Alchemistry (WIP)

[tropic elbow]

Overrides alchemy window with custom Lua-written one and changes bunch of other alchemy related things. I've been working for some time on this mod and the key features are mostly done, so I guess I can create a topic here, although it is still work-in-progress.
The detailed description and pictures at the link: https://github.com/Kromgart/omw_alchemistry (sorry, discord hates me and uploads my images completely blank)
Let me know what you think.

[dull citrus]

Interesting that's it's even possible to replace the alchemy tab 😮

[soft osprey]

It was already, i had done some tests
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1P8r4gMVmP0

Won't it be better to wait for magic effect in lua than override all the game mechanics?

(because it's the only missing part)

[tropic elbow]

But they are in lua

[dull citrus]

Nice UI changes there. I'm wondering about compatibility. Do you cover ingredients handled by other mods automatically or do they have to added manually?

[soft osprey]

I mean Magic effect create record

[dull citrus]

Is there ETA for that?

[tropic elbow]

There is a python script that makes patching pretty trivial, but yeah, if mods add ingredients - those mods need a patch

[dull citrus]

Since you are doing so much, I guess that it would be a good opportunity to rebalance how magnitudes and durations are calculated for various effects.

[soft osprey]

Sorry, don't know what's an ETA

[dull citrus]

Do we know when it's coming? Even roughly?

[tropic elbow]

Not sure what you mean. The records for new potions are created in lua, by calling the types.Potion.createRecordDraft(...) and so on. That function bugs out in currend 0.50 build if you feed it a lua table that specifies the effect, but there is a MR (still waiting in MR limbo) that make this work. When this gets merged, the mod will work with official build. If that MR gets rejected, then I'll wait for a different implementation and will update the mod (the record potion creation is the only missing bit). But surely someday it will be added

[tropic elbow]

That's the plan, yeah. With potion creation moved to lua you can completely change the ridiculous vanilla formulas and apparatus infulence, make potion creation depend on phase of the moon or whatever.

[dull citrus]

I think that @soft osprey is talking about magic dehardcoding. It's been talked about often but I have no idea if and when it's going to be implemented by the devs. It's like that ultimate boogeyman 😅 .

[tropic elbow]

Well, that would allow even more possibilities. But I don't think it would break the current vanilla potion-making (and therefore the mods that kinda rely on that)

Ingredients would still have some 'effects', and combining them in a certain way you create new 'potion' items. Frankly, even with vanilla hardcoded effect types there is a ton of cool stuff that could be made

[soft osprey]

For me, it works but you can only feed it with an existing effect https://openmw.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/lua-scripting/openmw_core.html##(MagicEffectWithParams).
Because you can't create MagicEffectWithParams ye twith lua.

[tropic elbow]

Yeah, but there is a merge request on gitlab, that allows doing it. The devs reaction seems to be positive, but the changes have not been merged yet. Doesn't stop anyone from using that.
But anyway, the potion creation is a tiny bit of the mod, changing that in the future for a different system (whatever gets adopted in the engine) should not be a big change.

[soft osprey]

Probably i misunderstood how work your mod.

[tropic elbow]

You can see that in the https://github.com/Kromgart/omw_alchemistry/blob/master/00_Core/scripts/alchemistry/global.lua
The function getPotionRecord does not work in the current official builds, because it will fail on call

local recordDraft = types.Potion.createRecordDraft(draftTable)

because the potion record draft "effects" field has a lua table assigned. This is not allowed in the official build (yet). But a person made a patch for the engine (8 month ago) that parses that lua table of "customized effects" and creates the proper magicEffectWithParams from the table, and everything proceeds smoothly!

[soft osprey]

It's more this part that tikkle me The magic effects have been stripped from the ingredient records, and moved to Lua scripts

Anyway nevermind

[night roost]

If you want to do something kinda cursed, you can create potion templates and apply those to a potion template

Idfk how to even describe it but that’s what I did for cooking, instead of using vanilla alchemy spell effects for ingredients though I chose my own but you could easily use vanilla ones instead

[tropic elbow]

Yeah, but then I essentialy need to have pre-made effects? And this would not be practical in case of alchemy with its huge amount of combinations of effect types, durations and magnitudes, which vary wildly with player stats and apparatus quality.

[night roost]

Yeah you have to do it all ahead of time which is cursed but it would allow you to balance durations and magnitudes as you see fit

[lusty belfry]

Looks exciting! I was just thinking how we could really use a lua-based alchemy system that rebalances stuff to make it less broken.

Any specific plans to change the potion-making formula? Stuff like making the potion's magnitude and value scale with ingredients value or such

[tropic elbow]

I was planning something like that. Ingredient effects could have something like 'intensity' and 'duration' tiers, and there could be accounted in the formulas which calculate the final effect. Or another one: adding more ingredients with the same effect type will increase the potion power (and give more xp, but be more difficult at low skill levels). Or randomising ingredient effects on new game start.
But right now I'm starting a new run on this mod without these extra changes, I wanna play it already and find and fix any remaining issues before adding more stuff. I've been working on it for about a month and haven't played the game.

[dull citrus]

effect-specific restrictions/modifiers on magnitude and duration...

nobody wants 80 pts Light or sth

[tropic elbow]

Well, but then you truly shine like moon and star. 😄

[lusty belfry]

Sounds good, can't wait for the full release

[lusty belfry]

I'd say that for proper balancing, every single effect in the game would need min/max values for potion magnitude/duration and maybe value

[dull citrus]

probably

or at least some common "groups"

in Vanilla alchemy is utterly broken. With mods it's sort of broken but it's very hard to balance everything by using the same formula for all the effects

[harsh crypt]

Mod looks really great! One thing you could think about are rare "alchemy treaties" that teach the effects/an effect of a particular group of ingredients. After all it's a science one can learn in books
But that's just a suggestion 🙂

[tropic elbow]

Thanks for the interest! I was thinking of generating 2 types of those:

1. big expensive compendiums for either flora/fauna of a specific geographic region, or broadly available ingredient type (gems, minerals). These should cost A LOT, but will teach you all properties of corresponding ingredients.
2. smaller and cheaper "alchemist notes" sold by alchemy vendors. Based on ingredients that they usually sell. And not guaranteed to teach 100% of effects.
   I'm currently playing/testing the mod together with randomized ingredient effects, and (as expected) it is just not practical to do your own tests for rare expensive stuff (like gems). Although I guess in the base game such things were often also "vendor-food".

[harsh crypt]

But everybody would like an invisibility potion that lasts more than 5 sec lol