Ideas and stuff

I've played a little bit around with scale changes, here's a test mod tuned for actors only:
Mod-ModelScaleRandom-Alpha2.ds2res (Alpha 2, 6kb). Please check the ReadMe file for essential details.

Also important to know is that the mod tries to store data in savegames (so better make backups), because it looks quite strange if NPCs in a town are changing their body size from one session to the other.
Right now the mod is 'stand-alone', but it could be included into other mods, or it's tuned at least that other mods could read out some piece of information.

For example, bows indeed have a ~10 meter range only (however up to 20m with skills), the (poor) monsters only have 16m sight range and are not allowed to walk more than 20m or 25m away from their home point. Party members actually can see less than monsters but luckily the human player leading them usually has a camera span of ~30m perhaps.
...and after 60m the (loaded game) world often doesn't exist anymore.

So when adopting the range of a real 370m bow even only in parts then it would become in DS an inter-continental weapon, on you could shoot arrows to the moon probably.

Cool, you were able to do it :). Can't wait to see this in action.

It could be interesting to create real game-play differences between short-bow and long-bow in DS2. Something like, if you are using a long-bow your arrows' damages will increase with your distance from your target. And with short-bow your arrows will get useless if your are too away from your target but can become really deadly if your are standing from few meters. Long-bow will have a big reload delay unlike a short-bow.

I don't really know if it's possibly but could be really interesting.

As KillerGremal pointed out you can't expect real life values in DS2! It's all to do with balance and don't forget you can get a lot higher ranges through skills. If you have too high a range then the monsters wouldn't stand a chance. You would have to have a system similar to a lot of games when monsters suddenly teleported behind or around you or constantly ambushed you in order to maintain a balance. I'm not a fan of that sort of system.

Also DS2 also gives ranged players the throwing ability and if bows are too strong, then throwing weapons will be pointless to use (which they probably are anyhow).

It could be nice to choose the scale of the character in the creation menu :).

The growing balancing conflict of the increased (cross)bow ranges and the AI values of monsters is evident I guess...
...and concerning (cross)bow and thrown weapons, I would take care that bows don't get faster than 0.6s - because the faster they become, the more/sooner players may wonder (if they don't already do) why it's easier/faster to draw a bow with an arrow than to throw a knife (currently 0.73s without skills).
In contrast to this, assumed you are going to make your long bows +1s slower because of +2m range (are they so strong then? +1s is quite a lot even for my 'restrictive' taste), wouldn't it be appropriate then to this (or any other delay increasment) for crossbos with a +3m upgrade as well?

Well, just some rough thoughts on this, and there's absolutely no reason to adpot this point of view.

I have added a little slider to the GUI, but my problem is now to make this slider usefull :D. I don't really know how to get the character...

@HardLess: As far as I remember there are (only?) sliders for the details in the game option and for the zoom of the teleporter map - how is it handled there?

Also important to check (already now) if there is a way to 'reach' the hero during this moment of character creation, resp. is it already a valid party member we can store any numbers on so they are available finally on the map?

 
...looking at the 'hero name' box there are possibly other ways too to smuggle some data into the game without side-effects on long terms (primitive though, and only in worst case of course).

Edit:
There seems to be an interesting slider example in: ui/interfaces/backend/drawn_map.gas

We can get the value of the slider pretty easily, we can set some options like the max/min value and also the step of the slider. With the messages of the slider in particular the "onchange" message we can call a function and then get the value of the slider ("UISlider.Value"). There shouldn't be any problem with the slider.

I couldn't find a way to get the character for the moment... :(. Perhaps you have an idea how to reach him. But I have seen that characters displayed in the menu can be modified as there are in the game. I doesn't have a clear idea for this problem.

HardLess.

try Server.GetLocalHumanPlayer or something similar

...it looks really tricky to get a hero on the frontend interfaces, specially in this case where the hero never has been saved before.

However there would be also the possibility to append a suffix like '+15' onto the hero's name, and as soon as in-game this suffixed could removed from the name and taken as scale change.
It rather would be a tweak of course, not really sophisitcated...

Could it be possible to create a skrit that run in loop only in the front-end menu and read a global variable and scale all actors with this variable, so the actor in the creation menu will be modified and then when we click on next this variable will be set as the constant scale of the actor ?
Because the problem with adding the scale onto the hero's name is that we can't see the influence of the scale on the actor in the creation menu.

Mod-ModelScaleRandom-Alpha3.ds2res (Alpha 3, 16kb, ReadMe).
Mirror:
Mod-ModelScaleRandom-Alpha3.ds2res (Alpha 3, 16kb, ReadMe).

I wasn't able to access the hero, nonetheless i have found a way to get his custom size into the game.
A big problem was/is to modify the corresponding screen to work in v2.2 and v2.3 as well.

One thing that I would love to see that was a feature of the original DS1 but no longer seems supported in DS2/Broken World is the ability to randomize the equipment monsters and npcs could wear in the pcontent block as per this example for a skeleton mercenary ranger:

	[inventory]
	{
		selected_active_location = IL_ACTIVE_RANGED_WEAPON;

		[pcontent]
		{
				[oneof*]
				{
				es_shield_hand = bw_g_c_c_l_4_avg;
				es_shield_hand = bw_g_c_c_l_r_avg;
				es_shield_hand = bw_ra_g_c_c_l_4_avg;
				es_shield_hand = bw_ra_g_c_c_l_r_avg;
				es_shield_hand = bw_ra_g_c_s_l_c_avg;
				}
				[oneof*]
				{
  				es_chest = bd_ch_f_g_c_avg;
				es_chest = bd_ch_r_g_c_avg;
  				es_chest = bd_ra_ch_r_g_o_fin;
				es_chest = bd_ba_f_g_c_avg;
				es_chest = bd_ba_f_g_c_fun;
  				es_chest = bd_ba_f_g_c_low;
				es_chest = bd_ba_m_g_c_str;
  				es_chest = bd_ba_r_g_o_fin;
  				es_chest = bd_pl_f_g_c_low;
				es_chest = bd_pl_m_g_c_str;
				es_chest = bd_pl_r_g_c_fin;
  				es_chest = bd_ra_br_f_g_c_str;
				}
				[oneof*]
				{
				es_feet = bo_gr_ba_f_g_c_avg;
				es_feet = bo_gr_fp_f_g_c_avg;
				es_feet = bo_ra_gr_ba_f_g_c_fin;
				es_feet = bo_bo_sc_f_g_c_avg_alloy_dsx;
				}
				[oneof*]
				{
				es_forearms = gl_ga_ba_f_g_c_avg;
				es_forearms = gl_ga_fp_f_g_c_avg;
				es_forearms = gl_ra_ga_ba_f_g_c_fin;
				}
		}
	}

Update# Did some more testing, trying out different variations to see if anything worked. The above code does generate a weapon at least (didn't try armor in the test case) but only when the monster is killed. It dies with the randomly produced weapon in its hand. Otherwise the weapon is invisible.

If the pcontent code is incorrect then the monster will disappear when killed.

So perhaps the differences in pcontent code between DS1 and DS2 is in DS1 pcontent is generated when the monster populates the game world while in DS2 pcontent is generated upon its death? Possibly for optimization reasons?

@iryan: As you have experienced DS2 usually treats a pcontent list just in the moment when the actor dies or when a container is opened - and not when the actor/container is created.
This is the default procedure I think (see components.gas, most probably not to generate loot possibly never spewed out) and may be different to DS1.
So if not set yet, retry it once with 'create_pcontent_on_drop = false' which should generate the items already when the actor/container is created.

Moreover, if the equipment piece/template have variations ensure there's a leading '#' in front the template name then.

Just defining the template name without variations works the best. Sometimes otherwise (about 10-20% of the time) the monster ends up with no weapons which can look strange, depending which monster it is.

This will keep me busy for a week or so, randomizing the weapon wielding monsters and hopefully those that can wear armor as well (skeletons, bandits, pirates, etc). Only thing is is_pcontent_allowed = false; has to be avoided to allow the equipment to appear on the monsters.

I had to try this out if this approach here also could work for items with 'is_pcontent_allowed = false' (and without leading '#'). Will the item be ignored just because of [pcontent] and the item is not part of it!?

Edit:
I've made a short test with an NPC. It seems it can work without the '#' as well, most important seems to be that 'create_pcontent_on_drop' is disabled.

	create_pcontent_on_drop = false;
	[pcontent]
	{
		[oneof*]
		{
			chance = 1.0;
			es_feet = amr_bot_ftr_leather;
			es_feet = amr_bot_cmg_apprentice;
			es_feet = amr_bot_nmg_tribal;
			es_feet = amr_bot_rng_explorer;
		}
	}

	create_pcontent_on_drop = false;
	[pcontent]
	{
		[oneof*]
		{
			[all*]
			{
				chance = 1.0;
				es_forearms = amr_glv_tutdryad;
				es_feet = amr_bot_tutdryad;
			}
			[all*]
			{
				chance = 1.0;
				es_forearms = amr_glv_ftr_cstlsoldier;
				es_feet = amr_bot_ftr_cstlsoldier;
			}
		}
	}

However another thing to remind, if items are generated at the creation of the monster, what happens then in SE2 when you (re)load a region?

Scenario: SE2 loads a monster, monster creats boots, and then you save the region the SE2 *possibly* saves the boots for the boot slot.
Assumed they get saved for the equip slot, where do the new/second boots go when the monster gets loaded again in another SE2 session?
For example, if one would save a region 20x times, would the monster drop 19 boots because all surplus went to il_main?
That's perhaps an issue to check first.

would think if one is to have more than 1 glove or boot to appear on a character that the chance should not be 1.0 (100%) if one has 4 items then the chance should be .25 (25%)