Macromancy 3.5 - Size-Changing Magic

Macromancy 3.5 is an update to Revylrie's Macromancy 3 - a spell pack that adds 7 new Alteration spells that allow you to change the size of yourself or others, as well as scrolls and staffs for these spells.

Macromancy 3.5 is a continuation of the original Macromancy 2 project by Vanax8991 (based on the work of harbinger86) and improved upon in Revylrie's Macromancy 3, where each spell has its own version of the spell, scripts, spell effects and inventory art received some basic fixes, corresponding staves and scrolls were created for some spells, and Nazira - a character in the first macro - once again became the revamped trainer and vendor for said project. Given Skyrim's rather limited support for dynamically changing character sizes, it's an impressive undertaking indeed - but I couldn't help but notice that buried within the insurmountable limitations are some bugs that still can and need to be fixed. Iterations of my mod aim to do just that.

Features from previous versions (3.2)

Six apprentice levels of alter spells (absorb size, give size, grow, restore size, restore size other, shrink) and one adept level of alter spells (mass absorb size), including spell size and level list distribution.

Two smaller powers (Dragon Soul Consume, Size Consume) become available upon reaching a certain maximum size threshold.

Four staves (absorb size, give size, mass absorb size, restore size other) and three scrolls (restore size, mass absorb size, restore size other), also have horizontal list distribution.

Vendor and expert Alteration trainer named Nazira, based in Frozen Hearth, Winterhold.

The Macromancy 3 MOD page provides more detailed information on the spells and their effects, as do their in-game instructions.

Macroeconomic improvements 3.5

Spell outlines, staves and scrolls should each have their object bounds set correctly.

The dysfunctional Mod configuration menu has been removed - even though it works as expected, it's not necessary in any way.

Consuming Dragon Souls/Consuming Sizes no longer requires you to have a Dragon Soul of up to 10/max size to be able to use them once you unlock them; the conditions have been changed and the math has been reworked so it only requires one Dragon Soul or a max size of 2 - anyway, the effect cannot be triggered without these minimum amounts.

These scripts have been optimized - for example, functions such as SetActorValue had an alias (SetAV) and due to the inefficiencies of the Skyrim scripting engine it went through the extra step of calling its parent function (and therefore took slightly longer to execute), so instances of "SetAV" etc. have been replaced by their native (and therefore slightly faster) counterparts. Where feasible, extraneous If and While statements have also been merged or removed.

The current and maximum sizes are now represented by a single actor value - Fame. One feature of actor values ​​that previous authors overlooked is that each can have a current and maximum size; that is, there is no need for two separate actor values ​​to track an actor's current and maximum sizes. Therefore, Macromancy 3.5 no longer uses Infamy actor values, and scripts and magic effects have changed accordingly.

As a result, the script has been rewritten to only use SetActorValue, DamageActorValue and RestoreActorValue to modify the current and maximum sizes; this prevents the actor from bypassing the minimum size cap (0.25) or failing to reach its maximum size due to rounding errors caused by incorrect use of ModActorValue and ForceActorValue - none of these functions are required for Macromancy's spell effects. Other functions (with the help of some clever math) can also do the job without unintended side effects.

Speaking of clever math, the magic resistance formulas have been rewritten to scale - this includes the magic resistance formula used to determine your cast's increase, shrinking the cast. The previous equation was weird and could lead to a bug where absorbing size and …