[[Complete] [OB] Book Texture]

Okie dokie, that should be easy. I'll whip something up for you. Is there a particular book mesh that you want?

[[Complete] [OB] Book Texture]

Basically, you just want a book that looks like the one above?

Does it need to be exact down to the positions of the imperfections or will somewhat similar do? Or would you like a copy + paste + cleanup of the above?

The red parts should be reddish like above, but the black parts should be a deep blue, is that right?

[A Day Of Celebration]

Wow, awesome! Watching it was like watching the evolution of F1 cars from the 50's to the 80's. Even though some of them are 50 years old, they sound like they mean business!

[New "Legal" threat on internet!]

Another piece of scumware. Us folk who use the Internet regularly are aware of such scams, but I feel bad for the occasional users who might fall for it. If you know anyone who has made the payment, urge them to call the police. While they might not be able to recover the money (criminals use layers upon layers of financial transactions to hide their actions), it will at least help authorities somewhere to build up a case.

[What do you look for in a quest mod?]

WIIFM - "What's in it for me?"

There was once a writer who said that to get audience attention, you have to address the question in the reader's head - "What's in it for me?" Saving a damsel in distress or recovering a McGuffin is all well and good, but after the quest, nothing has changed for the player or the character. Even if the quest was rip-roaring fun, there's nothing to motivate the player to start it.

For small quests, the quest reward is usually the carrot. To make the carrot as large as possible, this reward has to be desirable, lasting and balanced. Glenvar Castle used a very nice Castle as the reward, and is something that the player will use for a long time but didn't turn them into the king of the world or somesuch. Anduril Reforged gave a weapon that was pleasant to use, had powers that were useful in dungeons (glowing light) and would level with the player.

For larger quests though, one carrot isn't enough, Through story-telling, you have to find ways to make the WIIFM factor bigger and bigger until the player feels that getting the quest completed becomes the most important thing in the world to him/her.

I'll use Knights of the Nine: Revelation as an example of a large quest. All of this is huge spoiler material.

Part of the purpose of the description, trailer and advertising for KOTN:R was to dangle an important carrot in front of the player - Crusader's Relics upgrades.

When they download the mod, their expectations is that they'd fetch a few McGuffins and BAM! Power Up! Indeed, the early stages of the questline are fairly typical fetch quests that feed that expectation.

Motivation for the player.

1. Cool new itamz
   
2. Maybe some fun adventures (this is a weak motivation as there are many good adventure mods to choose from)
   

Just as the player is about to get a bite of the carrot, Gareth screws the player over and steals the Crusader's Relics. Instead of providing the anticipated gratification of a power-up, the mod just multiplied the WIIFM factor:

1. I want my Relics back!
   
2. I still want those cool new itamz!
   
3. I want to kick that SOB Gareth's arse!
   

So the player tries to apprehend Gareth and instead gets thrown into the First Era. Later, Gareth tries to change history by paralysing Pelinal, allowing Umaril to win (which threatens the player's existence). And he kills off an NPC that the player has probably become rather attached to. AND the player is stuck 4,000 years in the past. The motivation to get those Relic upgrades originally promised has been fulfilled, but the player is now desperate to recover everything that was taken away. Towards the end of the questline, the motivations for the player will be something like the following:

1. I need to get back to the future!
   
2. Cyrodiil is royally screwed up! I've got to save the Empire!
   
3. Me and the Knights of the Nine are hunted criminals. This is bad good!
   
4. That SOB Gareth is SOOOO gonna pay for stealing and destroying my Crusader's Relics.
   
5. That SOB Gareth is SOOOO gonna pay for murdering Naomi.
   
6. That SOB Gareth is SOOOO gonna pay for trying to change the course of history.
   
7. Some cool new itamz would be nice.
   

Importantly, there has to be some successes along the way, otherwise the questline becomes a demotivating string of failures. In KOTN:R, the relics are recovered and visibly upgraded fairly early, a new world is presented to the player to explore, and he takes part in some famous events in history. But closing off a motivation must not occur before new motivations have been set up and established.

Other notes:

I feel that voice acting is important. It is an annoying, fidgety step that theoretically adds very little to the mod. However, it creates the perception that this is a quality mod where the modder has stopped at nothing to make it as complete as possible.

My $0.02.

[Unofficial Hearthfire Discussion Thread]

I wouldn't worry too much Meo., the very first part of a "making babies" mod already came out about 3 seconds after Skyrim was released. Someone is sure to expand on that and extend it to its logical conclusion.

Mixing races would be... um a morbid curiosity.

[Unofficial Hearthfire Discussion Thread]

I'm actually looking forward to it, even though I know we can easily whip any house desired in the CK. I guess the fact that it's an official DLC "legitimises" the house unlike a house mod that can be seen as over-extravagant or a cheat.

What will be interesting is the way it will change house modding - will modders focus more on additional components for houses? Retextures? Clutter? Or will Hearthfire fail to replace a well designed CK made house?

[How to make an ambient sound loop]

Here's another idea - why not just drag and drop the sound object into the render window? That way it won't need any scripting.

[Graphics Card Comparison]

I look up Tom's Hardware's Graphics Card Heirarchy whenever comparing graphics cards:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html

The list is updated monthly, so do a Google Search for the latest one if the one linked is out of date.

The Intel Mobile Series 4 chipset comes with the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500M HD. Looking at the chart above, it will provide roughly the same performance as a top end GeForce 3 (2001) or a low end GeForce 7xxx series (2007) except that it doesn't support DirectX 9.

[The Happy Birthday Thread #7]

Happy Birthday Dollparts!

[Hello Everyone :)]

Hello windclan, good to see you here. Looking forward to seeing your WIP thread.

[Drunkard's Tale]

A couple of years ago, I was finishing off Anduril Reforged when I posted in the Beth forums asking for beta testers. Khetts came along and suggested I check out the BTA Guild at TESA. And that's how I first found out about this place.

[How can I track what spells are cast on an activator by script?]

You can use a couple of OnMagicEffectHit blocks on the activator. Example

scn Whatever


BEGIN ONMAGICEFFECTHIT LISH    ; LISH is the effect code for shock shield


if ( GetStage MyQuest == 30 )

    SetStage MyQuest 40

endif


END


BEGIN ONMAGICEFFECTHIT SHDG    ; SHDG is the effect code for shock damage


if ( GetStage MyQuest == 40 )

    SetStage MyQuest 50

endif


END

Note that this block does not differentiate between touch and ranged effects. If it is mission critical that only a ranged effect should update the quest, there is a rather complex, indirect way of doing it involving getting the reference of every missile launched from the player... I'll have to dig it up if you really need it.

[[OB] Search: Tool to automatically optimize the texture path in Nif files]

PyFFI can do some of that for you, but it's not quite a one-click process. You can optimise a nif from the context menu in Windows Explorer. It only does one file at a time, though you can highlight a whole bunch of files at once if you want. (Not too many as it opens a Window for each one.)

[Hello from MEEEEEE!]

Hello jamochawoke. Good to see you here.

[The Happy Birthday Thread 6]

Thanks for the birthday wishes everyone. 's all round!

[GetPOS function]

Edit: Ignore me - posted in wrong section.

[Artist wanted]

Animated meshes can have more than one animation group and scripting could be used to play a particular animation. For example, the gates you see in ruined fortresses have an "open" and "close" animation group. The same can be done for animated textures.

[Artist wanted]

My understanding is that you want the poster to slowly transform in front of the player? Something like how the writing started appearing on the One Ring after Gandalf threw it in the fire? If that is the case, I think an animated texture would be the best way to make it, rather than using a script to overlay multiple layers. I've never created one, but I'd probably begin by analysing the mesh for a torch flame in NifSkope and see if I can resize it and swap in my own images instead of the images of the flames.

If I've misunderstood what you want to do, perhaps some rough sketches showing how your poster would look at various key frames would help any prospective artists here.

[Permissions Request]

Of course, go for it.

[LOD updating in existing worldspace]

One more tip - if you supply DistantLOD files for objects, don't flag them "read only" to protect them - they will crash TES4LODGen.

[LOD updating in existing worldspace]

I'm back. Yes, landscape LOD files work fine inside a BSA (unlike object LOD files that seem to require being unpacked). If you're replacing parts of Tamriel, you'll need archived invalidation of course.

The tutorial that I followed previously was this one. I was hit with the dreaded black landscape bug and I had to download and use the python script to get the distant landscape to work.

[LOD updating in existing worldspace]

I'm in China ATM with only my iPhone so gotta keep it brief (and I can't look up my previous work right now). I recall generating lod land with the cs and fixing the textures with a python script. Each lod mesh represents one quad and I discarded the quads that were unchanged from vanilla Tamriel.

Will be back on Monday if you need more details.

[LOD updating in existing worldspace]

Just keep in mind that there's two types of LOD... LOD Objects and LOD Land. LOD objects are things like trees and buildings and easy to generate with TES4LODGen. LOD land is the actual mountain scenery that you see in the background... messing with it opens up a big can of worms so read a tutorial or three before playing around with it.

This screenshot shows a LOD experiment that I conducted a while ago and you can see the difference between LOD objects and LOD land.

[Planet Elder Scrolls (PES) Going Offline]

To me - no big loss. Because of their association with IGN, I stopped using them when the Fileplanet debacle started. Even without that, their file management was a hassle for files over 25 MB.