David Brasher

You can create and edit .dds textures in GIMP or Photoshop. GIMP is free and downloadable. The hard part is building the UV map in Blender or whatever tool you use. The UV map takes your three-dimensional model and makes a flat map of it for use by your texture. It can be hard to make a map that is not a Flying Spaghetti Monster mess, does not stretch your textures into low res lines, or does not have razor sharp lines between texture areas. Once the UV map is created in Blender, it can be edited in NifSkope. You can go back and forth and back and forth between GIMP and NifSkope until you like how the model is textured.

You could manually download the mod but not install it. (Maybe you already have it somewhere? I am not sure how NMM works.) Then you could examine the mod's structure and see exactly what assets it adds to the game. You would open another window and follow the directories to delete the things like meshes, textures, and scripts that were added by the mod.

So with the low number of views and responses this topic got, I guess that means there is not some easy Papyrus command that I am overlooking. The thought had crossed my mind that maybe enchanting was tied in to key words attached to enchanting workstations, and I did a couple of experiments, but was unable to prove or disprove anything. It might be like Cynster suspects, that enchanting is tied in with quests and the radiant story system and aliases and such. WorldInteractionsScript is real short. Only like one screen long. It mostly just holds variables. I did not see any commands in it that looked like they were related to enchanting.

In Oblivion, if you wanted a script to cause you to enter the enchanting menu, you used the ShowEnchantment command. How do you do this with Papyrus?

The cat noises sort of sound like they were done with a synthesizer or in an echo chamber or something. They sound just a little robotic maybe. But I really like the idea of the Khajiits making more appropriate noises than the vanilla Skyrim ones.

I most cases, you can claim that the work that you were inspired by was inspired by somebody else much earlier. So lets suppose you downloaded a mod with a custom lich in it that you really like. It inspired you to use Blender and other tools to build another lich from scratch. If the mod author gets mad and says that you stole his idea and that the concept of the lich belongs to him, you can just say, "Look at Oblivion. It had liches. Look at Dungeons and Dragons. It had liches." And then you can accuse him of stealing ideas from other people if he still won't shut up and leave you alone. If viewed in that light, William Shakespeare stole almost all of his ideas from books he read and plays he watched. Hollywood usually steals all of its ideas from earlier books, plays, and movies. So I do not believe you will get in any trouble at all if you do your own work with the software.

Indeed, there are hundreds of leveled lists. If extensive changes are desired for the game, then many of the lists will need to be edited, and it will take a good long while to edit them.

In Skyrim, the stats of an item are changed by punching in numbers for one particular item at a time. There is no way for the interface to change multiple numbers on multiple weapons all at once. So the system does not work on the principle of master slider bars where you can just command the computer to make a master adjustment to everything at once like saying, "Computer. Reduce frequency of glass armor by 37%." So any sort of mod like this could possibly require the creation of hundreds of new variants of existing items with different stats, and hundreds of new leveled lists. I am pretty sure the scripting for vanilla Skyrim does not exist to swap out the items and leveled lists, but there might be SKSE commands, or maybe someday there will be SKSE commands to do such things. If that didn't work, then it would be a task for a computer programmer and not for a mod builder. For some tasks, talented programmers have actually built .dll programs to alter things like inputs to or outputs from Skyrim to change the effect of the game. This would be sort of analogous to viewing the output of the game through colored glasses. What the game puts out would not be what was shown on the computer screen because an interpreter would have altered it first.

I noticed that I have this problem too now. It must have started after the last update. I never had it when I first bought the game.

Have you checked to make sure that you are not missing any masters? (None of your mods require additional mods which are not there, not activated, or in the wrong position in the load order where they load after the mod that requires them?)

You will need to make a custom outfit using the custom armor. If you just add the armor to the NPC's inventory, he or she will tend to run around naked. The weapons can simply be added to the inventory of the NPC. You will need to be sure that copies of the custom items you use reside in the same mod that your NPC does. Mods can't see things that live in other mods unless you follow special procedures.

This is a fairly simple task for you. To change armor stats you can open the CK and go to Object Window > Items > Armor. You can open up the armor you want to edit and change things like armor rating, weight, and value. To change the crafting recipes, you can go to Object Window > Items > Constructable Object > Recipe*

Upon request, I made a patch for the leveled list overhaul mod Skyrim Scaling Stopper that makes it so almost all the unnamed respawning guards, soldiers, bandits, and hostile NPCs are female. So when you walk around Skyrim, it is mostly women you see that are carrying weapons, wielding the power, and doing the violence. This patch does not touch the unique NPCs that have quests and dialog, and if they were male, they remain male.

All these items usually use the helmet slot. Only one thing can go in the helmet slot. You can't put two helmets in the helmet slot at one time. So a mod like this would have to edit tons of items to NOT use the helmet slot. They would use one of the undefined unused slots. It would take a fairly long time to build a mod like this. The mod would have to be carefully planned. There would have to be a clear idea of which things would be worn together. Like maybe you could leave helmets in the helmet slot, put masks in another slot, and hoods in another slot. This would mean that you could wear 1 helmet + 1 hood + 1 mask. You could wear any or none, or any combination of the three items. But you could never ever wear two of the same item type. Like you could never wear 2 masks at once. Issues: (1) The mod would require a great many edits to be made and would therefore be sort of long and boring to build. (2) Conflicts. The mod would only work for vanilla Skyrim and would not work for items added by mods. The extensive nature of the edits made would also cause the mod to conflict with mods that edit helmets or that use non-standard equipment slots.

With your dialog, there is a bug in Skyrim that occurs at unpredictable random times. If you do not use use Unfuzer to turn your .wav + .lip files into .fuz files, then they may not work on other peoples computers and sometimes on your computer. (There is also a bug where custom .fuz files won't play, but it is less common that the one where .wav + .lip files won't play.) I am not sure if this is your situation or not.

There is currently no TES4Gecko for Skyrim. So there is no utility to auto-merge mods. TESVSnip can slowly manually merge mods, but there is some sort of serious problem with the Skyrim 1.6 update where many mods that were built with TESVSnip no longer work. So unless you know a great deal about this subject, it would be very dangerous to go this route. Lots of merging can be done in the CK, but it is slow work. The easiest option might be for you to use Wrye Bash to espify and esmify at the proper times and the CK to build a mastered conflict resolution patch. This patch mod would load after the other two mods and would use one or both of them as a master(s) depending on how severe the conflicts were. In a few cases, the patch would not even need any masters if it only has to edit vanilla content, but load order is still essential. The patch has to come after the mods it edits. If trees sticking through floors is your only real problem, why don't you just go for 100% compatibility and load the two mods up at the same time and move the offending objects? You could possibly do this in a way that gamers who were only using one of the two mods would not notice that anything looked funny. You could do it with one mod active and the other not, and then reverse which mod is active and not. (If necessary.) So what you want to do is absolutely possible, and there are several viable approaches you could take.

No. The CK cannot edit savegames. It can only edit .esp files. (And .esm files if you turn them into .esp files first.)

I suspect that this is hard coded and cannot be changed. One thing that could be done is that a mod could be built to prevent anyone from ever tempering items. Then they would never get the tags that you dislike.

You have to be careful to make sure that his packages take him near a bed when it is time to sleep. You have to be sure he owns the bed or nobody does. You have to make sure nobody else has taken his bed. Some packages say to sleep in a bed within a certain distance of the editor location. So actors are often placed right by their bed for their starting location. Some custom sleep packages specify a particular bed reference. Don't have your actor be too many doors or worldspaces away from his bed. Navigation can be hard for an NPC.

Leave all the folders alone. For a mod for personal use like this, you do not care if the folder structure is nice and neat. Your files can be scattered all over your computer for all you care. You only care about that when uploading a mod for all the world to scrutinize. So just leave all the meshes and textures where they are at. This task might surprise you with how easy it is. Open MAK07's Armor mod and Killer Keo's at the same time. You make one active and the other one not active. Your edits will save to the active file. You want the active file to be the mod that is most complete that you just want to make a few changes to. So it sounds like you want MAK07's Armor mod to be active. You will need to open and copy each individual piece of armor one at a time. You open the piece of armor from the mod that is not active, and change its name. You can just add a single letter or number if you like. Save the piece of armor. The computer will ask if you are changing the name of the item or creating a new one. Select the option to create a new one. Do this for every single piece of armor you want to copy. Save your mod. To check that everything is okay, load up your mod again without the other armor mod. If you did it right, all the armor will be there and be usable in the mod that you used as your active file. (If the mod has crafting recipes or leveled lists or chests full of gear, you can copy them from one mod into the other in the very same way.) Merging content from armor mods like this is real easy. You don't have to mess with a single mesh or texture path. If you know the in-game name of a piece of armor, you can find it in the CK by opening the entire armor list and clicking the bar on top to sort by name. So if a piece of armor was called "Full Steel Plate" you would just use the alphabetical order to find it in the "F" section.

There was a thread over on Bethsoft forums about TESVSnip. They think there is some sort of pattern, like if you edited certain record types, it causes problems, but if you only edit other record types, you are probably okay. Some really famous and popular mods have been broken, like "Live Another Life." Some people are getting so crazy that they are going through their mod lists and deleting all the mods built before a certain date.

Basic question: Did you package the scripts properly for the upload that you sent to your play-testers? If the mod was packaged wrong or installed wrong, then it won't work for other people even if it works for you.

When someone talks about a clean save, usually they are talking about one particular mod. Like if I am playing "Skanky Swimsuits for Combat 1.5" I may need to get a clean save before I can upgrade to "Skanky Swimsuits for Combat 1.6." The procedure I would follow would be this: (1) Deactivate Skanky Swimsuits for Combat.esp. (2) Load Skyrim and load the savegame I will be using the mod in. (3) Save my sadly swimsuitless savegame. (4) Exit Skyrim. (5) Install the new Skanky Swimsuits for Combat.esp on top of the other one to overwrite it and replace it. (6) Activate Skanky Swimsuits for Combat.esp. (7) Return to playing Skyrim and test out the exciting new content in the mod.

There is TESVSnip, but it has recently fallen out of favor because Skyrim 1_6 is bad and broke a great number of mods that had been built with TESVSnip. Unfortunately, I fear that it is practically all we have. You can do a great many mod-merging actions in the CK although it can be slow and tedious.

You will need to refinalize the navmesh for both cells that a door connects to.