Instead of relying on flashing and beeping to know when you’re in danger, get obvious notifications when your suit protection drops to 50%, 20% and 5%.
The description above says it all, really. But…
Your character (assuming they’ve equipped a helmet, spacesuit and pack) has a level of suit protection. In hazardous places, this soaks up environmental damage until it’s depleted, and you start actually getting hurt. (And there are resistances to various kinds of environmental damage and so on.) But there’s no way to tell how exactly how much protection you’ve gone through and how much you have left. There are symbols on the watch that flash, and a noise that beeps, and both of these speed up as there’s less and less left. But it’s all very imprecise.
And, weirdly, I couldn’t find any existing mods that filled this niche. So I made one. It sends a notification when half of your protection is gone. It sends another when you’ve only got 20% protection left. And it sends a final, more urgent message if you have just 5% protection left (uh oh!)
To make it more exciting than plain text messages, the watch also flashes ‘SUIT INTEGRITY’ (that was the most suitable alert of the ones available). I spent a while trying to get an actual message to appear on the watch, and I think it would be possible to get custom text through use of hazard objects, but I couldn’t figure it out so I kept things simple. Also, this way the alert appears immediately, regardless of how many other alerts the watch wants to show first.
This is most useful if you’re playing with the harder environmental damage settings or other overhauls. It’s a very minimal mod, telling you when it’s important without being too intrusive or annoying. It doesn’t actually provide constant exact values, but at least it gives some idea of how close you are to getting hurt and when it’s time to find shelter.
Compatibility
Hopefully 100%. It doesn’t modify any existing game components, and while damage/realism overhauls might change how damage is applied and what damages you and how you can resist it and that sort of thing, the suit protection system is pretty fundamental and I bet they use the same variable that this mod checks.
Customisability
None. It’s an invisible mod that should “just work” (which includes no way to tell if it’s active without triggering a message). Go stand on a gas vent for a few seconds, I guess. Sorry, the values that trigger the alerts can’t currently be changed in-game. Easy to change in the creation kit though.
Installation/Uninstallation
Removing it should be fine at any time. Like I said, it doesn’t modify anything in the game.
There’s no requirements to install it, but if you happen to load a save where it was already partially-depleted, it might not start working until your suit protection fully regenerates. It should, but it got less testing than the rest because it’s such a tiny issue.
How it works
In scripting, you can trigger events when a certain value (in this case, suit protection, which internally is ENV_Damage_Soak) goes below a certain value (e.g. 50, 20, or 5). Each event shows the appropriate message(s). That’s about it. Plus a quest to hold the script, the messages to display, and some framework code so it works reliably no matter how much your suit protection changes and it only warns you once per level. I don’t know the exact performance impact of these value-watching events, but I’ve tried to make them as specific as possible so the script is only active when it needs to be.
By the way, maximum suit protection appears to be a fixed value, no matter your stats! It tops out at 100 and is considered ‘depleted’ at 0. Better suits and perks give you better resistances, which means the same amount of it lasts longer before depletion. Convenient for me though.
Future goals:
- Nothing immediately, unless it turns out to be buggy, in which case “fix bugs”. Probably none of the below ideas either – I made this for myself and I’m happy with the way it works, so I’d rather work on other mod ideas now!
- Maybe make the watch alert more specific if I figure out how
- It’s the first time I’ve put out a mod with a papyrus script, so there may be some room for improvement there. Performance shouldn’t be an issue, more like, not following best practices
- Similarly, if it turns out there’s an easy way through gameplay options or some other method, it would be nice to provide customisable alert percentages without resorting to the creation kit
- Ultimately I would have liked to have a bar on the hud itself, like health or oxygen, but that’s way beyond me (if it’s even possible)
Credits:
bhurnie
Download mod
| File | File size |
|---|---|
SuitWarnings-1-05
|
4 KB |
