Imrinfected

So all you gotta do is, in the same mod, switch the ammo type from fusion cores to micro fusion cells. Do this by creating a new ammo type and switching names, then assigning that ammo type to the gatling laser. Rename the original micro fusion cells to small energy cells. Then you can control loot tables for gatling laser ammo without destroying the balance for other energy weapons and their ammo frequency. Then drastically reduce fusion cores in the loot tables, leaving them only on power armored enemies, in those generators and spawning inside power armors.

Design-wise, Bethesda clearly inteded for power armor to be used as a valuable but expensive weapon. Something to deploy when you're desperate and save until you really need it. In practice, their target audience must be super mutants because they throw fusion cores at you like candy. I and everyone I know, despite using the power armor non-stop, practically have warehouses full of fusion cores. I have no idea how people are making mods right now outside of resource replacers but somehow people are managing. When the sdk is released I can do this myself but until then, if someone can make a mod that removes fusion cores from the loot table and merchant tables, I'd be grateful. I'm pretty sure power armor was initially balanced around only using fusion cores you get from generators. You know, those things you have to fight through entire dungeons to get to and have a whole model, animation and sequence dedicated to them. Valuable stuff. Then you can find the exact same thing for 500 caps in diamond city, or 6 of them in a crate in a super mutant outpost. Pls fix

Has anyone ran across a variable, or some way to allow more summoned minions or followers? I found two variables: playerfollowercount playeranimalcount Which show how many followers and animals the player has with them respectively. I know the game probably uses this for checks with followers, so setting playerfollowercount to 0 after having a follower will probably allow for another one, which would be repeatable, and similarly could be done with animals(Like the dogs in the game that can follow you, I assume). I have found nothing for summonable minions, however. I know that the perk Twin Souls allows for another minion, but editing its values has given me no result. I'm using Tessnip to look through all of these, and there's absolutely no organization so it's very difficult to find anything. If anyone has found something interesting regarding this, I would be grateful for any information you could give me. I would very much like to be able to summon a great deal of minions. When the CK is released, I plan on making a mod in which summoned minions or raised minions slowly drain magicka, where their duration is indefinite so long as magicka is still being drained. Raising more minions would increase the rate at which magicka drains, but could be counter-acted by increased magicka regen. I think that's a much better model for conjurers, and could allow for very interesting fights and the ability to maintain a favorite raised minion indefinitely. On that note as well, has anyone found any way to disable raised minions turning to ash once their duration is up?

Some are stored in separate files with an _S suffix, you say? I wonder why that is.

Agreed. I think before using it, people should be aware of how it works.

Depressingly, that's true. I'm reminded of Doom 3, where everything looked to be made out of some intensely shiny material - skin, metal, it made no difference. How supposedly professional texture artists are able to make such bad specular maps(or textures in general) is astonishing, but I suppose in Bethesda's case that would be because (evidently) a person doesn't actually have to be competent or have any range of experience to work there. With that said, quality of everything in Skyrim ranges from amateur "My first retexture" quality work to very professional and well-done work. It's like Todd Howard is actually Sheogorath and really just wants to mess with everyone who plays Bethesda games, making them wonder "What the hell were they thinking?"

It really bakes my potatoes to see so many people making normal maps without speculars in them. It's not optional - if you don't include one, then the object will look very glossy, which is almost never how it should be. If you didn't already know, the specular map is a grayscale image which is contained with in the Alpha channel of the normal map, and it determines how light reflects off of an object. They're a great way to add subtle detail and greatly enhance texture quality, but they need to be done properly. Typically you can just use a grayscale version of your diffuse with the levels altered, but often times and usually for better results it's necessary to do further editing for fine detail. They're very simple to make, and disappointingly it seems most people are overlooking their usage. Another important note is that most textures need to be seamless. Skyrim reuses many textures for many different objects, with the exception being seemingly all equipment and misc items. If the textures aren't seamless then they will look very ugly in-game, as they repeat and visible seams make them look very bad. Making a texture seamless is a very simple process - just cut the texture into a 4x4 grid, flip all of the sections, and then either meticulously use various tools to fix the seams, or do a quick job with the healing brush tool or clone stamp tool(or non-photoshop equivalents). Altogether it would be maybe an additional 5 minutes per texture for superior quality. Also, when using the healing brush tool or clone stamp tool, do not sample the same section of the image more than once or it becomes very repetitive and ugly. Lastly, for Talos' sake, do some tutorials. I see so many very easily avoidable mistakes in textures that would otherwise look very good with basic knowledge. EDIT: When you use the Nvidia normal map filter, keep in mind that black is depth and white is height before converting it. It uses those two values to determine the depth and height, so be sure to actually edit your diffuse before using it. A good rule of thumb is to use a high-pass filter first to eliminate the unwanted shading that would cause strange results, and use the burn/dodge tool to add fine details for the normal map filter. When you convert it, it may(and probably will be) inverted, so either convert it with Y inverted, or invert the Green channel after you convert it. Depressingly, I see a lot of normalmaps that indent where they should extrude, and it's such a simple fix to avoid that. EDIT 2: Upscaling and sharpening a texture does not add detail. In fact, higher resolution does not necessarily mean detail either. There is a maximum texture resolution which you will benefit from depending on your resolution, and for many people textures that are 4096x4096 are just wasted VRAM. For example, assume that a texture is (unconventionally and unrealistically, for the purposes of simplification) 1000x1000, and that your screen resolution is 1000x1000. If you are in 100% view of that texture, you are getting the maximum and optimal benefit from that texture. With a resolution of 500x500 however, at 100% view of that texture, half of that texture resolution and thus vram consumed from it goes completely to waste. Please keep this in mind when making textures. At a distance, pixel ratio is smaller, so distant objects should not have high-res textures, or high-poly models for that matter. In fact, that's why this game uses LOD swaps in the first place. So things like the roofs of houses, chandeliers, places not easily reached by the player for closer inspection, should be a lower resolution than say, the ground, which they are almost always very close to. What's more, the demand for retextures is chiefly for high-resolution textures, in the 2048x2048-4096x4096 range, so anything less than that will go largely unused. Never downscale a normal map, by the way. You will get artifacts and strange results. You may downscale the diffuse and maybe the specular depending on the algorithm(although not the best practice), but never the normal. Similarly, you can never upscale any image and get better quality - it's impossibly by the fundamentals of reality, and more directly the laws of thermodynamics(Law of conservation of energy, namely) to create more from less, and this stands true with data. The normal map filter is also not the best way to create a normal. Conventionally you would use a normal baked from a high-poly version of a low-poly model on the low-poly model. That requires considerably more time, however, and the quality improvement is really not good enough to be worth it(at least for the purposes of modding pro bono).

That mod worked, thank you.

00000007 worked. Thank you. I'm still immortal though, sadly.

I'm using console commands to play as a little girl. However, I am immortal, causing horrible bugs when I reach 0 HP. I need to set myself as non-essential, which means I need my own baseID. How would I go about getting that?

Oblivion had it as well. I'm curious as to how it works if it is present. I tried experimenting with the method used in FO3 and Oblvion, but got nothing. Oblivion did not use POM. It had a parallax mapping shader, but it wasn't POM. At the time Oblivion was released POM was only just demo'd. It was using parallax scroll mapping. :geek: And how did you experiment with the method used in F3 or Ob? NiTexturingProperty nor BSShaderPPLightingProperty exist in Skyrim nifs.. What does exist is several unknown floats which appear to affect the material, the shader flags: which are just strings of numbers atm and have no names, and so on. Anyway I have been looking into this. Many of the textures have a sort of height map in the the diffuse maps alpha channel. I have also found a _p.dds texture. That's about it. Several texture that you'd expect to have some parallax... just don't. Like cave walls. I tried added a height map to the diffuse alpha. It didn't do anything, of course. I also tried boosting the height through the blue channel of the normal, which obviously didn't work. A _p texture though - that's interesting. Considering the naming scheme of the other textures (_n, _g), I can assume that that means "parallax". What about those doors in nordic ruins? They seem to have a kind of depth to the texture. Surely that's not part of the actual geometry of the model. I looked at the textures and didn't find anything indicating parallax, however.

Using icons in a grid let's the player locate and recognize items much faster than with a list. With a list, the player has to read each individual item's title, whereas a grid allows the player to simply skim through until they see the right icon. The amount of time for recognition is shortened with a grid and icons. Like I said though, there aren't any icons and they would be a pain to make. Condensed lists would be acceptable.

I saw this mockup posted on /v/ http://i43.tinypic.com/1676xz9.jpg I thought the layout looked alright. I think a grid would work better than a list to make better use of the space, and perhaps use more of the screen for that and have the 3D view of the item in a smaller space. Since there aren't any icons though, multiple condensed lists would be ideal. Less scrolling to find an item is always better.

Oblivion had it as well. I'm curious as to how it works if it is present. I tried experimenting with the method used in FO3 and Oblvion, but got nothing.

I haven't noticed the use of POM in Skyrim. Is support for it even in there?