[Hello everyone]

Hello Zib! Even if you're new to TES, you're still an experienced modder in other games.

Anyway, all introductions require a cookie or three: here ya go!

[Retexturing To Scale]

Here's something that's probably worth experimenting with:

In Nifskope, in the render screen, Right-Click on the bit whose texture you're working on. Select Texture and then Edit UV. You'll see what a UV map is, what it looks like and how your flat texture ends up on a 3D object.

Now with NifSkope's UV editor, you can actually drag the vertices around and preview how the changes look. Control-Z will undo any changes that you make. There are some controls that will help:

• 
  
  
• You can draw a box to select all vertices in that box.
  
• You can right-click a selected vertex and...
  
  • Select Connected to select all the vertices in the current "section" (I don't know the correct term)
    
  • Scale it to increase or decrease the size of the selected vertices
    
  • Rotate the selected vertices
    
  • Scale only X by -1 to mirror the selected vertices
    
  • Scale only Y by -1 to flip the selected vertices
    

Experiment to see what works for you.

[Community Picture Thread # 5]

This ought to be just enough overkill - once I overclock it of course.

(Sorry for the poor quality of the pic - my iPhone was feeling rather depressed today.)

[The Lurker's Lair #36]

/me makes mental note to install two floppy drives on new computer...

[Air or water cooled?]

Settled, liquid helium it is then.

On a more serious note, the simplicity and "tried-and-testedness" of an air cooled rig is in the lead - hopefully a high quality positive pressure case and filters (Lian Li does look good) will keep cleaning to a minimum.

Overclocking? It's a bit like increasing a car's horsepower - no amount of horsepower is ever enough. Therefore I'm not going to even try for maximum overclockability since I know that whatever overclock I get, I'll wish I had more. As for quietness, it's probably not a concern given the 24/7 traffic and air conditioning noise here.

I have one question that would pretty much rule out water cooling:

Is practical or even possible to have a water cooled computer that requires no airflow? I know I can water cool the CPU, GPU's and voltage regulator (and Northbridge?), but will the heat generated by the hard drives, RAM and other components become problematic in a sealed system? (I'm assuming that I can mount the power supply unit outside the case.)

[Air or water cooled?]

It's October, the month before Skyrim's release, which mean's it's time for me to get my new rig!

Specs will be something like the September Performance PC in Tom's Hardware System Builder Marathon - hopefully overkill for Skyrim and any games that will be released in the next couple of years.

Living in the tropics, in a concrete jungle a short distance from one of China's manufacturing hubs, the air here is hot, humid and very dusty. The heat and dust is so bad that every 2 months or so, my current PC starts blue-screening due to thermal overload. The graphics card fares slightly better (maybe because I haven't overclocked it) but because of its closed construction, it is extremely difficult to clean.

So to address this, the options for the next PC are...

Water cooling - A fully sealed system that no dust can get into.

This looked ideal, seemingly requiring low maintenance while providing better cooling than an air cooled system. However, I've read that they need as much or more maintenance as air cooled systems. The benchmark tests seem to indicate that water cooling performs no better than the very best air coolers which I found rather odd. Has anyone had first hand experience with water cooling?

Air Cooling - A very high quality case with big ventilation fan that ensures only filtered air gets into the computer.

For a very high quality case and air filter, how effective is it at ensuring enough air reaches the heat sinks while keeping dust out? Provided I clean the filter as needed, can I hope to run it for many years without having to clean the insides?

I'd love to hear experiences from those who've had to deal with dirty environments.

[looking for help to make a Char mod to myself]

Hello Canadus, welcome to TESA - have a cookie!

It looks like most of the modders here are busy working on their own projects which is why no-one has responded.

Since everyone's occupied and you've made it this far, why not give modding a go? There's some very good tutorials in the Oblivion School in the Enclave.

What you requested up there is basically a birthsign change. To make it exactly how you described it will require scripting which would make it intermediate difficulty, but if you don't mind using Absorb Magicka type spells instead, it is actually quite easy.

Good luck on your request, and happy modding if you decide to give it a try.

[Reactive Narrating]

For those who are wondering, I found a gameplay video that illustrates the concept:

Narrating games is definitely an interesting concept. It's already widely used in sports games though at this point, I'm not sure if it will function well in other games. Then again, maybe I'm not used to the idea yet and narration in games is something will take off over the next few years.

The trend of games is that they are becoming more immersive and cinema-like, giving players a "you are there" feeling. With the exception of some hardboiled detective stories, frequent narration is not commonly used in cinema. Even then, it is used sparingly as bookends to "chapters" in the story. This suggests to me that Spielberg, Scorsese, Cameron etc. don't consider it to be a helpful storytelling aid.

Assuming that we think that it will aid storytelling, there are some technical limitations:

• 
  
  
• The narration starts to get repetitive and annoying (even in that short 10 minute video)
  
• Every conceivable action the player could do would require a prerecorded passage and some sort of trigger to play the voice.
  
• The context of the narration would change depending on the character. A noble warrior would do a quest quite differently from a chocolate elf with BBB installed.
  

Overall, I think it might be a helpful add-on for games where the number of actions is limited (sports games, linear dungeon crawls) but it would "de-immersify" an open-ended game like Oblivion unless used very sparingly. Then again, I would love for someone to prove me wrong.

[Hello!!!!!!!!!!!!]

Hello Demoncleaner! Good timing for you to show up - some of the demons in the shoutbox look like they need a bath.

It's always good to meet one of the old school modders who blazed the modding trail at a time when nobody really knew how to mod.

And as is customary:

[Was your mod stolen?]

PDF's are a good idea - you can include images and formatting into the ReadMe to boot. I suspect that those sites would just delete the ReadMe from the package though. Anyway, there's a number of free PDF creators around - CutePDF is an ad-free one that I happen to use but I'm sure others have their favourites as well.

[Was your mod stolen?]

Good idea DarkWarrior.

Since sites like Gmod.com are editing the readme files to remove permission information, I was thinking an extra step would be to include that info in an ingame "ReadMe" or "Credits" book. That would force them to at least open up the mod in the CS, find the book (with a deliberately obscure EditorID) and edit it themselves.

[Stinking Books]

You can make the DDS file any size you want, but only 444 x 650 can be displayed in-game. Unlike HTML, Oblivion doesn't resize the image - it simply displays the top-left section if you specify a size smaller than the image itself.

So what you could do is create the image at 444 x 650 and then add black space at the bottom and right hand side to increase the canvas size to 512x1024. In the book itself though, you would still use:

<img src="am7books\am7ifcatimpbed.dds" width=444 height=650>

[Stinking Books]

I spotted a couple of things on this page that could be messing up your images:

The largest Image size possible is 444x650 pixels. Go over this and the book will crash when opened in game.

Just make sure that all THREE sizes are created (as placed in the Menus, Menus80, and Menus50 directories).

[Getting an NPC to attack Creature with a Staff]

I'd probably remove all weapons from the NPC and force-equip a staff on him. After that, use the StartCombat ActorID function to make him start fighting the cat. Note that he may dodge around for a bit instead of firing straight away.

Instead of shooting real fireballs and whatnot, the staff should have a scripted effect that stops combat as soon as the cat has been hit. And as a failsafe, I'd script the stopcombat to occur automatically 10 seconds after the fight starts, just in case the NPC does something stupid like picking up and equipping a sword or fleeing from the cat .

That's one way I can think of, there may be others.

[PlaceAtMe for NPC Summoning Spell]

The player would still have to enter the holding cell for the references to disappear, even after the holding cell is reset. Don't worry, though, I'll create a hidden holding area in the Market District, and reset the market district each time the summon spell expires.

[PlaceAtMe for NPC Summoning Spell]

Yep, I know of the workaround but I was concerned about the player not entering the cell.

To delete an actor, you can move them to an interior cell the player is not in, kill them and reset the cell. When the player next enters the cell, all dead actors in the cell are deleted. Note this requires the player to actually enter the cell before actors in it will be deleted, which can restrict usefulness. recent tests seem to show that living actors are removed as well.

Hmmm... I suppose I could move them to a hidden area in somewhere like the IC Market District that the player will surely enter at some stage in the near future... thanks for the idea!

[PlaceAtMe for NPC Summoning Spell]

Bad idea?

My understanding that once creatures summoned this way are killed, they will be deleted when the cell resets. The problem I can think of is that although the "reset flag" is raised after three days (or manually by script), the creature references will not actually be removed until the player next visits the cell.

This means that for a cell that is visited only once, the summoned creature will forever be bloating the player's save file. Is this correct?

The reason I'd prefer not use MoveTo is that each NPC in an area would have to be a unique base object summoning a unique persistent creature (either that or I have to do some really fancy scripting).

[[REQz] Adjusting greaves in Blender *RESOLVED*]

A big "thank you" to Hana for fixing up the greaves!

[Increasing weapon speed]

Most elegant would be the OBSE SetWeaponSpeed function which does precisely what you want.

The only way I can think of doing without OBSE would be to unequip the item, remove the item, add the faster item and re-equip it. In addition to the extreme level of clunkiness with this method, weapon health would also be reset to 100% each time.

[The future of modding, and the future of the Nexus]

Yep, I was in that situation during the dotcom era.

What I do know is that web design started out as a hobby for me. I used to love creating websites back in the late 90's as it was a form of creative expression that could be done from home with minimal equipment. As soon as I started doing it for money though, it all changed and I no longer enjoyed it. Instead of putting my heart and creativity into websites, I had to create them the way customers wanted them leading to all sorts of bad designs that I'm ashamed to claim credit for.

At the end of the day though, getting food on the table is the top priority, so if modding gives sellable skills, then it opens up another option for us. Some of us will become and stay professional modders, some of us will dabble with paid modding work only to return it to hobby status (like my experience with web design) and some of us will refuse to get paid for it (like me now).

[Location location location]

If avoiding conflicts is your top priority, consider creating a new worldspace. Players can access this worldspace via boat or a cave (like with Pale Pass, one of my favourite vanilla quests). Silt striders would also work though I think a teleporter would be a bit lame.

[The future of modding, and the future of the Nexus]

did RST, Nehrim, Elsweyr and other similar, large scale mods, or even smaller mods needed any monetary incentive to be made? We all know how they turned out (RST isn't out yet but we know how it will turn out). We don't need to go very far: I started modding because I like the idea of creating something for myself and ultimately sharing it with people who play the same game. Whether they like it or not, that's a matter of personal taste.

I think EP hit the nail on the head there. We enjoy modding. It's a hobby for us. We use modding to express our creativity. Regardless of how the modding world changes, it's still a hobby for us.

If history is a good predictor of the future, I see many professional "jobs" that are done for free by hobbyists around the world. Think of things like sports, painting/drawing, photography, web design, fixing cars, flying aeroplanes etc. etc. - when these became commercial, it's true that many made the transition from "amateur" to "professional", yet the hobbyists certainly didn't disappear altogether.

If anything, commercialisation has helped to legitimise these professions and there are now thousands of classes for learning sports or web design or photography. I think there will be ups and downs, and politics of course, but in the long run, there will still be plenty of free mods.

[My mod crashed people's games!]

Good to hear Ginny.

And Arthmoor, I'll take up your suggestion of using PyFFI since nifs can be so pedantic at times.

[The future of modding, and the future of the Nexus]

I've reposted this here for those of us who don't have access to the Mod Authors forum at Nexus.

The recent spate with Gmod has opened up a few avenues of conversation in the various threads talking about the future of modding, including paying for mods and paying mod authors for their mods. I've decided to write this thread to make sure you're aware of the direction in which every developer, publisher and modding website is pushing things and where game modding will be in the next couple of years. This is going to happen, big websites are talking with the major game developers and publishers behind closed doors about this very issue very regularly. In light of this, I'm going to share with you a copy of my conversation with Axel (the Nexus coder) on this matter and where we want to position the Nexus for the future.

It's going to be a long read, so get a cup of tea or something, maybe grab a cushion, and I hope it will be of interest to you. At the end I'd love to hear what you think about this issue. It's a big issue that is going to change modding communities as we know them. Money. Changes. Everything.

So a bit of a background to the situation. A website, GMod, have come along and shared their plans for the modding community in the future. This plan is the plan of every major file site on the internet right now (Curse, ZAM, IGN/GameSpy, ModDB/Desura, PCGamer (yes, the magazine), File Front, etc..the list goes on), so I'll just detail the main points. Be aware this isn't the plan of just GMod but all the sites I listed, and they're working with the game developers and publishers themselves, so there's no legal issue here. There are two ways things will go:

• Sites that get to work exclusively with game developers will create an "app store" for modders to upload their mods to and earn money on. Mod users will have to pay for the mods they want. The developers will take a cut of the profits, as too will the people running the app store, and the mod authors will see some of the money too, based on total sales of the mods they put in the store. Whether or not this will make free-modding impossible by limiting modding to a specific client (so you can only mod your game through the app store) awaits to be seen, but, in all likelihood this is likely.
  
• Sites that do not get to work exclusively with game developers, or operate for games that are more niche, will gear towards making a points system like the one Curse currently employs. Mod authors get "points" for every mod that is installed through the website's client software and at the end of the month mod authors will receive income from a "prize pool" of funds, generated through a cut of the premium subscriptions (normally about 20%), based on the total percentage of points that mod author has.
  

Those are the two options that will be happening in all the modding communities you know, and the big players like Valve and Blizzard have already implemented these systems for TF2 and Starcraft 2. It's only a matter of time before Bethesda, EA, etc. jump on-board too.

So what's the big deal? Surely mod authors making money off their hard work would be great!? Well, think a little more about this. I commented on this last night in the GMod poll thread:

As a community I believe we're already quite closed minded and covetous. There's a lot of modders out there that treat their work like it's a state secret and won't share techniques or assets with others. That is, of course, their prerogative, but the community is a lesser place because of this. If you add money to the modding community then a huge majority of mod authors are going to be like this. There won't be sharing of assets or techniques unless there's some monetary incentive for the person who owns the assets you want to use. And to be fair, I completely understand that, why should someone be allowed to use your work in their own and take 100% of all the proceeds? Want some help with a scripting problem on the forums? It's not going to happen, because if you release a good mod then you're taking money off someone else and diluting the prize pool. "Yeah, I'll help you out if you give me 25% of any money you earn off your mods". It's an extremely slippery slope that leads to 100% greed, and 0% community.

So with this in mind, how do I proceed. I've got to try and steer the Nexus in some direction either straight in to the eye of the storm that's already crowded with multi-multi-million dollar companies, or away from and around it. I can see the storm, it's on the horizon, which way do I go?

I had a little chat with Axel today on the topic, keeping him abreast of the situation, and I'm going to copy the chat in here for you to read. It covers most of the stuff already written but shows you how we think and talk. Bear in mind Axel is Italian, but his English is pretty damn good. I'm going to TL;DR this chat at the bottom so if you can't be bothered to read it, just skip the quote block.

TL;DR:

• I inform Axel of the future direction of modding already explained in this thread
  
• We discuss the pitfalls and problems with this future
  
• We agree that the Nexus should remain a completely free-to-use, free-to-mod environment
  
• Mod authors will not be paid for their mods on the Nexus any time soon
  
• Instead, we're going to aim to have a donation system for mod users to donate to their favourite mod authors
  
• We do not want mod authors asking for donations or offering "added content" or "the finished product" to only those people who donate to them
  
• People who donate to mod users can choose to have a special title, like "Donater" or "Community contributor" or similar that everyone will see
  

As far as we are concerned, we like the Nexus as it is right now. We want mods to be free for all, and we want an open community where mod authors share their work and techniques with others. I believe that, with a lot of big players moving their sites towards the methods described above, a niche will form that will provide a safe-haven for free mods, and mod authors who want to be a part of a free and open community, rather than a cut-throat money-driven community. This is where I want to position the Nexus sites.

What are your thoughts on this? What do you think about the direction modding is taking within the gaming industry? What do you think the Nexus should do about it?

It's great to be able to have these forums, and a private area away from the main forums, where I can discuss things with you mod authors.

[My mod crashed people's games!]

There's also a lot of NiTriStrips that are not parented to the scene root - this will definitely cause crashes.

I've cleaned up the parenting and texture paths and sent the mesh via PM. See if it still crashes.