darkjaffar

I suppose you could try just removing the default equipment, then adding the stuff you want equipped. Edit: Not sure why I thought this would work. You can, however, use Delphine's scripts (MQDelphineScript) as a reference for how to do it. When she is in riverwood, she will change outfits to something more civilian than she wears outside of riverwood.

Free, on the assumption that you have a Steam version of Skyrim at least.

How did you install Skyrim? Through Steam or retail disk? I believe the Nexus Mod Manager uses the install location from the registry on your system to know where the Skyrim executable should be. Unless you messed with it afterwards, it should still be there.

I don't think it's fair to say they didn't spend time on the gameplay in Skyrim. I've played every single TES game since their launch, with exception of Morrowind, which I played later, and Skyrim has, by far, the best balance of realistic combat mechanics and role-playing. Indeed, it does mean losing some of each, but in the end, I think the balance is /fun/ which is an important part of gameplay. Gameplay is not dictated by the complexity of the system being implemented. Daggerfall wasn't better than Morrowind because Daggerfall let you pick a ton of useless abilities that were either redundant or for most purposes, completely unused (Dragonish, you were skill before your time, friend). For discussion purposes: Morrowind was a streamlined casual game designed to appeal to console players. The UI needs tweaking, that I can certainly agree with, but I don't think the tweaks need to be drastic in anyway. The streamlined approach to the inventory is good, but the interface behavior is at times inconsistent or at times doesn't work. Mouse-free navigation should be easily possible, and their current layout allows for it, but it was just implemented poorly and thus doesn't behave the way you would expect. The same UI should also work with a mouse, which again, the UI does support, but does so in a pretty buggy way. For example, if you click outside something that is clickable in a menu, it will leave the menu, for some reason. While speaking, it will select whatever the last selected item was on the list, which often leads to you selecting a discussion option you did not intend to use. They tried to make the same button do too many things at certain points, which do make sense on consoles, but make no sense for PC. It'd be nice to see that decoupled. I hardly think any of these reasons is a call for boycotting DLCs or whatever was being advocated though. They've been dumbing down the series since Morrowind, yet Morrowind is widely considered to be the holy grail of the series, despite the huge streamlining that occurred in that game in comparison to the games preceding it. The only game in the entire series that is more complex than the prequel is Daggerfall. I'm confused as to what good old times this is in reference to. Every single game in the series has given you quick access to all the cities. Skyrim and Morrowind are the most restrictive, and Morrowind only /slightly/ so. (excluding games like Redguard, since I never played those) TES1: Arena: All Cities and Dungeons are auto-discovered TES2: Daggerfall: All Cities and Dungeons are auto-discovered TES3: Morrowind: Cities and Dungeons not discovered, but many (all?) of the cities are can be accessed by silt striders. TES4: Oblivion: Cities auto-discovered. Dungeons are not discovered. TES5: Skyrim: Cities and Dungeons not discovered, but many (all?) of the cities can be accessed by horse carriage. Never in a major TES have you had to really run around and actually discover cities, unless you strictly wanted to. In Arena and Daggerfall's case, doing so means spending 10 real hours going between towns, and spending many real full real days to go from one side of the map to the other, one way. In the Fallout series, you do have to actually run around and find cities, and it's been that way since the original 1 and 2 games, and continued that tradition once Bethsoft took control of the series.

Yeah. I don't really find trolls to be an issue at all. Just blast with fire, once they are too close, use the fire breath or unrelenting force to stagger and knock it back, then repeat. Usually dies on the second approach towards you. If you are melee focused player, it's harder, but with a few power hits, fire breath to create distance, so you can heal and go back in once it regains balance, you can take it out without assistance. Giants, on the other hand, are just simply over-powered in this game. They literally kill dragons in 1 on 1 fights consistently. It's hardly even a battle. Giant 4/5 shots the dragon once the dragon decides it's a good idea to close distance. It's silly how strong they made the giant. Same story with mammoths too, though to a slightly lesser degree. The people of Skyrim shouldn't even be concerned about the return of the dragons with giants and mammoths running around. In the trailers it was the other way around, with dragons on the top of the food chain. Wonder why that changed.

Indeed. When I was younger, I only knew of a "cool 3D game for DOS" known as Daggerfall. I was somewhere around 5-6 back then, so beyond wandering around Daggerfall City, and stealing myself a fortune by resting in stores, and having nightmares about the ghost that would chant "Vengeance!" and guards yelling "Halt!" I didn't do too much in the game. But it was still one of my favorite games as a kid for whatever reason. Later I heard about Oblivion, and for whatever reason, Oblivion sounded a lot like that old game I used to play so I was going to buy it. Turns out, through the magic of Google and Wikipedia, Oblivion is actually a sequel to that game, and there was another game between them and a game before Daggerfall I didn't even know about. Most mind blown moment in my life. I've tried playing Daggerfall since then. Turns out I still play it the same way I did as a 5-6 year old though. :(

I don't think the game would break entirely. You just would have to be careful about what quests you are currently in and who you kill and in what order you do it. For an easy example, consider Baurus at the very start of the game. I don't think he actually is carrying the key to exit the sewers (though I could be wrong), so if you kill him before he ever gives you the key, you will be locked in the sewers. Likewise if you have the GOTY edition and you go to Shivering Isles for the first time and decide to kill Haskill at this moment, you will never be able to access the Shivering Isles beyond that little room you start in. Other complete areas of the game may remain locked because you killed someone related to opening that area. For instance, again with Haskill, say you decide to spare him for the first encounter, and decide to spare everyone in the fringe, at least until you can leave the fringe. You reach Haskill and kill him. This means anything that is locked during the main quest-line of Shivering Isles that involves Haskill even once will never occur and it remains locked. You also may end up stuck with quest items as a result since you may have been forced to pick one up (easy example is the amulet) and killed the person you were supposed to give it to. Console will be your friend for unlocking and removing such limitations. Likewise, as you run into limitations like these, you could take note of them so you can later create the mod to have a "quest failed" path for each affected quest triggered by killing each of the essential characters, giving you the needed equipment, removing the quest items, etc. Just make sure you do it for every questline the NPC is involved in for completeness sake. If he doesn't mind those limitations (I have Morrowind, but never really played it, so not sure if those limitations also existed for Morrowind. Only played Daggerfall and Oblivion) then I don't see why his game breaking is an issue.

Maybe a good starting point is to make multiplayer mini games. For instance, using Cakester's ability to send messages to an IRC channel (or a more fancy server-client system eventually), a game can grab the messages and use them for basic manipulation of a teddy bear's position in a small interior square room. The clients just send an x,y,z to the channel frequently under their username and read x,y,z from the channel until an x,y,z from a different username than their own comes into focus. Each player would simply be a teddy bear on the other person's screen. No equipment or other character model, no vats, nothing. Not really a mini-game yet, but maybe it could be extended from there. One person plays as the teddy bear and the other player runs at toddler settings and they have to chase the bear around the room. Kinda like tag, with the toddler as "it". The person playing the bear would actually see the other player as a teddy bear, but that's fine as this would be more for a proof of concept. Maybe even it could be part of a bigger mod to add a still active Vault which was assigned to the social experiment of forcing residents to play crappy games with each other until using a mechanical mechanism to expel them from the Vault after they have become adults to see the effects of prolonged exposure to the games. Kinda like Little Lamplight, crossed with Vault 114. Of course, you aren't playing the other kids in these proof of concept games, rather, you are playing a specific person on the internet. It would just make the atmosphere for the proof of concept work more complete. =D

I have to admit, it would be interesting to see the VATS slow-mo of that hitting some raider dude in the head.

Mesh replacers often aren't disabled by turning off the .esp that came with it, if the replacer even had one, which usually isn't the case anyhow. Deleting the meshes the mod added will resolve the problem. Mesh replacers don't actually replace the mesh, they just tell the game to use the new one instead. When deleted, the game will go back to using the one it was using before the replacement was placed into the meshes folder.

I'm not sure which is more humorous though: the people on the parody site, or the people here calling various groups of people (Americans/Christians/etc) stupid and/or accusing them of overreacting even though it has constantly been stated over and over again that it is a parody site.

I said: "A Fallout 3 modder has managed to connect to the internet and more importantly IRC channels with a mod (and external program, just like OBSE)" Yes, but they /do not/ have rights to /any and all files on your hard drive/. From my understanding, the Fallout 3 mod puts the results it gets in a file the game's engine is allowed to read. This file very well could be made from scratch, ie. not one of the original game files. They don't have control over that. They also do not have rights to files containing your banking information or personal passwords, regardless of where you save them, including your Oblivion's Data directory. You may have a point on usage though. Regardless, any "Oblivion Online"-esque mod makes less changes to the engine than OBSE does. The project has been known to be in the works for a long time and BethSoft has never challenged it to my knowledge. I don't know why people are suddenly rushing to the assumption it is illegal to do considering it's been known for around 3 years now. I am a programmer, about to get my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. I will be continuing on to get a Master's degree. I don't recall saying it was easy. I was saying doing it certain ways would make it /easier/ considering the modders working on projects like these already managed to make progress in the ways I was stating. Downloading a website with an external program and putting the results in an .ini is about 5 or so lines of Python code (import modules, open file, grab from internet, save to file, close file). I am actually not a modder of Oblivion or Fallout 3, though I have played with the Construction Kit for both games for my own uses before, so I assume the game engine side of making use of the ini file is harder, but we can read .ini files from the game engine to the best of my knowledge as other mods do it. If so, you read the .ini and get information for whatever purposes you want.

Nobody suggested that. If you see the Fallout 3 work on a similar mod (I don't know the link right now. Somewhere on the forums though) no decompiling of the game is needed. An external program handles everything and sends information to the game. The game then reads the information and puts the information to use using standard functions it already knows, or the Fallout 3 equivalent of OBSE knows. If running a program of that nature is copyright infringement, then so is OBSE, or for that matter, running any program that could possibly interfere with files in the Oblivion directory. They simply don't have the power to say that. Not really. When you join an IRC channel you can send messages and read messages others sent to the channel. This is more or less the definition of a server/client relationship. Of course, the IRC channel was only an example as it has been proven possible in Fallout 3. A small server application could be made that client programs connect to, then send information from the game to the server, and obtain information from the server and to the game. *sighs* Again. This is not the game connecting. This is just an /external program/ that is running alongside the game grabbing information from internet sources and placing the information in a place where the game can grab it. As compared to OBSE which actually modifies the game once in RAM. There's no way OBSE is legal and what is being suggested here is not. They really have no control over where I save files on my own system. It just so happens that a client program I own saves files in an area that the game reads from. OBSE makes more drastic changes to the engine than what is suggested here.

How is this copyright infringement? There are functions that OBSE enables that the original game engine did not want modders to access. Is OBSE, and as a result, all mods that use it breaking rules of copyright as well then? Seems so under expansion of copyright law you imply actually exists, as any sort of multiplayer Oblivion would operate in a similar way, where you are not actually running Oblivion directly, rather, you run Oblivion through a launcher than handles stuff that the original engine did not support. BethSoft relies on modders to keep their products alive. There's no way vanilla Oblivion would have lasted this long. I don't see them shutting down OBSE any time soon, or anything similar, as there is absolutely no gain for them. It would just be a decline in sales and likely less interest in future products. A Fallout 3 modder has managed to connect to the internet and more importantly IRC channels with a mod (and external program, just like OBSE), and Fallout 3's engine is quite similar to Oblivion's engine with only some expanded features. If such a mod could post coordinates to an IRC channel as well, you would have the basics of what you need to establish where the other players are and what they are doing. Players wouldn't need to be in the same cell, so fast travel isn't a major problem, but you may want to disable it anyhow as one client could be in night-time while the other is in day-time as a result of it. The biggest problem would be figuring out the random, not player-related, factors of the game, such as what monster spawned, and make sure that all games agree that the same monster spawned, as it could be one of several different kinds. This information may be hard to translate between the games. A simple, interior cell, PVP arena would be easier as the only information that needs to be sent or read from an IRC channel is player information. This goes for both games, Oblivion and Fallout 3. I don't see any reason to be hostile towards modders who wish to make lan enabled Oblivion or Fallout 3 for that matter. Those who don't want a lan enabled game just don't download or run it, just like every other mod some people disagree with out there.

I'm having different problems with FOOK2 that make the game entirely unplayable (and found this topic in a search), but I think I know what is wrong here. Make certain that you have all things FOOK2 depends on. If you only have one of the DLCs, you cannot enable the DLC aspects of FOOK2 because it assumes you have all of them. If you crash during startup, that is why. From my experience with it so far though, it simply makes the game unplayable anyhow, once you do get past that little hiccup. I haven't got the game to go for 10 minutes without a problem of some kind, and it is the one and only mod running on my system right now.