no one stops and says "hey, Lydia, how's it going?" But I think that'd be a cool thing. Kinda like New Vegas, people making references to the company you keep. Such a thing is possible in Fable but they don't do this with the 4 bodyguards because they have semi-randomly generated normal names, like Jerry or some crap. It's for the heroes, Guildmaster, Maze and etc. They do this for the playable character with 19 different names. When npcs are talking to me, asking me why I'm called Malificus, I get put off by it and sometimes I want to show them why. If, however, they were referring to my bodyguard, I think it'd be pretty cool. Yes, that's right, I'm bffs with a guy who calls himself Assassin.

If I remove the hero titles and means of getting them, that frees up 19-21 named characters who are greeted by name by other npcs. I say 19-21 because there are 2 that might work. They're not used in game but it appears they may be all set up to be used and just need some definition work. Scorpion Slayer and Shadowhunter. Not impressive names, no, but they're decent.

Sadly this means giving up my idea of Queen of Roses. Still, it's an idea I like, it's easy to implement and I already know how to do it.

Weapons.

There's something like 160 weapons in Fable, and that's just the ones that are 100% ready to go and not the ones that just need a little work to be implemented, and also not counting the insane number of weapon mods out there. But how many are used in game? 58. 16 of those are legitimately available for the hero to use. Then you have bandit, guard, hobbe, undead, minion and summoner weapons, tallying at 30 altogether. The remaining 12 are Jack's Aeon sword, only mildly different from the hero's Aeon sword, then twinblade, Thunder, Maze, Whisper, Scythe, Nostro, and Briar. Oneoffs.

In short there's no variety. That can't be fixed with this mod, but this means that the new bodyguards don't need modded weapons to be unique. They can just use weapons that other npcs don't use. This also doubles to convenience me in that I won't have to make a ton of custom weapons for them. Again, super easy to do, I already know how to do it.

I'll start putting together binary entries for this stuff this coming week and getting it all ready for when I figure out the AI. I still need to learn how to implement the npcs once I have them set up, so I'll focus my learning on level scripting for the time being.

I have to give thanks to Drakan for indulging me with my posts here, which would otherwise just be conversations I have with myself. I find that writing these posts is a helpful practice. Something about this process helps me figure out what I need to do next.

 

[Dark Drakan]

I find it fascinating to hear about what goes on "under the hood" and what could be tweaked to work better and what modders can actually effectively change within the systems.

 

[Precipice]

I'll start putting together binary entries for this stuff this coming week and getting it all ready for when I figure out the AI. I still need to learn how to implement the npcs once I have them set up, so I'll focus my learning on level scripting for the time being.

I haven't gotten the binaries down, I hit a snag. I can't fully express just how invaluable a senior modder could be to me now. But I'll tough it out and see what I can cook up.

On the other front, I've got level scripting nailed! Not really. Mostly, in a way.

The basics are pretty much just what a scripter might imagine in a script. You specify what you want and where you want it. But then it gets complicated. In the binaries, an entry is just an entry and the only thing that separates one thing from another is the extra data (cdef and ctc stuff, I still wish I knew what those stood for) attached to it. The scripts work in a similar way. You can have two things that are exactly the same, but then you have all of these ctc parameters and it's hard to find out exactly what each one does.

I figured out how to place an NPC. That's easy. But it appears that these extra data things could possibly open up so many doors and I just don't know how to utilize those doors yet. To try to figure some of it out, I've parsed, separated and compiled all of the scripts such that every piece of every kind of ctc is in its text document. I pluck out the duplicate data and observe the differences between them and try to match them up with the differences in-game. Systematically it works but it takes forever, and some of them do nothing near as I can tell.

More over, I suspect there's tons and tons of scripts that I can use that aren't used at all in any of the level scripts (and so can't use because I don't know they exist), and that the scripts that are shown are partial, incomplete examples. I suspect that they're generated elsewhere in full, and possibly saved in the game. They might also be observable through some tool while running the game, or maybe I can try to pick apart the executable? Somehow those scripts have to be accessible. Keshire managed to pull some phantomscript out of something for his customizable npc, because CTCHeroMorph and CTCHeroAttachableAppearanceModifiers (used in his mod) aren't exhibited anywhere and yet it's totally functional.



Unrelated, and yet related.

I keep bumping into words and phrases like impossible, can't be done, won't ever happen, 31st of Never. There appear to be several obstacles preventing a number of things (in every way that matters): new animations, new quests, new maps, new navigational data, new cutscenes, basically everything you need to make a popular, significant, high-impact fame-grabbing mod. I don't hope to overcome these obstacles if titans of the past couldn't do it, but I would like to learn why these things can't be done. Not quickdraw one-word reasons but explanations. I'm not seeing a whole lot of those, unfortunately.




Gonna take a nap and then shotgun some theories.