SATMA

Now, the question is, how would I attach that to a staff? :P

It was part of Supreme Magicka, which added in many spells from Morrowind, like teleportation spells.

My favorite mod for Oblivion was, hands-down, Supreme Magicka. Combined with the greater class discipline of Oblivion XP, Supreme Magicka greatly fortified the repertoire of spells available to you by reimplementing many classic spells from Oblivion while rebalancing what already existed. The overall experience it created really made you feel like a master of the arcane, not merely a mana-powered flame thrower/tesla coil that could regenerate on a whim. Skyrim has sadly hamstrung that, pushing you into that destro-restro corner once again. What use is a 60 second zombie minion when you're lousy with companions? Why waste time using illusion spells on an enemy when, in the same amount of time, you could just cook them alive? Most egregiously, they've removed Mysticism, which was my favorite school outside of destruction. In SM mysticism you got the really fun spells that didn't make sense elsewhere - teleportation, telekinetics, soul stealing, etc. etc. Sure, you could exploit them to "break" the game. That was half the fun, damn it! I beat Knights of the Nine by using my teleport to defeat the Leap of Faith test and get around dungeons. What better use of magic than to defy the will of the "gods" (or developers as the case may be)? So I hope to see a mod like Supreme Magicka or at least restoring Mysticism to be made. I don't know if such a thing would even be possible, but if there is any chance at all, I would do anything to help.

Well of course Oblivion's leveling was terrible. That's what we had Oblivion XP for. That's what we need in Skyrim now!

Here is my little progress report on leveling in Skyrim. I do admit it is definitely doing some things right that vanilla Oblivion did not. One of the biggest reasons for Oblivion XP in Oblivion was the problem of "oozing;" your character could very easily quickly become a jack of all trades and master of all, an invincible inferno of magic, blades and armor that could sneak past any guard and pick any lock. While it sounds nice, it was terribly boring. Oblivion XP helped put the kibosh on that by making your class by switching skill distribution to level up and level up only, and then making skills outside your class specialty harder to increase. Skyrim is doing much better at encouraging you to pick a path through perks; while you can still "ooze" raw skill points into unrelated skills, the skills where you concentrate your perks are inevitably going to be the most powerful and most useful. While it remains to be seen just how many perks you can divvy up, I think it's safe to assume it will be enough to only fill up a couple trees, or at least no more trees than your path has at one time. That said, stripping the statistics down to mana, health and stamina is very, very bothersome to me. I much preferred the stat system of Oblivion to this, because it was there that one was able to truly customize their character's build. It was possible to split up what you gained per level. For example, my custom class of "Warlock" from Oblivion focused on stamina, willpower, and intelligence. As a "mage" in Skyrim, one can't help but feel choosing health at level up is throwing points away; too much unrelated minutia is tied into that statistic and then obscured. As well, I'm annoyed by the statistics in a very general way. Whatever stats or numbers you pick don't really feel like they matter anyway. As long as you use a weapon as a fighter-build, and bulk up on destro-restro as a mage, you become an unstoppable death machine before you hit level 5 as long as you pay heed to the hit point counter and/or have a companion. We definitely need Skyrim XP. I hope there are others that would be willing to work on such a project, for I would be glad to help.

If you're like me and the approximately 60,000 other people who have tried Oblivion XP, you know that while you appreciate the uniqueness of Bethesda's system you're ultimately more at home and comfortable with the structure of traditional XP-based RPG systems. What I'm curious about is is there are modders preparing to make a similar mod for Skyrim? We already know that the developers have gone even further to remove the traditional systems from the game by not putting in class selection at character generation, so I think it's crucial for the community to get something like this together as soon as possible. You can put me down as interested in being on this team - I'm a bit rusty at Bethesda game modding, but I've been doing a lot of graphics work lately, which could come in handy, and I have modded before, my best work being the Wasteland Melee Mod Pack compilation for Fallout 3.

After a hiatus spanning about mid-2010 to now, I'm getting back into the Fallout modding groove with FNV. While I've made some progress in mod acquisition, I still have some lingering questions. For modding games, I tend to prefer mods which alter vanilla gameplay as little as possible; i.e., enhancing or enriching it instead of expanding it. It pans out that these are consequently my favorite categories for mods: -Radio stations -Hi-res textures -Atmospheric/immersion -Oversights/fanmade bugfixes -Body mods -Unique/aesthetic weapons, clothing, and armor -Companion mods I've got a start on radio stations and atmospheric mods but have had some confusion in other areas. So here are my questions: 1) Can anyone recommend a hi-res texture mod with relatively simple installation (i.e., relatively few files that simply slot into the data folder without fussing around with .esp) that is still faithful to the vanilla? 2) Good enhancement or bugfix mods (a la the Repair Rethought Reborn mod for Fallout 3, which added junk items to the repair lists of many weapons, or mods which correct nonsensical oversights)? 3) I'm sketchy on how body-mods like Exnem's female or Breeze's male body work in FNV; can you just install the old FO3 Nexus mods or are there new ones hidden away in the jungle of schoolgirl outfits on FNVNexus? As for the weapons, clothing, and armor mods, I figure I will find stuff that suits me well enough on my own, but if you know of anything which is similar to Unique Uniques or Unique Weapons With Unique Textures for FNV, chime in on that here too.

I've tried opening an FO3 mod in FNVedit and most of the time it shuts down when it looks at dependencies. You can follow this guide for converting mods, but be aware that this is probably only going to be the first step in conversion. If a mod uses dependencies from Fallout 3 specific quests or characters, you're going to have to track it down in the GECK and switch it to something that's in FNV. Also, posting a FO3Nexus mod on FNVNexus without getting permissions can get you in hot water very fast, so step very carefully.

You couldn't be more wrong. I got Fallout 3 at launch and I played it through all the major patches and I was contemporary with the release of the DLC, and the game couldn't have been MORE buggy. I still have a procession of Fallout .exes in my main folder named for their patch, because whenever you upgraded from patch to patch you were playing Russian roulette with your game if you didn't hold on to the exe for the last patch, and something in the most recent one messed up your game. I remember one patch in particular - 1.4, 1.5? - which broke every mod which altered an exterior map. There was a relatively simple fix for it on our end, but it was a monumental failure on Bethesda's part. How's this: game software is insanely complicated and any "fix" is almost guaranteed to break something else. Development is more or less like trying to balance china plates on a 5-foot pole with your nose while juggling flaming chain-saws.

I understand you're busy and this would be a ton of work :P. It'd be nice to know what you think is interesting enough to work on though, as well as any updates on your progress. because this stuff would be really awesome and I'd be sad if it seems like it'd die. No pressure tho, like I said totally understand that real life stuff takes priority over hobbies ;) I'll have some time during the first part of break to review what's been posted and put down what's going ahead, then from the 1st of April on to the end of the weekend, I'll take a stab at working at some of it.

No, I've been watching it. During the week my time for modding gets very limited due to school and work.

I should say so! If it doesn't use FOSE you're officially my hero.

Big guns are nice - but I find I kill just as many folks dead with well-placed sniper bullets as a hasty fat man. They're also too dang heavy - which is part of the reason I made [shamelessplug] this mod [/shamelessplug].

Glitch happens. Life's a glitch and then you crash.

Or build a mountain of corpses as testament to your prowess in carnage and war!