I'm absurdly bleeding-heart about not letting travelers die.

[But I'm okay.]

This is a list of Oblivion "Traveling People".

I care about these people! I will defend them if they are fighting, I will reload if I see their corpses, I will heal them if they need healed.

The problem is, I have no way to know if I accidentally allowed one to die in some cases, because their corpses disappear. When I realize people are just dying and I can't prevent it, I get sad, big time.

This is an Oblivion mod c/o Wrye's list that makes all named corpses permanent, but if I use it, I'm worried I'll get nonsensical results like Mythic Dawn sleeper agent corpses lasting forever, just laying and rotting in the town square.

A mod that only makes travelling NPC corpses everlasting would be nice, but even if that were implemented, it would still lead to situations like just now discovering that Trenus Duronius got killed and having to go back through 16,383 saves to find out when he died.

So, my question to you is, how might this be solved? Here are some of my ideas (note that they all presuppose everlasting traveler corpses):

•  Is there a way to determine how long ago a person died? Is it possible to mod in some kind of "detect date-of-death" spell? I'm envisioning an AoE spell that, when cast, causes any nearby corpses to glow, sort of like a necromancer's version of "Detect Life". The color of the glow would indicate time of death; every twelve "hours"/minutes, the color cycle could step forward along the spectrum, from violet for people killed within the past 12 minutes all the way to red for people who have been dead more than three in-game days.

 

•  Failing that, is there a way to message the player if someone near them has been killed or is being attacked? That is, something along the lines of "You hear a violent struggle [to the north/south/east/west][, followed by silence]!" It is my understanding that if I am not within five cells of these traveling NPCs, they will not be harmed, because no attackers will load, so if I'm right, this solution carries the minimum of risk to them by always alerting me if they're in danger. Plus, it makes sense in a game context! This solution would be more functional if the direction of the struggling NPC were included in the message and if it showed up multiple times, as in "You hear a struggle [to the north]!", "You hear a desperate struggle [to the northeast]!", "You hear someone breathing their last [to the east]!", and if they've just been killed recently (again presupposing time-of-death is something the game can store) "You hear a strange and dreadful silence..." The multiple barks would help prevent players using the mod from accidentally sabotaging themselves by overwriting them with e.g. the "Saving..." message.

 

•  If even this is not feasible, are there at least console commands I can use to check the "dead"/"not-dead" status of these people? Do these commands tell me where their corpses are, assuming I can find my "everlasting traveler corpse" mod?

My second question to you is, assuming that either of the former two are possible, how do I go about getting them implemented? How does a person with mod concepts and no experience or knowledge of any kind get their ideas to work? As in, are there people I can commission to do a mod? What are the vagaries of that?

 

Thank you for reading this thing!

[Poontank]

I also dislike good NPCs dying. However I'm not aware if a mod exists with the features you described.

 

What you can do as a compromise is using 'Mad Companionship Spells': http://www.loverslab.com/topic/1569-mad-companionship-spells-mcs-extension-humantouchnpc/

 

This mod has an 'Essentialize' function with which you can flag any actor as unkillable. If you encounter an NPC who is already dead, open the console and type resurrect 1 - this will revive the actor on the spot he/she died so you can then essentialize the NPC.

 

It sure is a lot of work to treat all the people in the world like that. Consider it a quest to make the world a better place by working the 'MCS' magic on everybody you encounter in your travels, picking prime candidates for the essential status first. For example characters like Alessia Caro with her dangerous habit to travel around, eventually getting herself killed by some random bandit or roaming monster. Go down that list of traveling NPCs first and grant them some 'essential touch'!

 

This treatment and giving NPCs custom equipment and clothing from mods is what I'm constantly doing (that 'MCS' mod also easily lets you access all actors' inventory). Great fun to customize the game like that. At least more fun than stealing some random 'Savilla's Stone'...

[trex]

Do you have the x117 npc mod? It has a nice little feature of making any of the npcs added by that mod to 'die' but not permanently. They revive some days later, with whatever items you'd placed in their inventories. I had one following me (MCS Follow) around, he got killed, so I promptly looted (bar broken items added from enhanced economy?) and left, MCS dismissing him. But in a previous save, I had left him with MCS still on, and it reported that he was dead. Yet, even being unessentialized, he rose days later, as MCS stated (Tekki has been revived). 

 

Even in the save where I took MCS off the dead Tekki, I saw him alive again wearing the broken items left from his inventory in Anvil, so that mod has some sort of long 'knocked out' timer which I just RP as 'not the same npc'. I guess you could even rename the npcs, but that may cause problems. Tekki had some armor which obscured who he was, so that was good enough for me. 

 

I guess that mod shows that it is possible to have death, without death, a failsafe incase you can't save everybody. It also stops the good npcs from being thinned out over time. At first I didn't like the way it worked, but with FCOM, it does help having crowed roads and battles in dungeons.

 

Edit: This is the mod(s) I'm talking about for the NPCs http://www.loverslab.com/topic/1565-from2ch-lives/

[Poontank]

Never tried 'From 2ch Lives', I'm using the 'City Life For x117' mod from the same thread (a customized version).

 

It's a possibility I didn't think of before when I wrote the previous comment: The characters in that mod just have the 'Respawn' box checked instead of 'Essential'. So every mod adding NPCs just needs to be edited accordingly by setting all characters to essential status to make them unkillable, even treating all worthy vanilla NPCs like that. It's almost as much work as MCS-essentializing them in-game (given the sheer amount of NPCs), just more effective and less fun.

 

Like I said, it's a lot of fun to role-play as the ultimate hero blessing the good people you meet with the 'Aedric Gift of Essentialism' .

[But I'm okay.]

I also dislike good NPCs dying. However I'm not aware if a mod exists with the features you described.

Is making one a realistic idea? Is it, first of all, possible to do either the "Coroner's Spell" or the "Alert System" (I'm going to refer to the first and second as these, respectively)?

Also, a question about the Alert System: As far as I know, if you're not on the cells the NPC is on, they're in no danger, correct? I have to be near them for the enemies that kill them to load, right?

The reason I'm asking is because, if I am correct in that assumption, then couldn't I just switch the alerts on and deal with encounters on an ad-hoc basis, thereby eliminating any chance for someone to die?

Plus, it seems a lot more "realistic" than just making everyone immortal. Silly, perhaps, but I feel like I'm cheating otherwise.

 

Secondly, how much work would it be to just whip up a mod real quick that makes all traveling NPC corpses permanent? According to the readme for Everlasting Corpses, the modder "checked the box for 'quest item'" on all named NPCs, and according to that UESP page, there's only like 51 travelers (not counting people who are in no danger, e.g. Brother Piner and the immortal M'aiq).

 

I assume you need to use TESCS to "check the 'quest item' box". Is it safe to install TESCS over OBSE/Wrye/OBMM, or does order matter?

 

Really, though, I'm interested in whether a directional alert system like I described is possible.

[ShiaNekoChan]

Hm. So what you basically want is to give your character the supernatural ability to hear souls so you can respond to them better and save more lives.

 

That's really doable.

 

All you need to do make a quest script that checks every NPC in the area, and use the "isincombat" (optionally) function along with "getheadingangle player" and getavc 8 (gets the characters current health).

 

The script would iterate through all of the nearby NPCs for these few things and if someone is in combat (I would recommend checking to see if the character is in combat, so it's not spamming messages at you), it would give you various messages through the message command depending on the NPC's current health.

[But I'm okay.]

Cool. I hope this ends up becoming a real plugin.

I wrote some dialogue for the barks last night. The idea is each set covers a variable out of distance, direction, and NPC health.

 distance
5 cells away: [Almost inaudibly]
4 cells away: [Far off]
3 cells away: [some distance away]
2 cells away: [Nearby]
1 cell away: [Right next to you]
 direction
[to the West, you hear]
[to the Northwest, you hear]
[to the North, you hear]
[to the Northeast, you hear]
[to the East, you hear]
[to the Southeast, you hear]
[to the South, you hear]
[to the Southwest, you hear]
 health
Health @ 100%: [shouting!]
Health @ 080%: [a fierce battle!]
Health @ 060%: [a violent conflict!]
Health @ 040%: [a desperate struggle!]
Health @ 020%: [ragged, agonized breathing!]
Health @ 000%: [a wet thud, followed by silence.]

 

ex.  Almost inaudibly to the Northwest, you hear a wet thud, followed by silence.

I'd like to ask about potential problems, though. What if the player enters the enemy-load-radius and causes monsters to spawn near an NPC, but then retreats? Will the cell the NPC and the monsters are on be dumped or will it play out no matter how far away the player is, or what?

Also, my understanding is that NPCs are only in danger if the player is close enough to them that their cells load. Is that correct?

 

If I can't do this on my own, how do people usually go about building a team to make these?

[Poontank]

From what I have observed many times and backed up by UESP knowledge one would assume only an active cell the player is currently in has any combat activity/combat AI at work. So NPCs would only be endangered when the player is near.

 

But unfortunately I have also encountered instances that certain NPCs have been killed off, be it by monsters or humanoid enemies. Alval Uvani for example found floating face down in a body of water close to a spawning point for some Redguard bandits. Or the same guy found dead in the vicinity of the Ayleid well in front of Anutwyll. In that case - it was years ago on XBox 360 - the monsters roaming Anutwyll exterior took care of him. And in both cases I was not in those cells for a long time. Entering them I didn't hear sounds of fighting which lead me to think the character was already dead for a while.

 

Makes me scratch my head what is really going on when I'm not near. Just like the "...is unconscious" or "...is fleeing" messages for essential characters popping up sometimes. Messages for NPCs that are nowhere to be found, verified by stacking a few strong Detect Life effects to have a range of more than 300 feet.

 

My guess from these observations is that an NPC-enemy encounter might indeed play out, resulting in the NPC's inevitable death because they aren't familiar with the concept of tactical retreat if odds are against them.

 

In any case ShiaNekoChan's concept and your dialogue lines are a good starting point to make such a mod possible. Wish I had any experience with this, but scripting is rocket science to me.

[ShiaNekoChan]

Cool. I hope this ends up becoming a real plugin.

I wrote some dialogue for the barks last night. The idea is each set covers a variable out of distance, direction, and NPC health.

 distance

5 cells away: [Almost inaudibly]

4 cells away: [Far off]

3 cells away: [some distance away]

2 cells away: [Nearby]

1 cell away: [Right next to you]

 direction

[to the West, you hear]

[to the Northwest, you hear]

[to the North, you hear]

[to the Northeast, you hear]

[to the East, you hear]

[to the Southeast, you hear]

[to the South, you hear]

[to the Southwest, you hear]

 health

Health @ 100%: [shouting!]

Health @ 080%: [a fierce battle!]

Health @ 060%: [a violent conflict!]

Health @ 040%: [a desperate struggle!]

Health @ 020%: [ragged, agonized breathing!]

Health @ 000%: [a wet thud, followed by silence.]

 

ex.  Almost inaudibly to the Northwest, you hear a wet thud, followed by silence.

I'd like to ask about potential problems, though. What if the player enters the enemy-load-radius and causes monsters to spawn near an NPC, but then retreats? Will the cell the NPC and the monsters are on be dumped or will it play out no matter how far away the player is, or what?

Also, my understanding is that NPCs are only in danger if the player is close enough to them that their cells load. Is that correct?

 

If I can't do this on my own, how do people usually go about building a team to make these?

 

That part is easy, too, it would just take some if logic with some string concatenation.

 

I feel like I could make this in an hour or two, but I'm a little busy today.

 

I'll probably end up calling it "soulwhisperer.esp" or something if I go through with it.

[Longherin]

This is honestly a very interesting idea for a mod. (If pickpocketing was actually worth anything I'd be doing it more) -ahem-

 

I think NPC-enemy encounters play out in abstract form; I'm not sure how much of their self preservation is kept in the abstract form, but I assume it's either minimal or nonexistent.

(I mean this in the sense of : NPC - Steel Mankind meets Drau _{wait I can't spell} Troll!)

(They start fighting!)
(Troll deals damage based on their strength, Steel Mankind takes damage based on his equipment list)

(Steel Mankind does damage based on etc etc etc, until someone dies)

 

and the NPC's position is determined by his movement package.

 

-NOTE THIS IS ONLY CONJECTURE-

 

...I only popped in here to say I agree with your sentiment but I'm a lot more crass and just use godlike powers (console) when someone dies.

[But I'm okay.]

Is there any way to test this? Like a script that

1. Monitors all traveling NPCs to see when they die and pings you at moment of  death
   
2. Gives their cell distance from you in the ping (so we can see if distance matters)
   

If such a thing existed, I'd be glad to do the testing-- using it and waiting to get messaged with "NPC 'Foo' has died at (xx,yy), which is n units away (about n_a cells from you)".

 

I wonder if this has anything to do with how close to Kvatch you have to be for the battle at the gates to start running, or if that's something else.

[quasimodo75]

I like the idea, in fact I felt the same thing about those traveling NPCs, so IMHO this idea is not ridiculous at all.

I´d be glad to see a PI like the ideas suggested here. 

About those everlasting corpses: Aren´t there some PI to revive dead NPCs? These PI´s should work neatly in combination.