Customizable Magic Progression

Intro/Description

Hi. This mod is aimed at addressing one of Oblivion's most glaring flaws, in my opinion: how you have to spam the ever-loving fuck out of spells in order to get skill increases, and how the whole system seems to be skewed in favor of allowing you to advance by crafting custom 1-3 MP spells that you just continually spam while going about your business. I find this system both incredibly tedious and slow. It occurred to me that this could be fixed just by making the spell experience gain magicka-cost based, while providing little gain for cheap skills and lot of gain for expensive skills.

So, to address this, I sought out other user's scripts, hoping to find something to my liking. I found Fundament, which provides a lot of configurability but is really confusing, has a much broader scope, and doesn't allow me to configure what I actually want to. I also found Natural Magic Skills Improvement, which has the right idea, but uses his own hardcoded formula that I didn't want, in addition to having some really befuddling source code.

So I just made my own mod. With this mod, such concerns should by and large be put to rest, because now you can make your own damned formula, and set your own variables, or don't and just use what I packaged for you. Do as you please. I've exposed both the variables and the algorithm in their own .ini files, and tried to explain them the best I could, so you may edit to your heart's content.

The Default Algorithm

Before explaining how this mod calculates XP gains by default, let's look at oblivion's default algorithm:

Yeah, that's it. The XP you gain is equal to whatever that school of magic's XP gain is coded as. They do this so some skills advance faster than others; Conjuration gains ten times as much experience as Restoration, and so it levels ten times faster. I prefer to think of it as:

XPvalue schoolMult

Where by default Oblivion just always has a XPvalue of exactly 1 for every single spell cast. By default, this mod doesn't touch the schoolMult at all. Whatever vanilla oblivion has it as, or whatever other mods you're using changed it to, that's what this mod works off of (though if you prefer, you may now edit the included MagickaXPbases.ini file to overwrite them and set them to whatever you like). Instead, it calculates a new XPvalue based on your magicka and several other variables, and then multiplies it by the schoolMult, as shown above.

Now, how is XPvalue calculated? Well, you can configure it however you like (and then some), but by default I have it calculated as:

(((spellCost xpPerMana) + baseXP) ^ exponentialDecay) + offset

Where spellCost is your currently equipped spell's magicka cost, and all the other four are just customizabl