The Lurker's Lair #37

[vometia]

I'm ashamed to say I have that album somewhere.

[DsoS]

Talking about monitors and stuff in the shouty, so I figured I'd share my monitor setup!

[vometia]

Figured I'd start a new play-through of Ego Draconis (well, DKS: but I still have the earlier version's files backed up, which turned out to be fortuitous) and being me, there's things that need to be fiddled about with. Because they're there.

I'd completely failed to get anywhere the last time I tried my hand at modding it, but a night's worth of insomnia to deal with seemed to give me added determination and I succeeded this time. Nothing special, just played with some of the outfits and did a spot of remeshing and retexturing; unsurprisingly, once you get past the oddness of the way it stores data (whose idea was it to keep dds files in nif format? By which I mean they don't just contain the file but actually replace the header data too) it's very similar to modding Oblivion since both are Gamebryo-based.

The main problem is that it doesn't have a huge modding community like TES, so tools are a bit scant and it's hard to find the latest versions: that's why it was fortunate I still had my Ego Draconis files as DKS changed the format which breaks a number of tools, though fortunately it seems quite happy to read the old file formats. Other bits that needed doing were debugging the Blender export script, which I thought was going to be hairy since I know nothing at all about Python, but fortunately the bugs were easy to find. The file format's still not correct, but easily enough solved by cutting and pasting the relevant bits into a donor file.

I think I'll view it as a challenge that I needed to try: altogether it's too much of a pain to do things like assemble the dds nifs by hand (couldn't find an import function, so I ended up having to use some Unix file-management tools) and rebuild an archive every time I wanted to try something since it apparently has no concept of TES's archive invalidation: and it seems the archive names are hard-coded, so no doing the equivalent of bunging my own bsa file in there.

At least I now know it can be done! Assuming I don't forget what I did.

[vometia]

Oh, bugger, nothing's ever easy, is it! Seems that stuff like e.g. armour and outfits aren't just defined by what it finds in the main nif directory, but they're also cached in the CharacterTemplates archive (I think: this is a guesswork by me, the .cat files are "kind of" nif format but not one NifSkope can figure out); so it's fine if your character is the first to use something and it loads properly, but if you're in an area where you've committed the fashion faux pas of wearing the same thing as someone else, whoever the game loads first gets to have their mesh loaded and reused by everyone else. And the player usually loads last, it seems. What's worse is that this only applies to meshes: textures are too big to be cached so any updates seem guaranteed to be used. Obviously not a good thing if the UV map changes.

Frustrating. The problem might be solvable... but I by someone else: it needs someone with a lot more knowledge of file formats than I possess. But as I mentioned, it was more an exercise in "can it be done?" than a serious modding attempt, so I guess I'll have to accept "almost" as a result!

Edit: ah, found a solution already: editing any matching .cat files with a text editor (yes I know! I'm using vim which preserves binary content though, except for the annoyance of adding a newline to the end of the file which needs to subsequently be removed) to change the filename referenced seems to have done the trick. Though I'm not entirely sure why since they still have the names of the individual meshes, but I figured that they might be used to determine what it wants rather than what it contains. But I don't really know what I'm doing and it might all go hideously wrong.

Edited September 21, 2012 by vometia

[Tigersong]

Torz, that's amazing. Bethesda really should hire fans to sing for Skyrim and hopefully TES Six.

[DsoS]

okay, a bit childish and immature, but still a OMG moment

[Khettienna]

okay, a bit childish and immature, but still a OMG moment

That is faaannntastic.

I am sick today, and muddy brains are no good for modding, so I resorted to mucking with Windows UI junk.

I wrote a batch script to shut down all non-essential services that I can run right before I start gaming, and another batch script to restart those services when I'm done. That's kind of cool. Now I can run more stuff in the background and don't have to be neurotic about it, because I can shut it all down with a hotkey press before loading up Skyrim.

I've always been annoyed that the Win 7 Start Menu button sticks out over the top of the taskbar when you use the smaller taskbar. I found a utility called "Start Orb Changer" by Kishan Bagaria at door2windows.com that would let me use a different image as my start button in hopes that I could find something that wouldn't stick out. The utility works beautifully, but I couldn't find any replacements that I liked that were small enough, so I mucked with a pretty one from Fiazi at deviantART to make it fit in my taskbar. Fiazi was also kind enough to send me a wallpaper I fell in love with that he used in one of his desktop screenshots.

My new desktop:

Up-close, new start button:

Hover Glow:

door2windows.com has a few other neat Windows toys that I played with, too. I tried a few Dreamscenes out, something I'd never done, and they were pretty, but not practical. I mean, I mostly only work in maximized windows, so the resource use just wasn't justified.

And then I made a few keyboard shortcuts for apps I use all the time, including one for Task Manager, because my brain keeps doing ctrl+alt+del to get Task Manager, which is... not efficient, let's say, in Win 7.

I dunno why I put this stuff off.

[DsoS]

Really nice Khett

I use Display Fusion for my Desktop stuff, but its generally more than what most need, or want. I paid for mine but I love the program... However I don't think that I can change the Start Menu button though. But I don't notice that it sticks out anymore though

[Khettienna]

Oh, I had been using UltraMon for all of that stuff. Although, it doesn't do window sticking, which I would really like for all the old school apps that don't have it built-in, so maybe it's time for a change.

[DsoS]

---Moved content to new thread---

Hope doing this is okay.... I don't see a reason to have two copies of the same stuff on the forum.

Edited September 30, 2012 by DsoS

[lilith]

Yay Ds! He's a cool looking dude! I think they're awesome pets.

[donnato]

Ok..recent Desktop featuring Willies screen...

http://

[Arion]

Guess I ought to post one of mine.. Dsktop is a picture I took last year up in the Great Smoky Mountains early in the fall.

[Ekanar]

http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/gallery/image/22849-ektop/

[darkstone]

[DsoS]

Dark

[lilith]

That's just too funny darkstone!

[donnato]

Anyone else here a Cyriak fan ..

..and ya like creepy? Best on full screen. ....

...and for you kitty lovers...

...and this one is just...trippy ...

... and pointless fun ...

....and this is just...whut? ..

...and I want this for my screen saver

...and..nightmare city ...

...and I like this just because ...

...and just because this needs to be saved...

These are all best viewed full screen.

Edited November 21, 2012 by donnato

[DsoS]

Very, ummm, interesting videos Don

A website that I just found and thought it was well made... give it time to load and play around a bit

[InsanitySorrow]

It's pretty fancy, I like that the loading bar is interactive, shame it takes so long to load

[donnato]

Just a little fun in Crysis..

[lilith]

Yay! It really is a pretty game.

[donnato]

It really is Lilith...pics don`t do it justice. thanks.

[InsanitySorrow]

What's it like Don?, I've heard it's pretty good, I've yet to play it though

[donnato]

I really like it IS. Great maps and the gameplay isn`t too hard to get used to. I am unfamiliar with the story line so I think I`ll go back and start with earlier versions.