[Sky]Adding Quests to Mage College; Support Thread

[Marthgun]

Herro,

I was playing through skyrim and came to the mages college in winterhold and remembered how bare the quest line was. It was depressing, so I am now going to add about 20 quests to it. We shall see how far I get.

I am making this thread for moral and technical support, and also to seek some tips from fellow modders.

The Plan:

Add about 10-15 NPC's to the college.

Create about 20 moderate to long questlines.

Learn, fail and fail again.

I am watching tutorials, I have no questions for now. If you have any tips to start me off, I would be grateful to hear them.

Thank you.

[Marthgun]

Oh hai marthgun, I do have a few tips for you!

1. When trying to setup notepad++ for skyrim, it will fail on multiple levels. The Creationkit.com tutorial is fail. click on the discussion tab to see why. So you should use Sublime Text 2 so you don't waste 3 hours trying to figure out why your scripts cant compile and why the papyrus text isn't supported.

2. Just use the complier in the CK, b/c you are a newb and there is no advantage except confusion.

3. Reverse engineer the vanilla quests to figure out how they script everything, how they use aliases, how they setup scenes. This may seem very obvious, but i didn't think of it at all until it was pointed out on a youtube video.

4. Get very comfortable with the CK, you'll be spending your every waking day and thought in there.

[WillieSea]

1-2. I use notepad (not ++) to edit and save my scripts. I then close that and right-click on the script in the Papyrus list, and compile it. Its always been what I recommend.

3. You can take a look at the beginners papyrus thread I created here, it will show you exactly how to write your first script and attach properties.

4. Darkrider has some good tutorials to get you comfortable with the CK. It is rather addictive to people who like to 'build' things. I have been addicted since the Morrowind construction set was released around 2002.

[lonewolfe10]

Would be interested to see where you get with this. I have heard a lot of talk about the same thing over the quest line for the companions too. Good luck with it.

[EpF]

3. Reverse engineer the vanilla quests to figure out how they script everything, how they use aliases, how they setup scenes. This may seem very obvious, but i didn't think of it at all until it was pointed out on a youtube video.

How do you get at the source of a vanilla script? I've been wondering about that, as there are no \source\ scripts in the .bsa...

Great idea, by the way - I played through this questline recently again, and I liked it better knowing what to expect. There's some interesting stuff in there, but it really suffers from lack of logic and depth, and the sense that you're being hurried towards a shallow gratification - Yay! I'm the Archmage! Next! And the college itself is depressingly bare and no-one does anything apart from wander around. The "students" have no more interaction with the "tutors" after Tolfdir's Warding lesson either. It would be great to have more every-day-type interaction with the college and its tutors that made you actually use your magic skills and gain some college-specific results from doing so. At the moment, one of the only reasons to go there for anything other than role-playing reasons is to buy the damn spells!

Also, the college needs a kitchen, unless they're all fruitarians...

[Marthgun]

hahahahha i completely forgot about this thread.

 

yes, its alive and ticking.  I have created about 9 interiors so far and written 5 of the quests.  I have alot of the dialogue written and recently learned scripting, so I would guess I have about another 7-8 months till completion.