vaultguy

Well, I finished the mod and put it on the Nexus. I've attempted to release it on TESA as well but I see we're still having upload problems for large files. http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/45214/

Finally managed to get regional sound overhauls to work properly. I'm adding this via a separate .esp for the sake of compatibility (I am pretty sure that Natural Environments will conflict and need some extensive patching work) Blackwood before and after (don't mind the sudden fog. Oblivion just likes to randomize weather each time you reload the game apparently) Here's how it's going to work: Vanilla Oblivion just uses short generic wind loops universally across all regions (with some separate intermittent sounds that are region specific mostly) which is baked into the weather. What I've done here is create duplicate weather conditions that are specific to Blackwood and assigned them to all Blackwood subregions. So these Blackwood weathers use their own 1 minute long soundscapes. One for daytime, one for nighttime. I think what I'll do next is alter the default weather sounds and make that suited for the several temperate, open regions like the area surrounding the Imperial City, the Colovian Highlands, The West Weald and Nibenay Basin. Then I'll replace more specialized areas like the Jerall Mountains with their own soundscape. I've also implemented a unique soundscape for the Deadlands. It sounds quite... hellish

Here's the deal... I want to add new, seamlessly looping ambient sounds to various regions throughout the worldspace which will always play when you are in that region. To start off, I made a sound for use in The Gold Coast. So I created the sound, made it loop, made sure it plays at every time of the day... Then I went into the Region editor, added the sound to the sound list for every Gold Coast subregion, gave it a 100% chance to play and made sure all weather conditions are checked. But when I wander around the coast ingame, I can't hear the sound at all. What gives?

Hello there. You may know me from such smash hits as Immersive Sounds for Skyrim and, well, nothing else really. Anyway, I've decided to focus my efforts on Oblivion now and create a comprehensive reimagining of the sound experience. I'm doing weapons, magic, monsters, footsteps, ambiance, doors, etc etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn5uFFulzYI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baCynszAy74 I'm putting an extra focus on creature sound this time. I thought they were mostly fine in Skyrim so I didn't really touch them, but for Oblivion there are several I'm not really happy with, and I think there could be a lot more life to them. The skeleton sounds in the second video are meant to be an optional choice (the original skeleton sounds are still being spruced up a bit, with better footsteps and audible bone sounds when you damage and kill them) modeled after the Daggerfall skeletons. I've also redone wraith, ghost and zombie sounds which aren't shown in the videos. One of the issues I discovered is that the aggro/aware sounds don't really seem to play when monsters discover you and engage in combat (I think this is especially important to get that trademark shriek from the Daggerfall style skeletons). I was actually hoping I could get some help from seasoned Oblivion modders on that front, since I'm still very new to serious Oblivion modding and have no knowledge of scripting. I think these sounds could possibly triggered via rudimentary scripting somehow? There are some other sounds I would like to trigger as well like death sounds for wraiths and ghosts, which don't seem to actually play. I suspect these things shouldn't be too hard to accomplish. I managed to get someone to handwalk me through making a script in Skyrim that played unique swing sounds for power attacks, so I imagine this shouldn't be significantly different (nevermind the fact that Oblivion doesn't use Papyrus).

Are you going to do this stuff without touching the perk trees? That might be a good idea for the sake of compatibility. Some of them already have some of the first ideas you've pointed out like making damage and magic efficiency scale with your skill.

In Sound Descriptors there's a setting called Alternate, which assigns a substitute sound to be pre-loaded into memory before it loads up the actual sounds for the situation. This is why you sometimes hear the generic looting sound for potions instead of always hearing the potion looting sounds, for example. The odd thing about this setting is that you don't simply choose an alternate from a list in the sound descriptor you want affected by this... it's vice versa. You go to the substitute sound, and then assign it as an alternate from there to the other sound. Now we get to the problem here when I want to simply get rid of the alternate for some sounds, but I can't find any way to do it. Right now I'm using a very convoluted workaround where I just create a new Sound Descriptor with the same sound, and assign it as an alternate to its twin. This is actually preferable in some situations where a Descriptor uses multiple sound variants, and you can just use one of them for the alternate to save up some memory. But I don't feel the need to do this for absolutely everything.

Vicn has released some great, usable static/clutter resources. Including generic statues! http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/45636/?

There is a snap to piece. Shift + Q, click the desired static and the snap offset will be set relative to its placement. I use it quite a bit for statics I have to adjust with the snap off initially. I see what you mean with the graph paper. Couldn't I essentially make virtual graph paper with a grid floor texture spread out over the entire area? I'd just place it a teeny bit above the floor level to avoid Z fighting. The texture would need to be transparent too, of course... I made an alpha layer for my grid texture, but I don't know of any flat statics in Skyrim with transparency enabled. Is there maybe a way to enable it in NifSkope? This is what it looks like currently The grid/graph paper alignment may not work well for my current project though due to the nature of the statics I'm using... Relying mainly on the arched ceilings from Solitude, which appear to be slightly bigger than 512 and they also rely on thin "TraCon" pieces to close the gaps between them. I think 4 of these grid pieces make up a 512 area as shown below Sure would have loved to use alternative statics that are easier to work with, but there's really not many options out there for arched ceilings...

A big, big thank you for covering the part about Chunk Merge. I have no ambitions to start modeling myself, but this was still a tremendous help for solving an annoying problem I had... Wanted to refurbish Skyrim's icicles into stalacites for regular caves, and have them also placed upside down on the ground instead of just hanging from ceilings. A big problem was that the collision was all weird and you can simply walk through half of the mesh radius. After letting the project collect dust for months, today I finally looked at the mesh with collision visibility on in the Creation Kit and saw that it was essentially just a rectangle covering half the radius acting as a collision model. So I took a crapshot, deleted the CollisionObject part in NifSkope, then applied the .nif on itself in Chunk Merge. To my surprise it worked flawlessly! So once again, thanks.

Well good news for those who wanted isolated windows statics (without invisible collisions, that is ). I managed to separate a lot of window models just by deleting the surrounding groups in NifSkope. It was in fact quite easy and straightforward to do. Not all of them could be salvaged though, like the Riften windows. Nonetheless, 19 meshes is nothing to scoff at. http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/files/file/1577-skyrim-windows-resource-pack/

I am asking because I so often run into issues and stupid mistakes that may be so bad it may require me to scrap hours of work because of some misjudgement I made much earlier... Trying to create interiors right now using a hodgepodge of different styles of statics, from Solitude, Whiterun, Castle Dawnguard, etc etc. These statics are typically much more divided into smaller pieces than what you usually find among dungeon statics and the likes, they require much more precision in placement and I have to set my snap-to-grid to 16, or sometimes even at 8. Usually I end up with stupid errors down the line because I'm awful at measuring distances properly and may be off by just a few grids, then subsequent statics will be placed according to that inappropriate placement which can really ruin the symmetry. As silly as it sounds, I actually made a pink 128x128 grid texture which I applied to a standard floor mesh for measuring. At least it's helping somewhat. You'd think they would have put a visualized grid feature in the CK, but if there actually is one I have never heard of it. Hopefully there are some veteran house modders active here that can share some tips and techniques to avoid these headaches.

I didn't do any manual ID edits, if that's what you're asking. I got duplicate issues the first time since I had forgotten to remove some statics, but that doesn't seem related as the ones without duplicates still refused to recognize the new identical ones. Someone told me I should ask the Beyond Skyrim people at Dark Creations about this, since they work with common resource libraries shared by several people. So maybe I'll register over there and do that.

I would like to recommend the website GameTextures.com. It has a pack of free textures provided in the link. What's really cool about this site is how all textures are provided in a ready-to-use package, seamlessly tiled with diffuse, normal, height, specular and glow maps. For someone like me with only the most rudimentary texturing skills, this saves me a lot of time and I only have to worry about some minor edits and recolorings to make them fit for my mods. I only came for the free textures at first but their subscription fee was so low I decided to pay. This site is such a relief for a hobbyist such as myself. This post almost makes me sound like a spambot or something, lol...

And here it is http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/40190//? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETyBCfH1nE4 I'll see about getting this up on TES Alliance as well later.

Aye, that was the first one I did before I got the proper routines in. I was thinking of redoing it, so you're probably right.

Download here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rkrr3ylwb1ws93v/ismagic.zip This is just a hastily thrown together preview for feedback purposes. Just replacements with no .esp so far. It's part of a larger project where I'm overhauling many of Skyrim's sounds. Eventually I decided it would be better to split the project into different modules. I've been working on archery, melee weapons, world interaction (doors, looting, etc), footsteps, UI and of course magic. Magic is one that I feel needed the most attention. Skyrim's vanilla magic just sounds so thin and homogenous, most of it being little else than high frequency sizzling and crackling. It's also one of the hardest aspects to do sound for given its abstract nature. That's what I recall the sound guy saying in one of Skyrim's Making Of videos and he was definitely right. I'm also doing this as a learning experience since I'm very interested in sound design but have next to no experience with it. In particular with magic sounds I learned a lot of cool tricks on the way like EQ automation to shape the "swooshes". So instead of everything sounding like a frying pan I've tried to make the sounds meatier with a bunch of drones and such. More in line with what you'd expect from classic high fantasy magic. Each school of magic should also have its own set of drones to help set them apart more. Restoration for example has dissonant choirs which is pretty typical of "holy" magic sounds. For conjuration I used a lot of whispers and rhythmic gates (this is a very popular "modern" sound design trick which I think is blatantly overused, so I try to use it in moderation). While I was working on this I ran into some obstacles though. It's not something you really think about since the vanilla sounds all sound so alike, but there really isn't much coherence in where the different school sounds are assigned. All of the staple illusions spells like fear and fury use the firebolt sounds, for example. I haven't gotten around to remedy that yet. I plan on creating some new unique sounds for those spells, then I'll have change the assigned sounds for them in the Creation Kit. This will likely cause conflicts with popular gameplay mods like SkyRe though so I'll also have to make compatibility patches. In addition, most of the new sounds are in stereo but are still assigned as mono in the game, so I'll have to make some edits in the sound descriptors for them.

I knew about texture sets, but I had no idea about the NullTextureSet. But does that also remove the collision from the affected surface?

So I have this project which is using a bunch of custom statics and texture sets. I decided that I wanted to split these resources into a separate file which the main mod can depend on. I'm just not sure what the proper way of doing this would be and ran into some trouble when attempting to figure it out myself. Initially I opened the .esp in Tes5Edit, removed everything except the resources in question and saved a new .esp from that. Then I removed the resources from the main mod and saved that one. After that, I opened Wrye Bash to turn the resource .esp into a .esm. And finally, I opened Tes5Edit again and added the resource .esm as a new master for the mod. But when loading the mod with the master in the Creation Kit, I get errors when it tries to load the resources used and they're gone from the cells I placed them in. What am I supposed to do to make it actually work?

Was this part of the Telvanni Isles project? I really don't think custom-made gear as a carrot on a stick is necessary for a dungeon. What's important is the journey in itself. I think it's actually a better idea to reward the player with some custom power or spell (like when you complete the chaurus-infested lighthouse or the dwemer lexicon). That'd be more likely to be something people would actually use, rather than going through the whole thing as an unarmored mage only to get a set of heavy armor or a warhammer.

Alright, so from what I gather the graphics are Scaleform and stored in .gfx files, but they can theoretically be overridden by .swf equivalents. By the way, that site is an automated clone of the Bethesda forums meant to steal traffic for ad revenue.

I think I've already asked this on the Beth and the Nexus forums without getting much of a response, so I thought I'd try here. Basicly I'd just like to know where and how the UI graphics are stored, and what tools I'd need to edit them. Previous TES games just had loose bitmap images for the UI, so editing it was a pretty straightforward affair. For Skyrim though they have switched to a Flash-based system, and from what I know the graphics are now vectors. I'm thinking about stuff like the borders, cursors, icons etc. I really dislike Bethesda's blatant Apple look for the UI and want to change it to something more like a classic fantasy UI, with shiny metal ornaments. I have little to no experience with Flash/vector editing though, so I've no idea what I'm supposed to do or if it's even possible, since it seems no one else has attempted doing it so far.

Be warned that you're heading into a lot of work to make texture sources work in the game. They'll need to be tiled/aligned to UV maps appropriately, then you need to start working on normal maps, reflections etc to get the shine you're looking for. Consult the texturing tutorials on this site to get started.

Mainly the Solitude and Dragonsreach ones.