Eleyvie

Actually I think I'll be ready for an alpha-release soon. Crafting part of the mod already works, and Smithing skill progression is now completely different. Smithing skill is trained by tinkering - i.e. breaking down stuff "to see how it's made and what can be improved", while experience gain for normal activities is reduced to 5% of former value. In other words, player no longer can quickly get ultra-powerful equipment by grind-training Smithing - he needs stuff to break down, and stuff must be either bought (expensive), stolen (risky) or taken in battle (painful). I still need to do the re-balancing part though, and that's quite a bit of work. Elven equip is now tier-3 in Smithing instead of tier-2, while Dwemer equip became tier-4 (and one of possible prerequisites for Dragonbone). So item stats need to be shifted quite a lot. But once that's done, alpha will be ready. After that, it's mostly finishing touches: adding recycling recipes (item-to-ingot), adding crafting recipes that are missing in the original game but really should have been there, bringing everything to my naming convention (I already renamed all Elven stuff to Altmer, but there's still Dwarven and Orcish), implementing my ideas for Dwemer, Daedric and Dragonbone, implementing my ideas for tempering rebalance, fleshing out Tailoring and Jeweler perks, and so on.

I stumbled on a small problem, maybe someone can help me here. I have a custom smelter with two keywords: standard CraftingSmelter and custom CraftingSmelterDwemer. Now, I want player to be able to smelt Dwemer Metal in both standard and custom smelters, but with different effectiveness. So I have two versions of recipes: one with CraftingSmelter as furniture keyword, and another with CraftingSmelterDwemer. Question is: how do I prevent the standard smelter recipe from appearing on the custom smelter? I do not want to remove CraftingSmelter keyword from it because I want all other standard recipes to be available there as well. The way I see it, there are three possible solutions. Either there's some trick to check keywords on the furniture player is working on. I'm not sure there is - I have experimented with Condition targets with no results. Still, this is the preferable solution. Or I could put an additional CraftingSmelterMundane keyword on all normal smelters, and use this keyword to make my recipes available on them. Of course, if some other mod will add it's own smelter to the game, then my recipes will be unavailable on it. Or I could put a script on my custom smelter to initialize a global flag when player activates it, and using that flag in my recipes. However I need to clear that flag once player leaves the crafting menu - is there a way to catch that moment in the script?

Well, re-creating something that already works is a favorite pastime of many a modder. :-) P. S. Finished designing the Smithing perk tree. Not counting Jeweler and Tailoring (which are just placeholders at the moment), there's a total of 17 base perks and 42 "specialization" ranks. Phew, that's a lot of perks. :-)

I'm doing major overhaul of the crafting system and Smithing skill to make it more balanced and immersive, while giving due credit to the lore. Completely re-designed Smithing categories, item material keywords, matching set definitions, earning of smithing xp, obtaining of smithing perks, entirely diffirent approach to Dwemer stuff, et cetera. Not sure if this work is useful, and it's definitely uncompatible with any item mod, but it's fun as hell. :-)

Ok, a brief review. Since Skyrim pretty much hard-codes item tempering difficulty depending on material, often with ridiculous results (Stormcloak armor is more difficult to upgrade than Glass? Really?), the only way around is to forget current materials completely and work pretty much from scratch with a brand new set of keywords. This has the advantage that you can finally group items in similar categories and assign them more sensible tempering difficulties. This has the disadvantage that any 3rd party item packs will inevitably end up in Misc category, as they lack any new keywords. This is acceptable though, because alternatives are worse: either keep the current materials system (which I really, really don't like), or re-assign the meaning of current material keywords and end up with steel items appearing in Leather crafting category. At least this way, all non-standard items are in the same category and you know where to find them. As an afterthought, I also created a brand new set of MatchingSetWHATEVER keywords, and re-wired MatchingSet and MatchingSetHeavy perks to use them. So no longer any random Steel junk is miraculously matched to your brand new shiny Steel Armor. At the same time, it's now easy to make an item fit with two or more sets. For example, Studded Armor is now compatible with both Leather and Scaled sets. Resulting crafting menu organization: WOOD. Long bow, hunting bow and wooden sword. Because a level-100 blacksmith should be able to make a toy for his adopted son. Tempering difficulty 0. DAWNGUARD. Crafting Dawnguard armor, weapons and crossbows/bolts will be here - as long as the player allies with Dawnguard. Tempering difficulty 10. TRIBAL. Forsworn, Falmer and the Shellbug Helmet. Tempering difficulty 5. RANGER. Fur/Hide/Leather/Studded/Scaled. Tempering difficulty 0 to 20. UNDERWORLD. Most items here should be restricted by character's quest progression. Includes vampire armors if player is allied with Volkihar. Tempering difficulty 20. MILITARY. Either Stormcloak or Imperial equipment, depending on what side the player chooses. Tempering difficulty 5 to 40. MERCENARY. Iron/Iron Banded/Steel/Plate Steel. Tempering difficulty 5 to 50. NORDIC. Skaal set, Wolf set, Ancient Nordic, Carved Nordic, Nord Hero, Skyforge Steel etc. Tempering difficulty either 30 (for skyforge/nord hero) or 90 (for ancient stuff and carved nordic). DUNMER. Includes chitin and bonemold stuff from Dragonborn. Tempering difficulty 30 to 40. ALTMER. Elven stuff and Ancient Falmer stuff. Tempering difficulty 40 to 60. ORSIMER. Orcish. Tempering difficulty 60. Also there's one reserved material entry with tempering difficulty 15 if I ever need some orcish items to be more easily tempered. EBONY. Includes both Ebony and Daedric stuff. Tempering difficulty 70 to 75. EXOTIC. Includes Glass and Stalhrim stuff. Tempering difficulty 60 to 70. DWEMER. I'm really pissed off with how vanilla treats dwemer, so I have big plans for this category. Tempering difficulty 80. DRAGON. Dragonbone, Dragonscale and Blades stuff. Tempering difficulty 90. APPAREL. Formerly Jewelry. There are some special plans for this category (include clothing, add ranked Jeweler perk to prevent character from crafting flawless diamonds at level 1, etc). Now, the next step is actually redesigning the Smithing skill tree: This is still basic. My current vision for Smithing is as follows: 1. The skill requires a freaking ton of perks. Not only the number of perk nodes increased, but most of those nodes become multi-tiered, with base tier giving the ability to craft, and higher tiers improving the tempering and possibly opening some extra options and recipes. 2. On the other hand, many perks (in fact, most base-tier perks) can be obtained without spending perk points at all, by breaking down and tinkering with various loot and stuff. 3. But to get most of that stuff, player must get his ass away from the forge, go out and explore. 4. What's worse, experience for crafting stuff is drastically reduced (maybe even to zero if I can't pull off a partial reduction). Player gets most skill xp for tinkering, and once he has tinkered his way into, say, Steel, tinkering with Steel stuff no longer yields anything. 5. To further humiliate the Blacksmith, tempering items becomes much harder. On the other hand, advancing from Iron to Steel grants a much larger increase in item base stats. So it's no longer that easy to bring your trusted imperial bow to the level of daedric stuff. In fact, it might be impossible at all. Oh well. Designing basic perk tree is done. So time for the next step - going through the crafting recipes. Perhaps scrap them and make everything from scratch...

Decided to post here in hope of hearing advice, comments, criticism and general chatter. Okay, so I have finally started learning how to mod Skyrim. It was a looong time since I last modded a TES game, and that was in Morrowind days. So be patient if I re-invent the wheel. :-) First step complete: smithing categories are completely re-arranged. Half my hair are lost due to intensive head-scratching, but objective complete. Oh well. This is just the first step. Time to make the next one. :-)

Voila! This worked. Unpacked the patch file, copied the language pack into the same folder, ran the "setup.exe" executable and everything went smoothly. Thanks for the advice!

MD5 is correct. I'm running Windows XP, where my account is administrator, so that shouldn't be a problem as well (at least it wasn't when I was patching Witcher the last time).

I've reinstalled Witcher 1 after some time, and tried to patch it (I still have patches 1.4 and 1.5 stored on my backup drive). Patch 1.4 reported that it wants me to register the game. Oh sure, I thought, and tried to register the game, using my old login and password for The Witcher. No success. Surprised, I went to the Witcher site. Wow, everything changed and apparently the guys also removed all support for Witcher 1 game. "Great move, guys!", I thought, and started searching for solutions. After 30 minutes or so of active googling I have finally learned that there's a new version of official 1.4 patch which does not require registration. I wonder why I only found this information on some remote forum, perhaps writing that on the official site would be too difficult for the team? Anyway, I downloaded the new 1.4 patch and it's corresponding language pack from the official site. And tried to run it. It failed with "critical failure" error in some "NotCensored" module. So the question is: what am I supposed to do in order to play the game which I paid for?