@alyx i want to say in oblivion this is circumvented through enemy level caps and being able to use the spell creator to create higher level illusion spells (at greater costs.)

in skyrim gg no re since there's no spell creator and you reach a point where there are never any higher level illusion spells to work with.

@alyx but to more directly answer; calm turns the npc completely passive until expiry so they won't care at all about seeing you or you raking all of the goods in the room in to your pocket in front of them IIRC. in skyrim it also disengages combat so if you do get seen you just no u and disappear again.

@icedquinn
I think it disengages combat in Oblivion too. At least that's what I noticed in some creatures.

@icedquinn
Yeah, in Oblivion they really want you to use the spell creator, but it's still pretty bad, cause it takes awhile until you get admitted to the University. So there's still a good chance you outlevel your calm spell if do any other side quests instead of being not laser focused on the mage guild stuff.

@alyx i'm just watching someone do oblivion rn and he's doing all the meta optimization for levelling up. it's not a part of the game i miss tbh.

never finished skyrim either. always got bored and it felt like the character diversity was significantly less than even oblivion

@icedquinn
Peak roleplay diversity was apparently in Daggerfall. Things have been getting simplified since then. Skyrim has almost reached being a generic action-adventure game with rpg elements, instead of being a full on rpg.

@alyx daggerfall had a very involved enchanting and spellmaking system. there was a whole set of certain clothes held different levels of enchant and there were bonuses and penalties that controlled the costs against the threshold (but also the coins to buy it) so you could end up with woozy clothes that only work during mid-day

i didn't really get in to daggerfall though. morrowind was the first one i played until my cd exploded in a faulty disk drive.

i couldn't tell you if there is a market for these old style games. i would guess some people still care because we have things like Wasteland and ATOM going at the old formulas.

@icedquinn @alyx There is enough market to build a free implementation in Unity. It's great!

@xyfdi @alyx there's a fun godot plugin that lets you load quake maps but it applies modern materials to the textures. so you can do up dungeon pieces in trenchbroom.

we have fun algorithms nowadays like wavefunction collapse or the cycle generators from dorman's papers that you can use to make weird dungeons.

but uh. i'm already working on a game. maybe depending how that goes i'd be willing to do a dungeon romper

@icedquinn @alyx Wave Function Collapse is great! 😊

@xyfdi @alyx my favorite part of the dorman's stuff is that a group of students took it for a school assignment and recreated it. they used it to make a zelda level for an open source zelda engine (open sword?)

its basically a replacement grammar that builds up a pseudo-plot from rules and then there's another replacement grammar for shapes to actually build up the dungeons from that. the general shape of the dungeon is supposed to follow the quest chart (so ex. if the quest generates a fork where you have two options the dungeon is supposed to have a loop in it too)

although they built the level by hand after running the generator to create the plan

i tried to implement this other crazy city generator some months ago but i think i ran in to trouble trying to understand what the hyperpaths they were using were. although someone implemented that one in javascript and there is a tool that uses it to make whole city grids.

@xyfdi @icedquinn
Daggerfall Unity is quite an achievement, especially for a dev team of 1. But OpenMW is still more awesome imo, especially with the multiplayer mod.

@alyx @xyfdi isn't openmorrowind very close to feature complete i haven't looked at it in years but when i last checked they almost had the whole game playable

@icedquinn @xyfdi
Haven't checked it recently either, but I think it's considered completeable (meaning you should be able to finish main storyline without problems)

@alyx @icedquinn I don't have the links handy to their Gitlab milestones, but...
- 0.47 is ready to be released. I have been running RC7 for a while and it has been great.
- 0.48 is well under way

And yes, you can comfortably play the game without running into issues.

@icedquinn
I see... so this is another one of those reasons why Morrowind is best. I really need to play it at some point.