vometia

Similar things have happened in the real world and with much smaller places than Summerset Isle (e.g. the British Empire); a few crumbling alliances can leave the way wide open for someone to come along and impose their own rule. Which is one reason I dislike Ulfric, who appears to be using the situation for personal gain rather than for the long-term security of Skyrim. That and I don't like him much as a person...

A nice pair of earrings from my girlfriend, some cosmetics and nail polish, a stack of collectible enamelled Pratchett guild badges, chocolate, extra chocolate just in case, and a copy of Bastion from an old TESF friend. I'm rather happy with my haul. Some nice things mentioned here, especially The Witcher 2, Bioshock and the new Zed Leppelin album!

I'm glad this has been properly documented! Trying to work on the armour in Skyrim made me think that eating my own intestines would be a more enjoyable pastime. I was going to make a suggestion regarding the nifs, but given some of my esoteric habits I think it's probably best the way it is.

A friend up mine was up there too, she had a fantastic time. It was loud, apparently!

It's unlikely I'll be contributing as my perennial fatigue is still menacing me, but by way of random comment I'd like to see it get off the ground and hope the contest is a success.

Oh, bugger, nothing's ever easy, is it! Seems that stuff like e.g. armour and outfits aren't just defined by what it finds in the main nif directory, but they're also cached in the CharacterTemplates archive (I think: this is a guesswork by me, the .cat files are "kind of" nif format but not one NifSkope can figure out); so it's fine if your character is the first to use something and it loads properly, but if you're in an area where you've committed the fashion faux pas of wearing the same thing as someone else, whoever the game loads first gets to have their mesh loaded and reused by everyone else. And the player usually loads last, it seems. What's worse is that this only applies to meshes: textures are too big to be cached so any updates seem guaranteed to be used. Obviously not a good thing if the UV map changes. Frustrating. The problem might be solvable... but I by someone else: it needs someone with a lot more knowledge of file formats than I possess. But as I mentioned, it was more an exercise in "can it be done?" than a serious modding attempt, so I guess I'll have to accept "almost" as a result! Edit: ah, found a solution already: editing any matching .cat files with a text editor (yes I know! I'm using vim which preserves binary content though, except for the annoyance of adding a newline to the end of the file which needs to subsequently be removed) to change the filename referenced seems to have done the trick. Though I'm not entirely sure why since they still have the names of the individual meshes, but I figured that they might be used to determine what it wants rather than what it contains. But I don't really know what I'm doing and it might all go hideously wrong.

Figured I'd start a new play-through of Ego Draconis (well, DKS: but I still have the earlier version's files backed up, which turned out to be fortuitous) and being me, there's things that need to be fiddled about with. Because they're there. I'd completely failed to get anywhere the last time I tried my hand at modding it, but a night's worth of insomnia to deal with seemed to give me added determination and I succeeded this time. Nothing special, just played with some of the outfits and did a spot of remeshing and retexturing; unsurprisingly, once you get past the oddness of the way it stores data (whose idea was it to keep dds files in nif format? By which I mean they don't just contain the file but actually replace the header data too) it's very similar to modding Oblivion since both are Gamebryo-based. The main problem is that it doesn't have a huge modding community like TES, so tools are a bit scant and it's hard to find the latest versions: that's why it was fortunate I still had my Ego Draconis files as DKS changed the format which breaks a number of tools, though fortunately it seems quite happy to read the old file formats. Other bits that needed doing were debugging the Blender export script, which I thought was going to be hairy since I know nothing at all about Python, but fortunately the bugs were easy to find. The file format's still not correct, but easily enough solved by cutting and pasting the relevant bits into a donor file. I think I'll view it as a challenge that I needed to try: altogether it's too much of a pain to do things like assemble the dds nifs by hand (couldn't find an import function, so I ended up having to use some Unix file-management tools) and rebuild an archive every time I wanted to try something since it apparently has no concept of TES's archive invalidation: and it seems the archive names are hard-coded, so no doing the equivalent of bunging my own bsa file in there. At least I now know it can be done! Assuming I don't forget what I did.

Happy birthday, Khett!

I didn't know about your mod! If it's relevant, the mods I found for adding a bit of greenery to the landscape I dug up by searching for "green": perhaps you might consider sticking that in its title somewhere...?

I'm ashamed to say I have that album somewhere.

Hope the pie fairy visits everyone celebrating another year!