syscrusher

My mistake. It seemed to be kind of a meta-topic. Given my recent history of forum posts, I conclude that my brain's organizational patterns must be dissimilar to the ones on TESA. Apologies for being a problem child; I'm not trying to be difficult. At least I should get my project thread into the right place, since the site docs clearly indicate where that should be.

Never mind on this one -- by making a custom sluice in Blender, instead of piecing together vanilla meshes in the CS, I was able to make it so the vanilla waterfall object looks fine.

I'm leading a team working on a large town/quest mod that we plan to release in early October; work started last November. I'm interested in posting a WIPz thread for discussion and status updates (in the appropriate forum section, of course, not this section...this is a "metathread"). The question is, how soon is too soon? Should I wait until I have a public beta ready, or would people be interested earlier than that? Right now, all I'm really ready to share is some screen shots. I've got a few already in the gallery, but could release more. On the plus side, having a thread would allow interested parties to follow the mod progress and/or volunteer as team members. On the minus side, too early would risk cluttering the forum with what is now basically vaporware on everyone's system except mine. So...what's the community etiquette standard for this? Thanks! Syscrusher

Apologies for that; I saw other REQz threads here and assumed incorrectly that it was okay. Thanks for the correction.

Hello, all I hate to have to ask, but since I can't seem to get my arms around animating from Blender yet, I need to request what I hope will be a really easy tweak to an existing mesh, by someone who has 3D Studio (or who is better at Blender than I am!). The mesh in question is landscape/landscapewaterverttop.nif, and what I need is to reproportion it so I can use it for the water over a mill wheel. Specifically, I need to narrow the upstream (horizontal) portion so that it is the same width as the vertical part, and I need to significantly (probably about 4X) increase the bend radius about the Y axis where the water goes over the edge of the fall. I am a little dubious of being able to do this in Nifskope because of the way its node hierarchy is set up, but I'll give that a try if no one has time to help me do it "the right way". If it would help, I can import the mesh into Blender and make an example with the proportions I need. I just can't seem to get the animation to happen after I do that, but it would show the desired shape. If someone would be willing to take a crack at this, I can offer a mention in my mod's credits in return for your assistance. Thanks for considering the request. Syscrusher

Cool. Make sure you have version 1.1 and not 1.0. I made a lot of improvements to the meshes. Syscrusher

My current mod has two really large AR-type levels in it, and it occurs to me that maybe we could break those up by rooms to rearrange them into what you need. It's not exactly what you were looking for, though I do have one section that would work perfectly as your dorm area. My suggestion would be that I sit tight and see if someone responds that they'll take on your project as a specific effort, but keep my pieces-parts as a fallback option if you don't get any takers with the exact request in mind. Syscrusher

If the Clutterers' Guild would like to include my Inkle Looms, they are released now and pretty well tested. Just let me know with a PM. Syscrusher

I just used Texture Replacer to refactor my resource directories, with well over 1,000 meshes affected. That tool is AWESOME! As a Linux command-line geek, I can say that graphical UIs may be *easier* for doing a thing once, but you can't beat the command line for being *efficient* at doing a thing hundreds of times.

Welcome. You'll find this is a very supportive and welcoming community here. Syscrusher

I do not expect it to change over time, but it actually does matter which block I use. The reason I'm changing is that I realized that with a dozen or more of these things in my cell, having them all do their detection on the same initial load might make that load a bit slow. The OnActivate breaks those detection loops into smaller pieces, and has the bonus of not doing the calculation at all for any that the player happens never to use.

If you want to see a really interesting expression parsing algorithm, btw, do a Google search for "Dijkstra shunting-yard algorithm".

Their syntax stack probably tries to do a POP operation when it hits the "else" keyword, but without the PUSH from a preceding "if" keyword they would get a stack underflow. It should be an error, but they may simply have coded it to ignore the POP on an empty stack. I am not in my modding environment right now, so can't test this, but it may be that similar code blocks would also compile. It's also possible that they didn't compile this for release in the CS, but rather may have stored all the scripts in some sort of version control system or repository, then sent them through a batch compile system. The CS is great for us modders doing a couple dozen at a time, but it's not how I'd approach the final-release packaging of hundreds of scripts at once. If my stack theory is correct, it's also possible that the "begin" keyword is a stack PUSH, and the unmatched "else" is a POP. In that case, the code before the "else" would execute unconditionally but the code after "else" may have been ignored and possibly not even scanned by the compiler. It would be interesting to see if this is the way it behaves in the game. Writing language compilers is *hard*; I've done it professionally in a healthcare insurance app with an app-specific syntax. The folks at Bethesda, or their subcontractors, had a really tough challenge to make even this rather simplistic language work with the raw speed it does, across three very different hardware platforms. Interesting easter egg find. :-)

I currently run it with each OnLoad block, but I think I'm going to change that behavior. I am finding that my algorithm is pretty efficient, and what I may do instead is run it OnActivate but then cache the result. At first blush, this sounds less efficient, but there are a number of these in the cell, and most of the time the PC will not activate more than one or two of them in a given visit to that cell. If I use OnLoad, all of them do the calc each time the cell loads. If I do OnActivate, only one can possibly run at a time, and it will only run once per cell visit. Find the guy in this picture who used to write industrial controller software.... :-)

Thanks for this thread. I am facing exactly the same issue, and read exactly the same background documentation, and was wrestling with exactly the same question. The custom race solution will work nicely for my principal NPCs who need full custom dialog.