What's up Zig Forums - I've been wrestling with an idea of mine recently, wondering about whether or not it would be possible to combine every NPC in TES4: Oblivion into a single NPC by fusing two NPCs together repeatedly until we have one NPC remaining in the game. I've made some initial progress - I think I've perfected the process of fusing two NPCs together as best as Oblivion's engine would allow. But is it possible to track down and fuse every NPC in the game together, two by two, and come up with one NPC who contains the collective stats of every NPC in the game (except the player, I suppose)?
I have a reason for trying this, ultimately it will tie into an even greater idea, but for now I'm just wondering if it's possible. Thoughts? I'll post screenshots as I attempt it here.
This, for example, is the fusion of an Argonian in the IC Market District and Simplicia the Slow. It's worth noting that it has the male Imperial voice.
>I think I've perfected the process of fusing two NPCs together as best as Oblivion's engine would allow Explain please. I'm interested in the process.
I think you should merge NPCs in this format and not going like npc1+npc2+...+npcN.
>and come up with one NPC who contains the collective stats of every NPC in the game (except the player, I suppose)? fuse every npc with Nickies Black.
Do you mean you could technically do everyone quest with him as your follower?
Cameron Lopez
This is a neat idea
Owen Davis
The fusion is a true combination of everything except for dialogue topics, because Oblivion's dialogue system doesn't seem to allow for dynamically changing any dialogue topic to a new NPC target rather than the exact reference it was originally assigned to. Besides that, barring bugs (haven't found any significant ones so far), a fusion possesses:
>The sum of the stats, attributes, and skills of the two constituent NPCs >The full inventories and spelllists of both >Combined Faction data and packages >AI actor values are the average of the constituents, i.e. if an NPC with an Aggression of 100 fused with one with 0, the fusion will have an Aggression of 50 >The sex of the fusion, in the case of the fusees being one man and one woman, is based on a coinflip >The eyes and hair are a combination of both constituents based on random chance >The fusion has a new name dynamically generated from the name of the fusees
I think you should write a script to automate the merging, because doing it by hand for 200 npcs will be fucking tiresome.
>The sex of the fusion, in the case of the fusees being one man and one woman, is based on a coinflip Do it based on stats. NPC with better stat will dictate the sex. But it'll only work with format. Also holy fuck, I thought you'll only merge models or something, but you're going with the whole ai package, starts and everything.
Josiah Richardson
On the topic of bracketing the fusions and them combining them, that would be more efficient but my concern would be keeping track of all the individual fusions walking around such that I can combine them all later. There's no doubt that that strategy would be best for one area, btw.
Additionally, to really show the effects of this process, the damage formula in my game has been uncapped so that fusions will actually deal relatively massive amounts of damage once they pass 100 Strength and 100 in whatever weapon skill they're using.
Could you use the infection code to somewhat simulate bracketing? Affected AI 9/10 times chooses to seek out and infect someone, 1/10 times seeks out a person to merge with.
Tyler Davis
Does this include npcs like dremora, sheogorath and Pelinal?
Adam Cooper
>But is it possible to track down and fuse every NPC in the game together, two by two, and come up with one NPC who contains the collective stats of every NPC in the game (except the player, I suppose)? The player, by definition, is not an NPC. Keep on rocking, though.
James Collins
I guess the fused npcs still have their IDs. As long as the scrip would go through a static list of IDs and merging them bracket-style then it would be pretty easy to keep track of which npcs were fused and how many times. Each tier of brackets would be one loop of the script going through the list.
Bentley Stewart
Hmm, yea I could repurpose the code to that end, but I'm not sure how the game would handle it. Triggering fusion is currently handled slowly and manually by getting the reference that I'm looking at with my crosshairs, because that's currently the most stable way I've been able to get it to work.
It should work on any actor except the player, in theory. I haven't tried it yet on those types of NPCs though.
Right now I'm combining every NPC in the Imperial City Market District into one. I might have to manually keep adjusting their speed, because I've combined only most of the ones who are outside during the day so far and let me tell you, it's already phasing through buildings just while walking due to its speed and athletics. See stats in pic related.
>>The eyes and hair What about the rest of the physique?
Charles Robinson
It's tied to sex, mostly. Scale is taken as an average from the two constituents like AI values.
Samuel Hall
I don't see why it wouldn't be possible given this description of the algorithm barring hitting the upper limits on inventory size, stats, etc. (be careful not to overflow!). However I want to point out that how you're doing the averages is not commutative, i.e. different fusion orders will lead to different results. If you could somehow keep a variable of how many NPCs you've fused into a single NPC, you could make the average commutative (for example, if you're fusing an NPC made up of two fused NPCs with another unfused NPC, by doing stat1 + stat2 + stat3 / 3 instead of avg1 + stat3 / 2, for example)
Liam Ramirez
So in Oblivion there's a thing called the Skull of Fusion, which you can use to merge NPCs. Using a glitch, you can use it to permanently merge them with yourself.
When I discovered this glitch online, I had already played Oblivion to exhaustion. My character, Nickies, a Breton battlemage, was nigh-invulnerable, and had spells that could one hit Minotaurs. It was pretty crazy, but it got boring fast. I decided the only challenge left was to fuse yourself with a result of fusion of every NPC, one who contains the collective stats of every NPC, a final fusion, a "Fused One," if you will.
So I did the glitch, purposefully not wearing my best gear as to make sure i will not override every stat of the "Fused One", but couldn't immediately fuse, and it created a clone of a fusion result because my stats were too high and it splitted me(us) into two. So, I left and returned, to see what would happen to him.
He had changed his equipment loadout to that of my own, real character's, including all my OP shit and items of every NPC in the game. Now I actually couldn't kill him...
Not only that, but he started upchucking a creepy mix of dialogue from every NPC, even lines I haven't heard before, like "I'm sworn to die, are you?" and "The training of thousands has passed through me!"
Sometimes he would use my invisibility spells and flee, and I'd have to find him again. One time I found an empty town , with him speaking for every NPC from that town. I even got him giving me quests from local NPC that now are part of him, and I swore I didn't speak to them before. Once I led him over a bayou to an underwater DLC home I had, and he equipped my waterwalking boots to easily keep pace - then, when I fled underwater, he swam under with me despite wearing said boots!
Other oddities include his Luck seemingly being higher for everything he did compared to my own, and being able to simultaneously as a two or more beings at once (which was actually IMPOSSIBLE in Oblivion).
Why dialogue wouldn't be possible? It's tied to persistent references. The issue is changing the reference tied to a dialogue topic dynamically. If I knew which NPCs I was going to change in advance I could manually script the change, but because fusion works such that NPCs can fuse in any order it doesn't quite work out.
That said your point about keeping things commutative is well-received and I'm currently making that change by keeping track of those values using global variables.
The only way I know of to do that would be to walk through each Actor in a cell using OBSE functions, but in the past when I've tried that followed by disabling the actors (as is necessary here so that only the fusion remains) it's always resulted in a crash.
Matthew Allen
This is the new Pannenkoek isn't it?
Chase Cox
So... the actors are refusing to have their speed and athletics stat set back to something manageable. The game is just refusing to do it apparently.
I have to say, fusions of fusions really stack fast in terms of stats. The speed is getting out of hand really fast. See webm related. I'll test out Strength against some generic enemies next.
All the grey combined with the lack of people really makes it look dystopian.
Luke Wood
This just sounds made up.
Jason James
Underrated based copypasta poster
Ayden Adams
>That we Haha!
Aaron Diaz
Anyway, I might as well share what my ultimate goal is. I want to find the stats of the "Composite Oblivion NPC" because I intend to then replicate this in the other two modern TES games. Then I intend to host a tournament between the three to find out who wins in a sets of fights across each of the 3 games (once I know the stats, inventory, spelllist, etc I can recreate the Composite NPC of one game in another TES game).
Back to more pressing matters, I'm almost done with the Imperial City Market District. Ideally I can finish the entire IC pretty quickly.
