A Mark And Recall Mod, is it a good idea? Options

[RobRendell]

Well, the impression I get is that Bethesda have taken out the Mark and Recall spells, on the grounds that the travel map allows everyone to move about quickly, not just spell-casters.

However, I don't think that Mark and Recall have been completely superceded by the travel map. Moving about using the travel map still takes time, in-game, and it doesn't work indoors. I used Mark and Recall a lot in Morrowind to avoid the drudgery of carting loot back and forth in dungeons (since my characters often started without a very high strength stat), and the travel map won't help with that.

Now, I haven't played the game yet, obviously, so maybe it'll be designed such that the spells really wouldn't be useful anyway. But in Morrowind, I used Mark and Recall heavily, and I anticipate that I'm going to miss it in Oblivion, so I'm considering writing a mod to add some equivalent spells back in.

Technically, from what I understand of the changes to the scripting language, it would now be easy to write outdoors-only mark and recall spells. Mind you, the travel map already works outdoors, so you're just saving yourself time...

A local mark and recall spell pair that only moves you around within the same indoor cell could also be useful, and shouldn't be too challenging to write.

However, a full re-implementation of Morrowind's mark and recall would be a pain, because cells are named by strings, and there are still no string variables in the scripting language to store the data. So, you'd have to do something like the Morrowind multimark mod, which has a scadload of if-elseif-else statements testing all the indoor cell names, and another scadload of if-elseif-else statements to call the PositionCell to move you back. Obviously, this is fragile - any new locations added by other mods aren't supported. Also, I don't want to spoil the game for myself by reading through all the indoor cell names.

So, I'm pondering my options. Would other people be interested in a mod that re-introduced Mark and Recall in some form, if they have indeed been removed? Would you consider using it on your first play through, or would that interfere with the experience that Bethesda was trying to create?

[RobRendell]

Well, MrSmileyFaceDude said this in the latest set of dev quotes:

As an experiment, I used a Script Effect spell to implement a kind of mark & recall spell. You'd cast it once, and it would move a special marker to where you were standing. Cast it again, and it would move you to where the marker was. Took about 20 minutes. Maybe I'll release it as a mod after the game's out. Our designers have found some insane uses for Script Effect, and I'm looking forward to seeing what the mod community comes up with!

So, there's an alternative, more elegant approach. It would even work to indoor locations without a string variable. And you could have several marker objects, making the same strategy applicable for a revamped multimark mod.

Anyway, we'll see whether we miss the spells once the game comes out. Can't be long now... (he says optimistically )

This post has been edited by RobRendell: Jan 23 2006, 07:06 AM