Lanceor

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.)

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.

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.

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 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:

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.

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.

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>

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

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.

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.

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

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).

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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

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.