focustense
commented
2 years ago This has been my "next big project after EasyNPC" since I started on EasyNPC, although my own vision of it is somewhat different.
My use case is driven partly by the fact that I have about 500 really sweet looking outfits and armors for BHUNP, 3BA and so on, and... no way to deploy them effectively in a real game. Leveled lists are dumb, I don't want to see random bandits wearing armors that look like they cost the entire annual GDP of Solitude, or ugly farmers made up like prostitutes. But it makes sense for Taarie to be dressed to the nines, the Companions to each have super cool looking unique armor, and Haelga to be all tarted up.
So this project requires very detailed information not only about the outfits themselves (and of course, many of these "outfits" are themselves mix-and-match, with not every piece matching with every other piece and no obvious way to match them other than looking at them visually) but also about the NPCs who might use them. It goes way beyond identifying a "chest piece" - which is actually already in the slot info in the ESP. The metadata required is all about fashion: does it look cheap or expensive, modest or racy, professional or amateur, is it for mages or rogues or warriors, and so on. There's no way to collect all that automatically, it has to be crowdsourced, and to avoid the problems with a tool like LOOT, the tagging system would need to have its own trust and reputation mechanic.
I could of course build just a really simple metadata system, but that variation of the project doesn't really hold my interest, because I don't see it as being a game-changer, it's not that different from just messing with leveled lists and loot. Being able to distribute thousands of different outfits, not randomly, but coherently based on an NPC's looks and personality - that really is a game-changer IMO.
While EasyNPC is, by necessity, all about choosing individual appearances for individual NPCs, I think a "fashion" tool should actually try to get away from that micromanagement, instead only having you decide which outfits you want distributed and based on some simple-ish rules, and let you be pleasantly surprised in-game. It would also hopefully be able to sort out any weird incompatibilities between armor meshes and body meshes, which human operators couldn't be expected to do reliably, as they don't even know which NPC mods mess with the body type.
Happy to see that there's support for the general concept outside of my own imagination. Timeline for it is, I'm sorry to say, on the order of months or even a year or more - but someday!
scorpiosixnine
TL;DR: Basically the same idea, but for installing armour and/or clothing packs.
It's a similar problem to NPC appearances, in that there are some mods than can happily co-exist, and some that overwrite each other. There are some that change vanilla items, some that add new ones, some that push them into the levelled lists, some that don't, some that provide crafting options, some that drop them into specific places or vendors, etc, etc, etc.
As a first pass, it would be great if one could just get a nice UI overview, in the same way that EasyNPC provides, so that you could see that you've got three alternatives for Forsworn Armour installed, but you're only actually going to get one of them at runtime. This could work with existing mods, analysing them and building a new packed mod, like you do in EasyNPC.
More ambitiously though, it would be brilliant if you could abstract the replacement process a little, so that mod authors could provide packs of clothing, marked up with metadata indicating potential roles for it ("this is chest armour, which _could- replace Forsworn Armour piece XYZ").
You could then put the choice in the hands of the user as to which armours go into the game, and whether they replace something or go in as new items, are craftable, go into lists, etc, etc.