Tes4Mod:Cobl/Projects/Atomization

Goals
Discussion
My mod Midas Magic has a vested interest in common ingredients. As these are used to make the myriad of spells. In order to get the items I need, I've developed a way to "atomize" ingredients. For instance, breaking down a "gold sapphire ring" into a "gold fragment" and a flawed sapphire. I've also done this for the various sigil stones as well (based on their magical effects). Coming from this lop-sided point of view, I have a proposal for the Cobl ingredient "approach". I believe that Cobl should take an elemental / atomic approach to common ingredients and leave it up to the mod makers to expand with their own custom ingredients. Because in essence, that's how it's going to happen. Today, you could include "Night Troll Toenails" as part of Cobl. When when Mart releases the Day Troll, Cobl will need a update.

I don't think I'm saying anything new. At least not yet. What I would like to see in cobl are the constituent parts. Wood, bone, clay, silver, ruby etc. And a way for the individual mod owners to easily break-down their "special" ingredients in to their individual elements. Or a way for the budding alchemist to do it.

Let me propose one alternative to do this so I do contribute something to this thread. This obviously has room for improvement. First, start with a Cobl common container. Any item placed in this container is subject to conversion. Provide a freely available and common framework for a script to the Mod authors that will allow them to inventory the container and break down their special ingredients into the Cobl common ones. The details of how this works is up for negotiation. Like, "Is his a quest script or triggered by an activator?"

And thats MHO, thanks for reading. --Xilverbullet (from forum post 8 August 2007)

:Hmm... To fully support that approach would require a fairly substantial addition. It would also be a lot of work on the part of modders -- the would need to write a script which goes through every new item that they add and then reduce it to it's constituent "atoms". Keep in mind that mods like OOO add thousands of new items. Not only do you have to handle each one of those items, but also you have to figure out for each what it's "atoms" are. That would be a heck of a lot of work. 

:If there's a lot of interest in it, then something can be done, but that doesn't seem to be the case at this moment. --Wrye (forum post, 8 August 2007)

The above are the first couple of posts in a brief discussion on the forums. At the time I said "No." but if there enough interest, it can be reconsidered. --Wrye 22:39, 21 October 2007 (EDT)

:I think even if rejected at this time at least their should be an atomic base for breaking up sigil stones and recreating spells and sigil stones based on recipes. First, because a lot of magic modders could use a mod independant recipe system for their spells. Second these base elemental magic system (atomic system) using 'magic essences' would be just a bunch of misc items (about 30-50 ?) that don't need alchemical sorting or a lot of work. These essences would have base names that are already part of the magic effect naming system (like fire, attributes, skills, drain, etc.) - and mods like MidasMagic could than just use a building system of their own (which is not part of Cobl). It would then be possible for any modder to link into any magic mod with own recipes creating a spell or even sigil stone with the magic of midasmagic, suprememagicka, lame, etc. Other raw material like metals or organic ingrediants could be treated differently (like all ingredients) inside Cobl. --Scanner 20:08, 28 October 2007 (EDT)

::Here's the dilemma: In order to break down an item, you need to know what it's magical structure is. For vanilla items you can do this, it's a pain, but doable. But even for vanilla, maintentance is a pain (after all, overhauls can change the properties of items). Once you add in new items added by various mods, the idea of having scripts which convert items into their components based on pre-existing knowledge of the components just becomes too massively unwieldy to be workable. OTOH, you can probably avoid doing this by using OBSE -- just query with OBSE to get the magical effects, spit out the tokens, and you're done. But... If you're that, then you don't need to define the tokens in Cobl. In short: without OBSE,it's too unwieldy to be practical. But with Obse, you don't need Cobl. --Wrye 00:47, 29 October 2007 (EDT)

:::Not really. Two arguments. First, breaking up sigil stones is just a subpart of a magical essence system and if it wouldn't work that doesn't mean that magical creation with recipes, rituals or other methods is completeley obsolete (because there could be other ways to gain the essences than using sigil stones). And for magic recipes its not necessary for Cobl to do the conversion job or even define conversion rules. But without a magic essence resource magic-mods have nothing in common - and the scope of Cobl is offering a needed shared resource (this could probably link together different magic systems). --Scanner 10:16, 29 October 2007 (EDT)

:::Second, I think I've found a method breaking up user sigil stones without needing their refs. As sigil stones are rare a user sigil stone could have a script that reacts to containers via OnAdd. Step1 would be placing the sigil stone in a special source container and OnAdd would then mark the stone ready for RemoveMe and put SpellEffectItems into a destination container (the player can't access). This is easy scripting since each user stone knows its own effects and Cobl already has just these needed tokens which don't run their code on containers other than the player. Step2 would mean converting the spelleffect items into magic base essences. But Cobl only offers them and the rules are completely up to each modder. The method would need a quest script to register source and destination container refs to allow different kind of user containers in mods. If I have more time I'll set up a demo of breaking up user sigil stones and converting them to base essences. --Scanner 10:16, 29 October 2007 (EDT)

::: OTOH - the main goal of user sigil stones would be to create them, while the vanilla stones can be found and get broken up. Because this makes the user sigil stones harder to gain and more valuable. You would have to quest for a user sigil stone recipe and not break up a rare user sigil stone to create a vanilla stone you can always find behind an oblivion portal. --Scanner 10:16, 29 October 2007 (EDT)

::::The question is now whether it's possible to extract essences, the question is whether or not it's practical. Yes, you could script every item to break itself down under certain conditions. But my point is that it's not practical to expect modders to do that. If modders were lining up, "Saying I'd love to that!" (I.e., if they were willing to go through a lot of extra coding and hassle to do that), then that would be a different matter. But that's not the case. 

::::Secondary note is that Cobl tries to avoid "promiscuous scripting" -- i.e., putting scripts on tons of items. There are other approaches (e.g. the grinder and the dinner plate) which allow you to operate on items without scripting them. (I'm against promiscuous scripting because I'm concerned about performance affect, and about compatibility -- script variable conflicts are danger that needs to be avoided.) (Note that this objection is not against atomization in general -- just against an implementation that works by scripting items).--Wrye 01:31, 30 October 2007 (EDT)