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vometia
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I've noticed that plugins have already started to appear, but in lieu of Creation Kit appearing, I guess they must be using a user-made tool to put them together. Anybody know what? It seems that TESVEdit hasn't been released yet and any other information seems to have passed me by. While I'm at it, if anyone knows of anything else that's useful or just fun to play with, please say so! :)

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They're using FNVEdit, which isn't something I'd recommend doing since it DOES NOT have all of the proper record definitions for Skyrim. This sort of thing happened initially with FO3 too and ended up biting a lot of folks in the ass once the GECK came out. I guess nobody has the slightest bit of patience as far as cobbling mods together.

Texture and sound replacers are about all that's safe to do right now.

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I'm eager to see the new tools, but on the other hand.... Bethesda had a team of top-notch designers working on great dungeons and landscapes and quests for five years. I figure there's just an outside chance (!) that maybe they did better teamwork in five years than I can do all by myself in a week. ;) I'm going to play for a while, let the tools emerge and mature.

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It's quite scary that people are using FNVedit. :o I did use it to have a look at the master file, which it opened with some difficulty; main difference is that the text data is now stored separately, and it remains to be seen whether or not that's a good thing. I'm assuming they've done it for the purposes of localisation: I'd hoped to be able to do a UK-localised version but the strings data is in some sort of binary format, so it'll be a time-consuming job if there's no sort of dump/reload feature I can make use of so I can employ my favourite text editor.

As regards teamwork, my experience of the user interface is not in favour of that argument! :lol: God it's abysmal. I don't know what're the chances of Bethesda fixing it, so I just hope Darn et al are sufficiently motivated to learn the assorted vagaries of Flash...

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@Vometia: String externalization is very common practice in software development, and your assumption that it is for localization purposes is almost certainly correct, IMO.

The binary format is probably to support embedded B+ tree indexing or some similar rapid-lookup process, and may also have been needed to support multibyte character sets.

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I wouldn't have thought they'd be indexed as such as it probably just loads the whole lot on startup, much like the plugins; though it will need the string's reference ID to be coded in there somewhere, and I'd hope they do properly support UTF-8 too! I've been surprised that they haven't had at least some sort of centralised text repository before now, it must've been a major headache for translators to have the textual data strewn around all over the place, so it's nice to see; provided it isn't too hard to make changes and additions, that is. Depending on how it's implemented, it may involve more effort for casual modders...

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There're three files altogether; DLSTRINGS seems to be the most straightforward, with a bunch of binary data (possibly containing stuff like the IDs and offsets), then followed by the string data itself in a sort of HTML/BBCODEesque hybrid, which will be how they do extended characters and so on (actually I prefer this to using UTF-8) which are separated by five bytes of data, probably a zero-terminator and at a guess, the other four bytes may be the length of the following string by the look of it, though I haven't actually taken the time to verify that.

The two other files, ILSTRINGS and STRINGS appear to just be binary data, so I've absolutely no idea. The prefix "IL" when compared to the "DL" of the previous file could suggest some sort of indexing, or it could possibly be a repository of images since many of those also need to be localised e.g. road signs etc. But that's entirely unfounded speculation on my part!

Edit: I tell a lie: had I paged through it a little further (or just used the "strings" command!) I'd have found that the ILSTRINGS file also contains the same sort of text data and seems to be dialogue, whereas DLSTRINGS would appear to be books and stuff. STRINGS seems to be general descriptions, placenames, items and so on.

Edited by vometia
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  • 2 weeks later...

Yep, early alpha quality but at least the BAIN tab works and you can manage saves and screenshot with it. That's all we need it to do at the moment. Bashed Patch support will come soon I'm sure, but there's little point right now with no mods out.

That stuff with the string data makes me wonder if we're going to get stuck having to maintain weird things like that with our own mods as well.

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A bit late to the party, but I wanted to chime in about plugins - right now it is easily possible to make them with TESSnip. However, due to the database-y nature of TESSnip, it's best to only use it for adjusting stats and settings or to add new records that are duplicated from existing records.

I forget where I copied this snippet from, but here:

It's possible to mod Skyrim without the use of the Creation Kit, which still has no announced release date.

You just need TESsnip, which comes with the Fallout Mod Manager. I used the New Vegas version of FOMM/TESsnip.

Open any Fallout New Vegas plugin (maybe Fallout 3 plugins work too), and delete all GRUPs. Then edit the file header: select TES4, doubleclick HEDR. Change the file version to 0,94 (make sure to type a comma, not a dot). Doubleclick MAST, change it to Skyrim.esm (Or you just skip all this and use an existing Skyrim plugin as a base). You can put your name into CNAM if you like. Save the plugin to a new file (i like to call it blank.esp, it's the base for all future plugins)

Now you can load Skyrim.esm into TESsnip and copy some stuff to your blank file. I don't know if creating new GRUPs from scratch works, i just copied whole GRUPs over to the blank file and then deleted the records that i didn't wanna change.

This works, I've done it a few times to adjust game settings and things like that. Just be conservative, and don't muck with records that have a wildly different structure than their FONV counterparts. :thumbup:

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I was a little concerned when one of the online TESsnip-for-Skyrim tutorials suggested to just pick a random FormID for newly-created items. The odds of a collision are low, but probably not zero. Depends on how Skyrim manages its mod ID numbers, I think.

I assume it means within your own plugin, in which case there wouldn't be a risk of an unintentional override: should be safe enough, provided you don't prefix it with the numerical ID of one of its masters...

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And now we have preliminary Nifskope support.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention that; been playing around with it for a couple of days. Even tried to get it to import a mesh to and from Blender by mucking about with the file's version numbers; kind of worked with the import (though only a bit), export looked like it'd worked as far as Nifskope was concerned, but rather predictably didn't translate into anything useful in the game. Still, progress!

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So the Creation Kit has been delayed until January (at least, probably). Perhaps I'm being unduly pessimistic, but I do worry about the effects that the delay may have on modding efforts: I was left with the (perhaps erroneous) impression that the delay in releasing the GECK had a detrimental effect on the longer-term prospects of FO3's modding endeavours, and that wasn't anything like as long. Personally I'll probably be happy enough with a tentative TES5Edit and Blender import/export scripts, but the lack of the convenience of using CK to browse stuff will be irritating. I guess it's another casualty of the immovable 11th November release date.

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It's better just to make pieces of one big tool-chain. For example seperate creation from generation tools, front-end (GUI) from back-end (file-formats). Then it's not that ambitious. I started programming with the CBash lately and I think if people (programmers) realize how quick they can do the really complex stuff ... a "custom" CS is not that pipe-dream if you build on the existing frameworks.

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