So, as part of a personal huge mod I want to start working on (tentatively called STOP – skyrim total overhaul project – possibly to be released frog knows when if ever I am able to finish it), changing among many other things most spells/spell effects and adding new ones to my taste, I started delving into the parts of the magic effects screen dealing with the ‘art’ elements – which as I understand also have a very relevant impact on practical gameplay, as the settings of the ‘art’ object selected here determines the type and size of the effect (projectile,cone etc and/or with/without explosion), it’s speed, etc, and MANY other properties NOT dealing at all with just simple visual representation.

After much pain, I believe I gained a minimal basic understanding of how this works, which I think might be useful for the community. I also have many questions, which I hope the community will help with. ?

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Enter the madness.

For ease of understanding (hah!) I will present two examples of relatively similar simple spells: incinerate and fireball.

Let’s start from the magic effects window.

- Incinerate (FireDamageFFAimed75) doesn’t have anything selected under the ‘explosion’ drop down menu. The effect has area=0 under the spellmaking section.
- Fireball (FireDamageFFAimedArea) does have an explosion selected, and has area=15 under the spellmaking section.

Fastforward to the projectiles these two effects refer to. Now starts the fun.

- Fireball’s projectile (FireBallProjectile01) doesn’t have the explosion box ticked (even though the effect does use an explosion). I guess this is because the magic effect already points itself to a specific explosion to apply.
- Incinerate’s projectile (FireBoltExpertProjectile01) DOES have the explosion box ticked, even though in the magic effects the explosion drop-down menu points to none (and the spell itself from an initial inspection has no need/use for one).

Moving to the relevant explosions (again, one referenced in the projectile but not in the effect, the other exactly the opposite):

- Fireball’s explosion (FireBallExp01) has knock down living actors –none selected (as expected since ingame the spell just damages enemies in the area of effect); it also has force=1.00 (huh???) damage=0.00 (again, huh???) plus some radius values that I have absolutely no idea how they relate to the actual ‘area=15’ of the magic effect.
- Incinerate’s explosion (ExplosionFireBoltExpert01) has ‘ignore los check’ ticked (why?), ‘knock down living actors – by formula’ (I guess this is the whole reason to attach the explosion to the effect, to knock down enemies under certain mysterious conditions – but why not use or make one of the various stagger-like effects and add it in the spell window as for many other spells?), force=7.00 (again, huh? Possibly related to the mysterious formula?), and radius/IS radius != 0 (??? even though this explosion is generated by a projectile of a magic effect with area=0).

And of course all of these have a sound level – even though in the magic effects tab there is a specific drop-down menu to determine the loudness of the effect


Conclusions (few) and Questions (many) – any help appreciated

1) a spell having an explosion or not and having an area of effect or not are totally independent things.
1a) explosions are NOT used to define the area of effect aspect of a magic effect (ie to determine which enemies are within the AOE of the effect)
1b) explosions make the check to see who they affect separately to the magic effect they are attached to, and apply their own ‘stuff’ (generally just visual effects, but not always) separately
1c) my head risks exploding even just thinking about the ‘spawn’ stuff
2) I have absolutely no clue as to the relationship between the force/damage/area settings of the explosion and the equivalents defined in the magic effect/spell (are they totally independent? Must they be the same (different unit measures FTW!)? – or what else?)
3) What’s the mysterious formula used under ‘knock down living actors – by formula’ ? (you have to love Bethesda with their total lack of documentation. And no, the wiki is not even close to being acceptable.)
4) What do the force and damage settings in the explosion tab do? And the range?
5) What are the sound level settings for? Is it just for the actual volume of the effect played in the pc speakers, or is it related to the in-game loudness of the spell (ie how it’s detected by npcs). And in the second case, how does it interact with the setting specified in the magic effect window?


I’m sure I missed a lot of unclear stuff that in the future will cause problems/headaches, all of this is just what I got from roughly one hour of mucking around in the ck …. Things are starting to look bleak.

1)Correct, the explosion has nothing to do with the magic effect and is only a visual unless it has it's own effects specified.
1a) again correct, the magic effect will apply to the area specified, not to the area affected by the exposion and there are many area spells that do not use explosions.
1b) yes
1c) Spawn Hazard is used for spells that continously damage anything in a target area, like a blizzard spell. They are again completely seperated and apply their own effects
2) No idea what explosion force is for, but it seems reasonable to assume it's for the stagger effect. It should be completely independent from anything you set on the MGEF. All the MGEF does is "spawn" the explosion, and that's it.
3 and 4 I do not know anything about
5) I am pretty sure this is only related to detection by NPCs. The sound you "hear" is only determined by the sound files set in the MGEF/Explosion. The sound level set in the explosion determines whether or not actors will react to a nearby explosion. Sound level on the MGEF determines whether or not actors will react to the effect starting on anything nearby. Explosions are not only used by spells, which is probably why they have their own setting.

2) Different unit measurements for radius vs area (radius of the explosion is measured in http://www.creationkit.com/Units and area of the magic effect is measured in feet).
3) No idea. If I had to guess, I'd say that they check for the same conditions as the spell they're attached to, except Incinerate has no conditions.
4) Force is havok (so the stagger effect). Damage is damage (so the health damage from the explosion, independent of spell damage). Radius is the range of the explosion (from how far away it can affect an actor, independent of magic effect's area). IS radius is the range of the image space (how far away from the explosion you have to be before you can't see the image space effects). Vertical offset mult... I have no idea.

Thanks for the help

the spawn option for explosions is a drop down menu from which you can choose any item, other things too maybe? its a long list

anyway whatever you choose from that drop down menu will pop up where ever the explosion hits.

I played around with the standing stone looking activator from beth's scripting tutorials.

I spent the evening playing with explosions, and here's some more info based on what Ive seen.

Vert Offset Multi works with Force, from what I can tell, and determines the number of units above or below the actual detonation location that Force originates from, which in turn affects the angle that affected objects in the blast radius appear to get "blown away" at. Setting it to a negative number (-100 for instance) causes objects to fly upwards, keeping it at zero or a positive number smashes them into the ground and slides them away.

Force itself appears to be equal to the number of force-pounds necessary to negate gravity on an object. Thus a Force of 10 might knock over a 10 lb statue, but barely staggers a 150-lb man, while a 150 force would knock him off his feet, and a 400 force would send him flying (upwards if VOM is negative.) Note that the actual weight of an object can be defined in both the nif file via Havok physics, or can be applied in some Forms by value - I dont know which value takes priority.

As others said, Explosion radius is in units, and magic spell radius is in feet. Giants, as I recall, are roughly 200 units tall and pcs are around 125-130, if that helps any. Most floor tiles are 512 or 1024 units square, although this can be hard to see depending on the texture used.

It appears that if the radius of the spell effect exceeds the radius of the attached explosion, the explosion force/damage radius is automatically expanded to the spell effect radius, but I'm not 100% sure of this. I need to test some more.

good to know. I'd suggest adding this to the wiki. where, i couldn't say, but it could be more helpful with in that more common arena.