RWS Horses

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Brokenbone
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Re: RWS Horses

Post by Brokenbone »

t-ice didn't have the benefit of seeing ALFA's NWN1 horsie implementation, but there were a lot of things that made ride ranks kick in, including in combat, which could see someone of insufficient skill unhorsed (and injured / knocked down for a tactical sticky situation) pretty quickly. Basically if you weren't a good rider, or took a horse untrained for war into combat, or BOTH, you were going to have an "unpredictable" time of it, and probably wish you'd been on foot. I suppose you could build a high ride ranks guy with say, all the feats up to Spring Attack to be able to zip around and avoid AoOs, but hey, blow your skillpoints and feats on that, and that's your prerogative.

Even in non-combat situations, we had to invent some penalties that I do not think were completely PnP derived, like an automatic "minus something or other" (maybe -10) to some skills, like MS/HS, if mounted. In PnP, I assume stealth penalties would just be DM prerogative, as in a circumstance penalty as high as his evil DM heart desired, because Buttercup the pony isn't very sneaky, even when ridden by a Shadowdancer.

Early ALFA iterations of the system had a lot of "interesting stuff to keep in mind", later iterations polished mostly by Zelknolf were also fairly well documented, but probably only used by a small group of PCs who were created in the NWN1 twilight, i.e., who from level 1 would know "taking ride ranks may be critical to my build", or "hey, a Charge system is coming in, I ought to buy a lance" etc.

Anyhow, it, the RWS release, continues to sound cool. Roger on things like no combat animations for now, a release is a release, these things improve over time as people get excited and volunteer to polish a product.
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Zelknolf
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Re: RWS Horses

Post by Zelknolf »

Being a person who doesn't know how to fight from horseback attempting to do so is very prohibative, but I have no plans to forcibly dismount people just for being in a fight. Being thrown, pulled, or knocked from a horse would still be an option, of course. And I would want to integrate the NWN v1.69 mounted archery scripts; they were just better than ours, and would make the average horse archer farmer just, y'know, fail.

As always, don't listen to BB. The bonuses and penalties came from the horse's skills.
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Brokenbone
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Re: RWS Horses

Post by Brokenbone »

My stealthy rogue barely rode a horse unless already wearing absolutely garish parade armor... I was under the impression, I guess mistakenly, about a "static" penalty to one's own skills by riding the horse, if instead it was a horse skill level being reflected in game, I stand corrected!

I was pretty sure though that crappy riders, particularly on "riding horses" (not warhorses) ended up failing checks and thrown from time to time. Seem to recall as a DM seeing people go ass over teakettle once or twice with horses in Daggerdale... hmm.
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Re: RWS Horses

Post by AcadiusLost »

I'd have to check back over the code to be sure of the DCs, but the combat things worked as follows:

Being on a "riding horse" in combat (not a warhorse) forced a high-DC ride check on an interval to avoid being thrown from the saddle (causing a small amount of damage with Tumble check autorolled, possible brief stun effect). At this point the mount tries to flee from the nearest hostile and generally needs to be searched for afterwards. The SRD check it was based on isn't supposed to automatically dismount you, but it is supposed to prevent you from doing anything at all that round if you fail (and may trigger another check to keep saddled).

We also had/have implemented the DC5 "control with knees" check on an interval any time the off hand isn't on the reins (doesn't have the bridle item equipped); so even on a warhorse some skill comes into play if you want to use a shield / 2-handed weapon / etc.

NWN1-ALFA horses granted a flat 20% speed increase while mounted; no other statistical benefit as far as I remember. This was a compromise position at the time since we couldn't implement many of the other features in a reasonable way. One of the oddities of it was that it was mechanistically advantageous for someone with a warhorse to dismount and fight alongside their horse rather than while riding it; however this is absurd enough from an IC perspective that we figured we'd just keep an eye out for it (and I believe HDMs tended to make players purchase warhorses via a DM rather than selling them from static merchants, so it'd be obvious is someone was burning through them like crossbow bolts).

My recommendation would be to just port the NWN1-ALFA scripts over to work with the new models, and get them in-game; rather than split hairs over changes to the details and rules of the implementation. We can always tweak things down the road once people have some experience with them.

(this said, I don't believe we've actually gotten our hands on the models/animations yet, so this is mostly planning ahead)
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Re: RWS Horses

Post by Zelknolf »

Well, obviously AL wins if there's a dispute on what goes into the haks, but--

The default ride system that shipped with NWN v1.69 was more advanced than ALFA's in a few ways. I do think that we could benefit from their mounted archery stuff (specifically because it does close a specific kind of exploit -- people on the kite-and-shoot plan on the default ride system did so at -8 to hit, or -4 with the mounted archery feat), and I don't think that we had a very sound system for making people use a hand to control a warhorse should they fail that low-DC "Steet with hands" thing; I know we forced the off-hand to unequip, but I don't think we forced, say, a greatsword to unequip.

If the fatigue system becomes standard content, we'll also have some work to do there (that is, horses on forced marches die, but people on forced marches get tired and eventually pass out-- we bipeds are nature's great endurance runners, after all), and we have a few functions that don't exist in NWN2 to account for (namely, we had one that gave us a movement speed adjustment to a flat rate move speed in NWN1, which we want something similar to here -- that is, horses don't become faster when they're under amonk, but a flat +20% would do that) which would prevent just doing a direct port.
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Re: RWS Horses

Post by Zelknolf »

Has anyone heard anything from Gimlor? Any notes on the status of the models / animations would be helpful.
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Gimlor Stoneaxe
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Re: RWS Horses

Post by Gimlor Stoneaxe »

Nope, haven't heard anything from him. :D

I am currently working on details to the horse skin like saddle strap and bridle stuff (no reigns)

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Re: RWS Horses

Post by CloudDancing »

Gimlor Stoneaxe wrote:Nope, haven't heard anything from him. :D

I am currently working on details to the horse skin like saddle strap and bridle stuff (no reigns)

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Re: RWS Horses

Post by Zelknolf »

Probably time to start managing expectations--

This set of haks is not going to be able to be implemented in the fashion that ALFA saw with NWN1. It's simply not made to be used that way.

In the shape that we expect it to be released, it expects a great deal of control to be exerted over the the riding characters. It might see some use on the overland map, because we already approach that level of control in that context, but it's important to note that these are not the horses of NWN 1.69. It looks like the pack's ideal use would be in cutscenes, which ALFA plainly doesn't use; that is, the content that a lot of people seem to be expecting simply isn't there.
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Re: RWS Horses

Post by ElCadaver »

I think we should move ALFA RP to a cutscene environment then. Playa controlled cutscenes, yeah!!
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Re: RWS Horses

Post by Adanu »

So, should I start asking for a ride point refund? :D
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Re: RWS Horses

Post by AcadiusLost »

As I understand it, the horses will be lacking in combat animations... but there is no reason we can't make them work in the same manner as our horse launch for NWN1-ALFA (persistent creature/henchmen when unmounted, part of the character when mounted, flat/minor speed increase while mounted, skill modifiers, dismount chance/ride checks in combat, etc).

The lack of combat animations will mean those who have invested in ride skills/warhorses would look kind of wonky while in combat (they wouldn't appear to be swinging their weapon, but attacks/combat would proceed as normal).

I guess there were more advanced horse things that came into NWN1 with the last patch that we won't have access to, but I don't think it is a reason to relegate them to cutscene/travel map only use.
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Re: RWS Horses

Post by ElCadaver »

Just put the emotes *KERPOW* and *BLAM* above the riders head every thime the attack. That should do.
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Re: RWS Horses

Post by Gimlor Stoneaxe »

Zelknolf wrote:Probably time to start managing expectations--

This set of haks is not going to be able to be implemented in the fashion that ALFA saw with NWN1. It's simply not made to be used that way.

In the shape that we expect it to be released, it expects a great deal of control to be exerted over the the riding characters.
What shape are you expecting it to be in?
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Re: RWS Horses

Post by Zelknolf »

What shape are you expecting it to be in?
People are speaking like they're expecting NWN 1.69 / ALFA1 horses (complete animations plus jousting, movement being walk or gallop, occupying the tail slot, without any inventory-related complications).

But I am to understand that the release will be lacking combat animations and occupying the cloak slot, movement being represented as a walk or a trot, without the available desire/manpower to make a version that would use NWNx4's objectproperties plugin.

The former means that a full and blanket integration will look buggy and incomplete (I promise that someone will post in the bug thread about it if we allow fighting on horseback); that part is AL's call. If he's fine with letting the missing animations shine, then the best I can do is grunt my disapproval (and I do; we've been so good about not adding stuff like that thus far).

The latter requires some scheme of invalidating the use of an inventory slot (which I'd rather avoid; nothing about being on a horse should disable your cloak of resistance) or controlling the inventory to fake the cloak slot while mounted (which presents issues with usability, if we manage to implement it without also introducing exploits).
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