nuska

Tedious, labor-heavy time consuming technical work = not many people willing to put their time into it. Those who know how to do it are usually so advanced they're preoccupied with a thousand other things higher in priority.

Life changes, basically. Some just lose interest and move on to something else. Graduation, work, families and changing life priorities. Making good mods takes a lot of time.

Shame OCOv2 got hit and I hope no one got infected by the trojan, but as an upside it gave me an opportunity to slip in a few updates I've been sitting on.

My educated estimate: It takes 4-5 years on average to develop a large scale AAA console/PC game, Skyrim came out in 2011, the next Fallout has probably gone into preproduction around that time with a small team, rest of Bethesda Game Studios staff worked on Skyrim DLC until Dragonborn release (last year) and have now most likely moved to work fulltime on Fallout. It's probably been in full-scale production for around a year and a half now and if my hunch is right it'll release in 1,5 years. The next TES game likely goes into preproduction when the Fallout release is near. Add another 3-4 years to that and you have TES VI's rough release time.

I'm also very curious as to where ahctapknot got their hands on a copy of the tool :)

On a somewhat tangential note, that's a lot of unused texture space on your map, you'd be well off cropping the texture into a small 256x512 square encompassing just the actual hair part and rearranging the UVs to fit the new location on the texture map :) It helps keep your work optimized and efficient and doesn't waste as much performance that way.

Yup, it's intentional. The readme and description would be a mile long and nobody would bother to get to the end of it if I'd described every individual change I did from the original game - OCOv2's scope was plainly that huge :D Long story short I looked at how the races were established in Morrowind and Skyrim and adapted to that. I'm particularly a Dunmer fangirl and wanted to really bring out their cultural traits like the face paintings and scarifications.

Yeah, this is unfortunately a major pie-in-the-sky thing and would be far from being as simple as hosting a server, plugging it into Oblivion and calling it a day. This would take a team of professional software developers experienced in client and server programming who would also be familiar with the Gamebryo engine, as well as dedicated servers, and would take major changes to Oblivion's source code. Pair that up with the game being as old as it is, having a very limited userbase these days and there being no compensation for the professional devs which would be needed for this, it's just not going to happen.

I'm using Blockhead for version 2 of Oblivion Character Overhaul and it's excellent. There aren't any mods that I know of that support it at this point but it's easy to set up yourself if you have meshes and textures ready.

Without getting into the debate I do have to note that anyone using that particular symbol on anything should be fully aware of the possible interpretations and connotations that will be drawn from it. That's not rocket science. It has so much heavy weight to it that I honestly don't get why you need to add it on anything at all unless you're prepared for the inevitable controversy that will come of it. It's so tainted that no amount of explanation about spirituality from other cultures will help, especially when it's used in the context of war thematics as is the case here.

Not all older mods have ESP content that clashes with game updates so that would be REALLY tricky to screen for. I had a situation like this with a race mod though that I just plainly didn't have time to bring up to date and ended up just hiding it so it wouldn't screw things up for any new users.

Oblivion heads can be easily modified in 3ds Max, actually, I do it a lot and it's just importing, moving vertices around and exporting. There's a more coherent explanation of the steps here, not going to rewrite it all. For getting gender specific heads you no longer need to split the characters into separate races, the OBSE-powered Blockhead plugin lets you have different head models and textures for both male and female characters. You can find it with a quick Nexus search. The gist of it is that you add _m and _f for male and female heads, respectively, to the model names so when the game searches for headhuman.nif, it also checks whether there's a headhuman_m and headhuman_f file. If those are present, it replaces the characters' head models with those instead of the unisex one on the fly.

It's possible, but I'd start off with just modeling basics and software operation before jumping into any ambitious projects. It takes a while to wrap your head around all the parts of the process of making something from scratch and getting it to work ingame. If you don't commit to needing to get a finished piece done right away you'll have an easier time just playing around, seeing how things work and scrapping stuff when something breaks. Speaking out of a lot of experience.

If you don't outright know what you specifically need 3ds Max for then stick to Blender, as it handles all importing and exporting and modeling for free. There are many reasons to buy a copy / get a student license of Max but if you're new to 3D work in general it's best to get your feet wet with Blender, Max is way too costly of a single purchase if you're only starting out. For average use the only real difference is the interface and keys you operate it with. Autodesk products also have their own limitations and shortcomings that can make them poor longterm investments for some users. I've been using both Max and Maya professionally and aside from certain morphing functions and symmetrical editing tools Blender does everything Autodesk programs do. It all really depends on what you want to do. For texturing I use Zbrush to sculpt normal maps and 3Dcoat and Photoshop for diffuse and specular work.