Leather/Chain materials?

[Ralzar]

How hard would it be to implement leather/chain in different armor materials? I assume the big hurdle is that the game defines "Leather" and "Chain" as materials, not armour types?

I assume the mod would have two parts:

1: Inserting the artwork for new armours. I assume would be completely doable?

2: Making it mechanically function correctly. So it gets dropped at the right levels, has the right values etc. And that it is still possible to wear if you have the class disadavantage of only leather/chain.

[daggerdude]

1.) is absolutely doable. you can actually go into a hex save editor and make your chainmail dwarven and the material will update accordingly, without any mods or anything... in the original game.

2.) to implement, loot pools would have to be populated with new items. since items are spawned from a hexidecimal table based on the enemy and such, this loot would have to be on that data table and coordinated to work with level limits and such.
I'm not a programmer per se but i do have a certain knowledge that comes from videogame modding to suggest that this would be a significant change to the system.
I could be wrong but I believe that interkarma modernized this table to be more accessible to modders. If that's the case, the ease would be much greater.

[daggerdude]

another thing to consider is balance.
I've pondered this myself because i have been creating scale mail and had ideas for transitional armors...

IF this were to be added....

Leather should have some upgrades, but not like metal. so instead of changing it to metal colors...
light brown, dark brown, black - light leather, heavy leather, hardened leather. +2 like metal. so a hardened leather would be +7 and be reasonably more expensive than normal leather, but also spawn later in the game; lets say 3 levels for every upgrade.

Chain should come in ANY of the metal upgrades, and be +1 so daedric would be +15, not 21 like plate.

so the TOP TIER would be 7+ for leather, 15+ for chain, and 21+ for plate. seems reasonable to me.

ANOTHER thing to consider is WHY one would do this. because there isn't an armor skill like morrowind (which i strongly encourage to add), one would also need to balance sneaking to be average with leather, chain to be worse, and plate to be terrible, all based on character weight minus the armor modifier; each piece would have to bear a certain modifier; i think boots, then greaves, then chest, then pauldrons would have the greatest positive or negative modifier, then helmets and gauntlets would mostly be neutral with small modifiers; perhaps they can affect other skills such as dodge, lockpicking, or pickpocketing more heavily, with some of the same ideas.

the point being leather should not affect stealth at all, while chain would to a lesser extent and plate to a large extent would affect stealth or agility related skills. knights using bows should not be as good as rogues in leather.

For everything that changes, another thing should have to change to make it work. that's the problem with game balance.

[Ralzar]

I’ve been thinking much the same and guessed the loot tables would be the real hurdle. One really hacky way of doing it could be a mod that took your level into account and started sometimes changing dropped chain and leather items for higher variants.

So, for example, at level 3 when you kill a monster and it drops leather armour, each piece has a 10% chance to get switched out with the next tier of leather. Then increase the % chance as you level up, introducing even higher versions as you reach even higher levels. This way you leave the underlying mechanic alone but fake it for the player.


For armor types, I’m thinking leather could have “hardened” and then maybe “studded” as the differen levels. Since it shouldn’t keep pace with plate, there is no use for as many variants.
For chain, you could either go for just having it in all materials with lower stats, or you could do the same as with leather. Chain, then Splint Mail and finally... Scale Mail maybe?

Agreed on the armor skills and stealth effect. This is something I would actually hope to see in the Roleplay & Realism mod which allready has debuffs for encumberance.

[daggerdude]

Funny enough, i've been working on studded leather and scale mail (transitional between plate and chain)...

[Ralzar]

Oh wow, I had no idea that tinting worked on chain and leather. This makes the visual bit easy for chain at least. I'm guessing leather only tints the metal bits on the feet? The problem would be giving it correct stats and have it actually drop in the game.

[BansheeXYZ]

This would be a huge improvement to the game and I'm honestly shocked no one has done it yet. Finding incremental equipment upgrades throughout the game to improve your character is a huge part of RPG reward systems. It's fun to find rare treasures and feel rewarded, it's just RPG 101. Yet in DF, plate wearers are the only ones that get armor upgrades. Who wants to find the best material for a non-plate character within 30 minutes? How boring.

Not only is it boring, it's confusing in two ways. First time players assume (logically) that chain, being a metal, gets these materials, so they forbid themselves from plate only to discover this inexplicable limitation. Also, basic chain is either iron or steel, but no material is expressed ingame, so classes forbidden from iron or steel can still equip it.

[hello]

great mod idea! hope this gets made

[Ralzar]

This would be a huge improvement to the game and I'm honestly shocked no one has done it yet. Finding incremental equipment upgrades throughout the game to improve your character is a huge part of RPG reward systems. It's fun to find rare treasures and feel rewarded, it's just RPG 101. Yet in DF, plate wearers are the only ones that get armor upgrades. Who wants to find the best material for a non-plate character within 30 minutes? How boring.

Not only is it boring, it's confusing in two ways. First time players assume (logically) that chain, being a metal, gets these materials, so they forbid themselves from plate only to discover this inexplicable limitation. Also, basic chain is either iron or steel, but no material is expressed ingame, so classes forbidden from iron or steel can still equip it.

Yep, and the fact that you can actually tint chain and leather seems to imply that they planned to include this but simply ran out of time. The complete lack of loot rewards is really the only thing stopping me from playing non-plate characters. You loose so much of the charm of the game when you get no incremental rewards as you level. If you go non-armour you can at least play dress-up with all the clothes in the game

[Rand]

I was looking at something related. It looks like, among a bunch of other things, you'd have to make some edits to the ItemBuilder.cs code (that gets compiled into the Assembly-CSharp.dll, I think). If you look at the code on GitHub (https://github.com/Interkarma/daggerfal ... Builder.cs), you can see starting at line 129 that there's already a simple randomization function for armor generation that could be added to. It wouldn't be very difficult to add some code for leather and chain, similar to plate. There's a bunch of other related code in that file alone that would have to be added to, as well. I haven't looked whether code in other files (like some of the includes listed at lines 12 to 22) would have to be added to, but I suspect so.
But since it's compiled, I don't see how a mod can change it, unless the devs allows for a variant Assembly-CSharp.dll via mods.
That's as far as I got.
Good luck. I'm rooting for this mod.