Kentoss

Hi guys, I'm enjoying my first play through of Dragonborn finally and I just beat Miraak. Immediately afterwards, I started the quest A New Source of Stalhrim and made my way to the Abandoned Lodge with the 4 Thalmor in front of it. I disposed of them and then went to enter the building, which I discovered needed a key. Upon approaching the corpses of the Thalmor, I realized they had no way to activate them. They cannot be looted and do not respond to being dragged. They DO respond to physics, I can shout them off the hill. I can still activate everything else, including other corpses. It appears to just be these specific 4. Here are my plugins if it helps: I've tried reloading to 3 different earlier saves, I've tried fast travelling somewhere else and back. I've tried entering an interior cell and then returning to the corpses. I've tried resurrecting them and then killing them again. Nothing seems to work. Any help?

I've tried and tried again, but whenever I reset the INIs to default the game crashes at the character creation screen on a new game, and while loading save files. Putting the old INIs back fixes it, but then the issue where the LOD buildings don't go away occurs. Anyone have any other ideas?

I've tried making clean INIs already, a new game crashes when I try to name my character. I'm going to try once more to see if it was just a fluke, thanks for all the suggestions though!

Yeah that's exactly it. I've tried changing various LOD variables back to their defaults but the issue still occurs.

Hey guys, I'm having an annoying problem that came about I think after I made some edits to the skyrim ini files. Basically, all the low resolution terrain and buildings that you see in the distance don't go away when I get closer to them. Instead what happens is I end up with the full models and the LOD models on top of each other clipping though. It's really annoying, especially for door ways where in the low res model they're just solid black, so I can't see through them to get at enemies and what not. I know it's an issue with the INI, because I'm on a clean install of Skyrim, so there are no mods. When I replace the INIs with the defaults, none of my saves load. Skyrim will crash to desktop. If I start a new game, I will get right up to the character selection, then the game crashes. However, during the opening scene the issue with LOD not vanishing is fixed. Does anyone know how to fix this? Or what setting in the INI makes this issue occur?

So I've been messing around with basic mod concepts and I've run into a lot of problems that I've managed to work around with fair ease. One problem I cannot figure out with scripting is how to get the name of an NPC as a string. I've been doing a lot of reading and research, and it's possible the answer is staring me in the face and I just haven't seen it, but as far as I can tell, there's no easy way to get the name of an NPC (without SKSE). I read about using aliases, but I'm not entirely sure how that works, because I'm trying to get the name of an actor outside of a quest with a magic spell. Obviously with SKSE it's as easy as using the GetName() function, and I'm quite surprised that CK doesn't have this functionality built right in. I would like to stay independent of SKSE though, because of how simple the mod I have in mind is, I wouldn't want there to be any prerequisites. Additionally, is there somewhere I can go to read about good mod practices? I fear that the way I have set my mod up currently would have problems with things like save game bloating, or not properly uninstalling. I think I would like to be able to run a script after the mod has been uninstalled that cleans up anything it leaves behind, so that people who have a problem with the mod for whatever reason can safely uninstall it and not worry about things left in their game they may no longer wish to have. Thanks in advanced!

You can read my tutorial: http://www.thenexusforums.com/index.php?/topic/456412-xwm-audio-format/page__view__findpost__p__3857703 2 pages back with a link to the file. :\

Thanks for the feedback everyone! I took the time yesterday to look into extracting the .xwm files from the .fuz files found in the voice BSAs. Upon initial inspection in a hex editor I noticed that the lip syncing data and the xwm file are basically just crammed together into the one fuz file. I then searched around to see if anyone else had done anything in regards to pulling out the xwm part of the fuz file, which is when I found a python script by liag247 on this post. Problem with it is that it only worked on one folder at a time, which is kind of inconvenient as there are about 104 of them. So I modified it to work recursively when run from a root directory. I also needed to put another script called argparse.py in the same directory or else it would not work at all. Once the script ran (it took maybe 20 minutes on my Core i7 machine), it had all the xwm files ready to be converted to wav, so I ran my previous batch file again and (again, after about 20 minutes) I had all of the voices neatly organized into wav files that I could play back. Here's another quick tutorial as an addition to my last one (assuming you've followed all the steps to the last one). You will also require a python installation for this to work. 1. Use your BSA unpacker utility to extract the content from Skyrim - Voices.bsa and optionally Skyrim - VoicesExtra.bsa (this contains Esbern's vocals by the talented Max Von Sydow). Preferably, extract them to the same folder you extracted the other sounds to. NOTE: There are A LOT of files in these archives, so give your computer time to do it's thing (and hope it doesn't become unresponsive). 2. Download this modified fuz2xwm.py file (again, originally created by liag247, so thank him for his work), and this argparse.py file in case you don't already have argparse available in python. Put both of these files into the same folder you have your xWMAEncode.exe and convert_xwm_to_wav.bat files. 3. Run fuz2xwm.py, and let it finish. It will take a long time, this is normal, as there are a lot of files to process. 4. Once finished, you'll have both .fuz and .xwm files in each of the subfolders within your voices/skyrim.esm/ directory. Now all we need to do is run convert_xwm_to_wav.bat and let it finish (there probably will be a few errors that pop up, these are just some files with malformed xwms, most likely. There's maybe 4 or 5 that don't get converted out of the thousands that are there, so I wouldn't sweat it). Once that's done, each directory in the voices/skyrim.esm/ folder will have the .fuz files, the .xwm files and the .wav files, to do with what you wish. Contact liag247 if you figure out how to modify a fuz file and put it back in the game. ALSO NOTE: If you do ALL of the voices, make sure you have room on your drive. After doing all these steps with every file in both Skyrim - Voices.bsa and Skyrim - VoicesExtra.bsa, my voices folder is 22.1 GB in size, and contains 184 947 files. Just a heads up. http://i.imgur.com/sT7oq.png

I decided to go ahead and download the 572 MB SDK to pull out the xWMAEncode.exe for anyone else who's interested in converting the sounds and music found in the game. I didn't see anywhere that said I couldn't upload this particular utility on it's own, but if it is against some rules that I didn't see, please let me know or feel free to remove the link. Here's a step-by-step tutorial for the PC version: 1. First, you'll need a BSA unpacker. As long as it lets you extract the xwm files, it would work fine. I used this BSA unpacker and it did fine. 2. Once we have the unpacker, launch it and navigate it to C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\skyrim\Data (Note: If your Steam folder differs from the default install location, you'll need to change the path accordingly) http://i.imgur.com/gzceF.png 3. Select the Skyrim - Sounds.bsa file and hit open. My program warned me about an unknown version number, and that's OK. Hit Yes to open it anyway. Once inside we should have a list of all the xwm files like so: http://i.imgur.com/LI9TL.png From here you can select the files you want to export, then hit extract, or hit extract all to do the whole archive. From here you need to select a destination for the files. I put a folder on my desktop called Skyrim Sound Files, but you can do whatever. Just make sure that you extract the BSA into an empty folder, as the BSA unpacker will create the folders and sub-folders as found in the BSA itself. 4. Now that we have all of the .xwm files from the BSA, we need to get that xWMAEncode.exe from the DirectX SDK I was talking about. I've gone ahead and uploaded that exe for your convenience at this link. Download that file and put it in to the directory that we created earlier, the one that holds all of the sound files and folders. 5. Now we're going to make the magical batch file that loops through all of the xwm files and converts them using xWMAEncode.exe. For convenience, I've also uploaded it at this link. If you download it, make sure you save it to the same folder as xWMAEncode.exe and the sound files. 5a. So first we need to create a new text file in the same directory as xWMAEncode.exe and the sound files and rename it to convert_xwm_to_wav.bat. 5b. Next, right click on the .bat file and click edit. http://i.imgur.com/YSlIQ.png 5c. A blank notepad window should come up. Inside, copy and paste the following: for /r . %%T IN (*.xwm) do @xWMAEncode.exe "%%T" "%%~pT%%~nT.wav" 5d. Save the file and close the window. 6. Run the newly created convert_xwm_to_wav.bat file and let it finish, otherwise it may not convert everything. It may take a while. 7. Once completed, you should now see the converted .wav files next to the .xwm files like so: http://i.imgur.com/mkpS9.png The wav files will be a lot bigger than the xwm files, so make sure you have room for them all. If you want to further compress the files, you can convert them to mp3 with something like dbPoweramp or lame.exe. If you need further assistance feel free to ask and I'll do my best to help! :)

What you'd want to do is download the DirectX SDK for xWMAEncoder.exe, then write a batch program that loops through each xwm file and runs the xWMAEncoder application through command line to get a .wav from the xwm file. I didn't feel like downloading the 500 MB package that is the DirectX SDK, so I looked around for alternate methods for conversion. One I found that is quite tedious but works with a simple download is this program from this post. Because the author forces the application to look for .wav files instead of xwm files, you have to rename the xwm files to .wav first, then choose that file in the application, then select the output destination and hit convert. Works pretty flawlessly, it's just tedious to do for more than a few files.