Darkness Hollows Chat Thread! - SPOILERS INSIDE!

[WhoGuru]

Welcome to the Darkness Hollows Chat Thread. Here you may discuss the mod, the levels, etc... Because the Title is spoilered, you don't have to spoiler your posts. You may also post those screenies you've been stocking up but can't show off yet because of spoilers!

Please, if you post screens of the end rewards of Darkness Hollows, put Spoiler tags on them for those in here looking for help that haven't finished.

However, until the voting for Darkness Hollows is finished at 11:59pm EST on November 12, 2010, you may NOT reveal which level is yours if you're one of the modders.

A warning, if you have not played the mod, have not finished the mod and don't want to know about what happens ahead of time, well then you should not have clicked on a topic CLEARLY marked SPOILERS then eh? No complaining if you're own curiosity ruins something for you. You've been warned.

Play nice and carry on! We're on the Honor System here folks.

[JulianSull]

When I got to Lord Thatchmoon he had no greeting =/

[Hanaisse]

You don't need to speak to him, he should have attacked you.

What's your last quest update?

[DarkRider]

There's a whole convo with Lord Thatchmoon actually, but you need to have updated the quest properly and to do so you need to READ the Captain's journal (acquired in the grotto tower before level III) and the Chief Surgeon's notes (acquired in the exam room before Level VI). These two characters have the keys for those levels so if you found the keys, you must have found the notes, If you don't read them, the quest doesn't update properly and Thatchmoon says nothing.

Looks like I'll have to add something somewhere to FORCE people to read them. Aren't you folks curious at all what they say?

[Hanaisse]

I read them, but didn't get quest updates. He attacked me when I approached him.

[WhoGuru]

Hana with you it was a matter of not having the keys as well I think. There are, as I understand it, quest updates when you read the journal and note and when you unlock those two doors with the keys.

[WillieSea]

Been playing a bit, in the castle now. How do I know what 'entry' I am in? Is there a number on a door somewhere? Its so dark its hard to see anything. I am guessing I am in the first entry, with a bunch of necromancers and liches?

[darkstone]

Theres a large Roman Numeral on the doors,that signifies the start of the next "entry".

[Arthmoor]

Well since this looks like the place to post questions/issues of a spoiler nature, I found one that's got me stuck cold.

In entry #10, Halls of Torment, there's this well. In this well, down one of the passage, lies a "strange skull". Upon picking it up, the room fills with water. I presume I am supposed to drown. Not happening. I'm running through with my Argonian. Yep, can't drown a lizard! So... um... any ideas? Or am I gonna need to open the CS and fix this somehow?

[darkstone]

I had major problems here too.I ended up activating the skull and running back out the alcove quickly.The room that had the skull starts to sink and stops after a few seconds.The only way I could proceed was to jump in the water where the room was and I managed to clip through the wall somehow into the area behind the iron bars.If I stayed in the sinking room I just drowned

[Johnn123]

Theres a large Roman Numeral on the doors,that signifies the start of the next "entry".

Is there actually? I never noticed that!

I like the entry where you have to go to the coffin at the end, but theres the collision that you cant go through, it took me forever to get through! So many dead necromancers and skellies

[Arthmoor]

I had major problems here too.I ended up activating the skull and running back out the alcove quickly.The room that had the skull starts to sink and stops after a few seconds.The only way I could proceed was to jump in the water where the room was and I managed to clip through the wall somehow into the area behind the iron bars.If I stayed in the sinking room I just drowned

Well at least as an Argonian I didn't have to drown

Ended up having to check the CS, looked at the script for it, and ended up having to do this with the console up:

click the wall

set tgmtest to 1

close console

wait

After a bit, it lowers and you can get back out. I always try and do the minimum necessary to escape a botched script, and that worked.

Unfortunately the journey ends once more as I have an impassable CTD in level 11, through the door just past the blood ogre. No time to do squat, it CTDs almost immediately after going through the door.

[WillieSea]

Theres a large Roman Numeral on the doors,that signifies the start of the next "entry".

Well, I had this problem last year too. So this year I decided to edit the 'numbers' to give them a glow.

[darkstone]

I had about 6 or 7 ctds on that level too,I`m now out of the level but I`m at a stop too with some strange game behaviour that has just started.It`s like some of the scripts from Level 11 have`nt terminated themselves.

[DarkRider]

Well, I had this problem last year too. So this year I decided to edit the 'numbers' to give them a glow.

Cool, maybe you should share them with the group I use a torch so never had trouble seeing the numbers

The issues with Level X and X! are persisting I see, we've tried really hard to fix everything there. I'll nudge Wind and see if we can't get it sorted for the next update here.

[Arthmoor]

Uh, yeah, glowing numerals would have helped, honestly I hadn't even realized I'd gone through the first two levels until I saw the number for #3 while my torch was still out.

The level 10 bug looks like an easy fix. It checks to see if player health has dropped to a certain level before resuming, all it needs is an additional check there to see if the player is Argonian, and continue if that's the case. The author simply overlooked that possibility.

The level 11 one is going to be tough to find, it's 100% certain to be a script, I turned off AI processing before entering the section and it crashed. Went back with scripts off, no crash, but obviously of very little value to leave things in that state.

[WillieSea]

How would you like me to share them? I cannot attach a file to this thread.

[Edit] I sent them to you in a PM Rider.

[DarkRider]

Brilliant Will thanks, I'll update them in the next update.

[Khettienna]

I had the same issue with level 10 as reported. Not an Argonian, but definitely handy with the waterbreathing spells, to the same detriment.

I had some issues with 11 as well. No crashing, but the Experimenter HAS NO GREETING, and it "felt" like scripts weren't firing properly. After the big startle in the lab, there was a lot of blind walking around, hoping to bang my head on a collisionbox or trigzone I'd missed, because events seemed to have just halted. I fumbled through it with some bad combination of a ring of nighteye I console'd myself, and ~TCL'ing (might have meant I missed something crucial, but by the time I used it, even being able to see everything clearly I saw no other way to proceed). When I got to the last room, the last encounter seemed to work fine - but the countdown didn't stop when it logically should have, and even after I'd left the level, the amulet continued to force-equip itself until I dropped it.

Not related to any levels - activating the dead horse outside the castle (as if to loot) triggers the messagebox about the spectral horse.

I am really impressed with this mod. Fabulous work, contestants and tech team!

[WillieSea]

Yeah, I wondered about the dead horse incorpral message when it was really solid. I was looting 'everything' that was not nailed down!

[EDIT] There is a bloody door that is very dark in entry 1. Its like its missing the normal map or something.

[DarkRider]

The Stym is vastly run through a series of trigger boxes which won't fire if you TCL through one leaving you missing something, yeah

I'm not getting any ctds in the Stym, I have added a check to the final door to remove that necklace and stop all Stym scripts from running past that point. I've run through it 4 times now and no crash after the blood ogre, any suggestions on what could cause it for some but not all? Are the ctds all at that one spot or multiple?

Yeah, I wondered about the dead horse incorpral message when it was really solid. I was looting 'everything' that was not nailed down!

[EDIT] There is a bloody door that is very dark in entry 1. Its like its missing the normal map or something.

Alright I fixed the horse, bloody pick-thieves looting a poor dead horse anyway.

All the bloody doors in entry one are vanilla, don't see how one could be missing a normal, they all reflect light for me in the CS.

[Khettienna]

Alright I fixed the horse, bloody pick-thieves looting a poor dead horse anyway.

Hey, it could have been a quest clue!

The Stym is vastly run through a series of trigger boxes which won't fire if you TCL through one leaving you missing something, yeah

That was pretty late-on though. The Experimenter didn't have a greeting right off the bat; I gave this the benefit of the doubt initially, because perhaps he was just there for ambiance and not chat. This part: "open the door and then run. When the room lights on fire just keep moving and the fireball will probably miss or not do enough damage to kill you." never actually happened. It was only after I gave up trying to trigger it properly that I ~TCL'd through, though at that point I figured any further mishaps could be considered my own fault.

Ah well, you've got things handled, I shush now and go play more.

[Arthmoor]

The CTD is 100% consistent, always right as I go through the door right after the blood ogre fight. I can't get more than 2 steps from the door on the other side before it dies. If I use TSCR in console to suspend all script processing before going through, I can walk to wherever I want, but obviously none of the triggers can fire that way either. So it's definitely a script bug.

I even tried playing a hunch and recompiled every last script, one by one, hoping maybe it would correct a bad reference induced by merging but no such luck there either. However that did reveal a few logic errors in some scripts that probably should get fixed. TES4Edit flags one script in the ESP who's source code has been deleted, something the CS would not let you do. It can't be the problem though because it's for a previous area of the mod I've already been through.

EDIT: Well, I was afraid of this. The crash is the result of a mod conflict somewhere. Such an awful process to track down but at least it's not a CTD being induced by this mod.

Edited November 6, 2010 by Arthmoor

[WhoGuru]

Huh. I've been through the Stym a dozen times or more. (testing) and never had a single crash at any point during testing or fixing, and there was some of that. Is anyone else experiencing the constant CTD in this spot that Arthmoor is? IF we can find more people with this issue it will make it easier to narrow the field.

[DarkRider]

EDIT: Well, I was afraid of this. The crash is the result of a mod conflict somewhere. Such an awful process to track down but at least it's not a CTD being induced by this mod.

Guess I can stop chasing the tail on this one then. Let me know if you track the conflict so I can note it in the readme.