enkephalin07

They can't be activated, so I tried casting a few spells at one; flames, soul trap, healing hands, and none of them did anything. I looked at all a few of these eyes in the console, and the one at the start of the bridge was only edited by Skyrim.esm, yet exhibits the same behavior as the ones edited by CWI.

What does it mean? I know it didn't flash when I first walked across these, possibly not until I became Archmage. Before I ever saw the college, I found the same symbol outside the Thieves Guild secret entrance, between the mausoleum and the fence. And after I finished the college questline, that symbol flashed blue when I walked over it, too.

I was skeptical, but it didn't cost me anything to try it, so I did and hellfkyeah it worked! Nothing worked like this before!

That's actually the model of the Septim Empire. Tiber Septim, model of bastardry that he was, was actually a smooth diplomat and negotiator. The heaviest resistance to the Empire's expansion was due to religious differences, and this isn't the first time the Empire has had to make concessions for those. Unfortunately this Emperor didn't have the cunning to get a better deal, or to notice this one was intended to set up a later invasion.

If the game never gives you the means to broker the significant influence you acquire into mediating a peace settlement, then I can just imagine it occurs beyond the scope of the game, and dismiss it while I'm playing. Maybe I'm just stubborn; I won't let either the Thalmor or Bethesda's writers pressure me into picking a side.

I'm seeing a black overlay mesh on CBBE bodies, especially when 2 or more females in view. The closer the camera comes to it, the more transparent the polys become, but from any distance the bodies look completely black. I think the problem started when I switched my installation to Mod Organizer, so the problem may be with the mod priorities, or a non-obvious compatibility problem. I tried adding the mipmap textures, I tried removing race overlay compilation, but neither of these solved it. I doubt the problem is from using ultra quality textures, because there's no noticeable performance hit from entering a roomful of women, and if I get close enough I can see the textures load just fine underneath the overlay. I would add my install order here, but MO only exports to csv, which is uglier than the human eye can read.

Still early in my first playthrough, just got to Hrothgar, but already I figured out that picking a side would be idiotic. The Aldmeri Dominion's armistice terms were a calculated divide-and-conquer strategy that the Empire and Stormcloaks have both fallen for. To choose a side would be to support playing into their hands; you know the Thalmor are just waiting for the Empire to hobble itself enough to steamroll all over them. If you really want to be responsible for eliminating the Empire for good, you might as well be thorough about it and kill 'em all -- beats slavery to the elves. If you want to preserve the Empire, they need to come to an agreement, it doesn't matter how, and launch a pre-emptive attack on the Dominion. Neither of these require picking a side.

I'm not sure how scripting works now, but in Morrowind's engine, every script looped unless specifically terminated, and it became common convention to let them keep cycling perpetually. Or slightly better, let it loop until it becomes relevant, then execute its instructions before self-deleting. Now you have AI packages to handle recurring conditions more efficiently, and use stationary NPCs to handle scripting functions that used to have to run in objects.

What is 'polling'? I'm looking at my latest save file with Save tool, and see only 56 active scripts, 6.9k scripts in total, but 63k instantiated. That last number seems pretty excessive to me. How would that be justified? I haven't done a mod since Morrowind, up until the guy who developed Morrowind Script Extender got hired by Bethesda, and support kind of vanished because there wasn't a clear successor to the project.

I've got an AMD/ATI rig right now, I'm not very happy with the performance. The problem with AMD is a recurring lack of industry support for hardware features that look revolutionary and awesome on paper, but becomes deprecated by more powerful CPU's by the time they are adopted. Look at the history of 3dNow for an example. Nvidia used to have this problem, but now they're dominating the market to the point that they can push their hardware through software developers who will deliver on their promises. I like AMD, but it seems like I'm yet again paying too much to be a first adopter.

Well, I thought it would be unreasonable to ask for a consistent answer, which is why I didn't ask for one. I didn't think it was unreasonable to ask for a number of opinions, which is what I did ask for. Surely there's a ballpark number that you could guess without looking that there's some unjustifiable script use going on. If there's a metric other than script count that you would use to measure a mod's overhead, then describe it. I don't expect that to be objective either, so feel free to give your opinion and explain your reasons.

Somehow a few flaws crept into a head I was designing over the course of swapping out body and face models. I really want to keep the results, but I can't remove the seams that appear around the mouth. Lowering Mouth Forward reduces but doesn't eliminate the problem, and because it's a Redguard character it looks kind of inauthentic. I exported the head to an *.npc file, but I don't know how to use that to port the parameters back into a fresh model. Is there a less tedious way to restore this face without going over each slider by hand? Better yet, is there an external editor I can use to type the values into?

I remember that she was killed by Jager Tharn around the time the Champion was thrown into prison, and that her spirit guided the Champion though the quest to assemble the Staff of Chaos. But I can't remember what happened to her spirit after that. Was it destroyed sometime during, or did it just fade out? It's funny that even UESP doesn't have a record of her, and they've had a wiki since before wikis even existed, way back in the dawn of the internet. I think they were around since before graphical browsers existed.

I did say the question was subjective, so I wouldn't expect a hard and fast answer; more like a rule of thumb. If you admit it's a term you would apply, then what would you apply it to? Imagine that had no reason to evade the question, because I can't imagine any reason you would.

Well, you just used the term 'script heavy', but no one was there with a meat tenderizer waiting to pulverize your toes one by one until you explicitly defined it. If there were, would you be able to do that?

This is probably a subjective question, but I'd like to hear opinions to get a feel for what the reasonable script burdens are, and how much is too much. How much is too much for a single plugin? How much is too much for the total load in any given state?

Skyrim is full of eligible lovers who you don't necessarily want to marry yourself; not that you can unless you have polygamy enabled for two kinds of cheating in one. But there should be some means to resolve lovers' quests by selecting a good partner to hook the character up with, and get the quest off your active list. Then you could do the quests even if the character's and/or your sexual orientations aren't compatible. For an added benefit, you could be named godfather/godmother of their child, then you can experience some of the joy of having a kid without actually being responsible for the brat. Well, not until those parents die.

Constant disk access is really grinding my performance down. There's no excuse for it, it's like the game is ignoring available RAM to abuse the hell out of my HD. I've got HD caching disabled, cell preload limit and papyrus both set to 2GB, and the latest ENB set to 8GB. Yet task manager shows it taking ~1GB, sometimes less but hardly more. I can't walk two steps or turn 2 degrees without the game spinning my drive and stuttering my game. What does it take to get the executable to detect and use my memory?

I think I've figured this out. As long as the package is on top it may override next time packages are evaluated, if the condition is true. And anything can be used as 'use item' target, and any anim can be used as a finishing idle. So in this case, the top package should be 'use item', select an NPC, under the condition that 'GetDead == 1', and end with the idle 'StartCannibal'. I could even have him make a comment about it. I'd have it set to 'Must Complete' and 'Once Per Day', so that he doesn't stop for anything else, but doesn't repeatedly keep going back to feast again. But would this be overridden by adding scripted packages?

I'd really like to see this, and I'd been considering something like it but with the realistic expectation that a script extender would be needed. You'd have to start with more complete choice in VATS, to move, to move and attack simultaneously, to open and close doors, use exits, show fully animated stim and chem useage, etc. Make the whole combat turn cinematic. Some of it's easy enough to do in engine, use an Effect Shader to draw a grid of hexes on the ground to represent units of movement, and make those into VATS targets so you can select them. Currently VATS targets can only be shot and not selected, but a script extender would be able to locate them easier than drawing one from the Navmesh. And if every action has an AP value equivalent, then turn-based and real-time would correlate seamlessly, and it's a lot simpler to apply a speed multiplier to make some actions quicker or slower based on added abilities and perks. The animation would be a LOT of work, unless it's already been done for Deadly Reflex and the maker wishes to contribute.

Templating, yes -- I wish more things could make use of 'inheritance', like objects, scripts, even skills, both base and reference items. I came across AIProcedures while browsing the G.E.C.K. documentation, and it looks like some of these contain behaviors that Packages don't make reference to. Is there any way to set their liklihood in a Package, or do they have to be specifically invoked in script? eg, I have an NPC traveling overland to a set destination, but I want him to stop to cannibalize any fresh corpses he may come across, whether the PC is there or not.

Then do it. What's stopping you?

It'd really be elementary to script a generic fade-out that could be matched with any NPC's additional comments. Cutthroats Partners for Morrowind did this with an actually pretty graphic sound byte of loud slapping and savage moaning, and the scripting language and directory structure aren't so different now. Even without the sound, you wouldn't need animations if you're just going to fade out, simply drop both actors at the time of fade out, and on fade in allow both to rise, and you can pretty much fill in the blanks with your own imagination.