DixiePig

I've played Enderal through to the end, and it is fantastic. It feels grander than Skyrim because they spent time on a core cast of characters. Each has their own personal stakes in the overarching story, which makes it actually mean something to the player.

Hi, haven't done it for a few years now but I'd like to help. No matter how you do it you will need to use nifskope. I have used three different methods to get my models in-game. In ascending order of difficulty: 1). .obj: Only works for items like swords that do not have bone weights. Export your mesh from blender in .obj form and import it in nifskope. Take a vanilla sword in nifskope, save it as your own and cut and paste the data branches of your exported sword into it, deleting the vanilla data branches where necessary. 2). Outfit studio Works for outfits, armor; things with bone weights. Might work with swords but I've never tried. Export your mesh from blender in .obj format, import into outfit studio (OS). Weight paint in OS. Export to .nif and make final adjustments in nifskope. 3). Blender .nif scripts I don't know if they work for the current versions of blender. I had to install the ancient blender v2.49b and install the working nif scripts for that, and use blender's "append" feature to get my model into the older version for export. DON'T DO IT THIS WAY unless all else has failed. It's really annoying. I'd be happy to provide any more specific details you may want. Feel free to pm me for instruction if you prefer.

Wish I could be more helpful, but I wanted to say that this armor looks fantastic. When I made outfits using outfit studio I just copied bone weights from the body. It may be possible to import, say, the leather body armor piece and copy the weights from that.

I think there was a female Necromancer follower in "Interesting NPCs"

My favorite recommendation is Death Alternative. Basically, it lets the game continue when you lose fights. Getting beaten is costly, but leads to new and interesting situations. It means that fights have real stakes. Instead of just reloading over and over until you beat it, you have to pick fights more carefully, and approach the game more strategically.

Well, welcome to the modding community! I like to hear what you're saying about 3D modelling, I hope to see your work soon!

Yep, that's what I needed to know. Had me confused for a minute: turns out that both the armor item and its component armor addons need to have a matching reference to the slot they are using. Thanks! Any further word on implementing scripts would be appreciated. If nothing comes up then I suppose I'll release it as a cosmetic item/modders' resource.

I'm working on a set of slave items: A bomb collar, wrist manacles, and ankle manacles. http://s19.postimg.org/p7ex7vyov/manacles_006.jpg I would like these to be worn as accessories without taking up any slots used by vanilla clothing items. If anyone could point me in the right direction I would appreciate it very much. Also, this is a bit of a stretch, but I would like to give them some functionality if possible. For example, placing them on a pacified NPC turns them into a follower. This is complex and I would imagine would be a job best left for the GECK, but there have been similarly complex mods created, such as the power armor companion mod. If anyone knows anything about how to do that I would appreciate any info. Thanks!

This looks like good info, I'll look into it at the next opportunity.

Update: Faction rank values show some weird behavior at values over 100. When increased above a value somewhere around 130 (probably 127), the actor is removed from the faction altogether. There's a lot you can do with numbers between 0 and 127, but it falls pretty far short of an int.

The creation kit basics forum at TESA has tutorials that should cover everything you need. They'll take you a few hours to complete and then you'll have all the skills you need: http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/forum/114-creation-kit-basics/

It's important to start small so you can test ideas and get a feel for how much work/time things require. A lot of people come into modding with grand ideas of forming a team and making a huge mod. Do not join their team. A sword is a good 3D modelling project to start with, as they are less work than armor or statics and don't require you to figure out weight painting or collision.

I like this approach. Especially the part about avoiding save game bloat. So attaching ints to actors without conflicts or bloating is doable. That means that we can also assign more complex data, like a custom struct (does papyrus support those?) if we can have queue of structs somewhere, and use the faction rank variable as indices to access the queue. Could I attach an object script to a rock in a test cell , and use that script to hold and manage all the data?

Right. I'll see what I can accomplish with just the Actor variable floats. Thank you both for your help. Any tips in the interest of minimizing conflicts?