hymhym

\Documents\My Games\Starfield\Saves That's where mine are at least. I assume it's the default locations, unless you change your settings and stuff.

The thing with the release of AE is that in should not really affect anyone in any adverse way at all. You do not have to update your current SE build, you can continue chugging along just fine. There are steps you need to take though, and it baffles me how many do not seem to understand these really basic things about this game we spend so much time fiddling with. Now this is a bit blunt opinion, I do admit, but can't help but feel that the state of modding these days has given rise to a culture of complacency. I get the drive to make modding more accessible and easier to get into, but still... a certain level of basic understanding is a must. But what do I know, this is only my opinion after all. As for the release itself, I welcome it even though haven't bought it yet. I will, at some point, but am busy with other stuff so am in no hurry. I never bought any of the CC stuff, and got my SE free as an upgrade and only paid full price for the base game 10 years ago. Got the DLCs when they went on sale. So to me the 20€ price tag is not that much of a biggie, and who knows, come this years Winter Sale, it might be offered at like 20% discount, Might grab it at that point, and by then SKSE is bound to have been updated, as will some of the most crucial DLL based bits too, like Fuz Roh Dah (or someone will have made an alternative.) So for me at least, the price tag is well within reason, when compared to the new content it offers. A lot of it is pointless crap, but plenty enough seems worth playing through, and bunch of the new assets it offers come in handy on personal mod builds. I do understand why someone, who has bought lot of CC stuff already, or is running a build using lot of specialised DLLs, might feel miffed, but honestly though (especially someone who is running a heavily modded build using lot of advanced features utilizing DLLs) veteran modders should know by heart the steps one needs to take to preserve previous builds for personal use. And on that front I fail to see how this is a modapocalypse. The thing with modding is, that modders come and go, and so do mods too. Some mods will never get overhauls needed to make them work with AE, and new ones will appear that wont be available for anything but AE, and your personal build will shift with times. A mod build is never really done. It's something one constantly tweaks and modifies. Unless you are running someone else's build, but in that case, it's the person maintaining it that keeps fiddling with it. I have no reason to expect Skyrim mod scene to die anytime soon, and wont really be impacted by AE. I bet Starfield will have a bigger impact of Skyrim modding than AE will, and even then new stuff will be kept made for Skyrim, and made for all it's editions. Modders do not mod because of Skyrim, we do it because we want to mod, and the avenues available for that are few and far between. Modders mod on the platform that suits their needs the best. Heck, people still mod Oblivion and Morrowind, and when TES6 finally releases, some people will keep modding Skyrim. As for the releasing of the AE itself... Well, again, from personal point of view, I welcome it, since it offers all that CC stuff for a quite reasonable price. But if you have them already... Well it might be less appealing, but thems the breaks. Can't please everyone. It does make sense from a corporate point of view though. Microsoft sunk a crapton of money into the company and want to see some profits, and Skyrim is still the best money maker the studio has. Starfield is still a year away, and TES6 will come in some distant future date, so how does the studio make profit? By re-re-re-re-releasing Skyrim of course! Now I am not fan of this development, but am not oblivious to the current state of the industry to not notice the impetus towards MTX and recurring user spending. As Todd himself noted in that interview some while back, Skyrim is sorely lacking on that front. The CC models doesn't work when it competes against free mods, loot boxes would be pointless in a game where you have access to the console and the frigging game editor itself. So what can you do? You keep re-releasing the game with some minor tweaks and new content. I don't like it, but that is the reality of the industry itself, and despite all the meme-worthy fun it provides and how much we like to poke Bethesda for it, the Re-releases of Sklyrim are far from the most aggravated ways game companies monetize their products. Heck, just look at FO76 for what is considered "normal" these days. On this front, am quite interested to see what sort of model they will adopt for Starfield. They have to add some MTX or recurring spending to it, or it simply wont have margins large enough to make it worth the effort in the modern market. But the whole point of their model, and long long long development cycles is the fact that their games keep selling for 10+ years, and can be re-released several times. Oblivion is still selling for 20 bucks on Steam for efs sake. And you know what, fully modded to modern standards, it is definitely worth that price tag. 15 years after its release. Not a whole lot of games that can be said about. Personally, I think Bethesda will go for a model similar to what Sims4 has. Constant release of content and asset packs and mini-mods that add new features and maybe new world space and stuff. (They did mention in one interview that one of their engines positive features was how fast they can set up new worlds with it.) That way they can preserve the fully moddable nature of the game, but still incentivise people to keep spending money on the thing. I mean, if the latest hot and trending mod uses stuff from the latest asset pack... Well, you are kinda pressured to get it. And it works. Full version of Sims4 costs like almost 900 bucks! And a lot of people have spent that on their game. And the mod scene for that thing flourishes as well. Thore is crapton of free stuff available for it. So 20 bucks for the new features (and any CC you have not bought already) is not that bad. I mean, even if you vector in that a lot of people buy their Sims4 DLCS on sale, you'd still be hard pressed to have spent that kinda of money on Skyrim, even if you bought all the versions, and did so at full price. But enough already, sorry about the novel and all. Jut felt the need to vent my 2 pennies worth on AE and it's release. The bottom line, for me at least, is that it isn't the end of the world. Just relax and chill, in 6 months things will have settled back to business as usual on the modding front. And in the meanwhile, you can still keep playing your old build, or play other games. As for me, I will be playing Oblivion since I just upgraded my computer to latest monster specs, and my new beast of a rig can finally run my 500 mod build, with about 60 gigs of graphic enhancements without crashing. So I'll be busy with that for a while. And come this spring, I'll give AE a spin while waiting for Starfields release.

For a good while now, I've been trying to mirror two interior meshes for a mod project I'm working on. But no matter what I try, I just can't get it to work. There are always weird graphic glitches, or parts of the final mesh will blink in and out of existence, or the textures get garbled depending on the angle of my camera. Like they get distorted or bulge or seem to move about the surface in a real odd manner. As a graphic artist, I am familiar with 3d software, but would not call myself a 3d modeller. I work mostly on 2d stuff and only use Blender occasionally. So I am fully aware, that there is a lot I do not know about modelling. Especially when it comes to textures and stuff. I mostly use 3d to set up perspective for my composition and then do the texturing bit by hand while painting... I have, however, edited and tweaked fair number of Oblivion meshes and have had no issues with modifying their geometry. This is the first time I am trying to mirror a mesh, and it has me completely stumped and the errors I get baffle me. I just do not understand what could be the cause of the problems. Googling has not been all that helpful either. Any advice I've found on the matter has failed me, and more often than not, lead to totally unrelated topics. None of the suggestions I've found have led to a working nif. I get the feeling that there are some steps, that are common knowledge to more experienced modellers, that I am missing, and thus they are not spelled out in the advice I've found. Or maybe it really is that complicated an requires advanced modelling skills... At this point, I just don't know. If someone could possibly bring some light to this matter, I'd be ever most gracious for such assistance. If it is harder to explain than to actually do, then I'd be quite glad if someone could flip the two buggering meshes in question for me. Though ideally I'd like to learn how to do it myself, so that I could mirror other meshes in the future as the need arises. There's some statues I might like to mirror at some point in the not too distant future for that symmetrical look... In any case, the meshes I am trying to mirror are icgroundfloor26.nif and ictopfloor26.nif. They are the ones used for the interiors of the Arcane University buildings. As you enter icgroundfloor26.nif through the front doorway, you will find the stairs to the upper floor on your left hand side. What I need is the same nif but with the stairs on the right hand side, and obviously the upper floor to match the ground floor. I've been at this on and off for several months now, and really could use some advice on it.

Do not pay any attention to the man behind the curtain.

The game doesn't force you to participate in cannibalism, unless you want to get all the achievements. But achievements are not character specific so you do not have to do everything with one character to gain them. Furthermore, there are some glitchy ways you can still gain 15 daedric artifacts even without doing the cannibal bit - although it does require some wheeling and dealing, and you have to do at least some "evil" acts. The way I dealt with it, was that I did all those daedric quests cautiously (after all, when one is dealing with daedra, one can expect things to turn foul at some point, so it's prudent to be cautious) and if the quest had tasks that I could not see my character perform, I left them for later. Then, when I had done all the quests that did not require me to do anything unsavory - relatively speaking that is - I did all the gruesome quests in quick succession. After having gained the Oblivion Walker achievement, I just reverted to an earlier save and did the quests again, but this time refusing to do the dastardly deeds. Well, all except Boethia's - that one I skipped. Couldn't figure out a way to get rid of that quest without doing the questionable stuff, so I just chose to ignore it. As for the cannibals: I went along with the quest up to the point where you are supposed to kill the priest. My take on it was that my character was playing along to find out all the members of the coven. Once they had revealed themselves, I just killed everyone one of them. The quest of course "fails" then - but it gets resolved, in other words, it's removed from you active list. To me at least, it's just as good as "successfully" completing the quest.

You're wrong. OBGE works just fine on windows 7. It can be a hassle to set up, and a lot depends on your graphics card, and you need to do ini tweaks. But it really is no harder than any other advanced modding bit. And the results do look amazing, so it's well worth the effort.

I guess it's a play style thing, but I find horses indispensable. The key reason for this, is of course the fact that I do not use fast travel, at all. Furthermore, I avoid running. It really rubs me the wrong way, to have my character run all the time everywhere. And since the walking animation is just insanely slow, I use horses. As an added benefit, they are really good climbers and can get me to places I couldn't go otherwise. And while they cannot carry stuff as such, they do not care about how much you are carrying. You can have encumbrance of 10000 and the horses don't care at all. It helps me to retain immersion, when lugging a heavy haul of loot from a dungeon, if I have my trusty steed to help carry all the junk. But, yeah - all the horses in Skyrim are psychotic and go into a killing frenzy at the drop of a hat. They also have random moments of utter cowardice and disappear into the woods without any real reason. Or sometimes they jump down from mountains, plummeting thousands of feet to their death, apparently just for kicks. And for some crazy reason, NPC's feel that the horse is a far greater threat than the guy in the heavy armor wielding a really big axe. All in all, handling horses in Skyrim can be really frustrating, but I still like to have them around. And I really like their animations (the idle animations that is, their trot and gallop look bit awkward to me), they seem to give the horses tons of character.

The changes to the camera is, at least to me, the biggest single WTF aspect of Skyrim. I really wish I could turn in place. The way the camera switches to vanity mode if you stop moving, is a feature I simply do not understand. It's really disorientating and doesn't seem to serve any purpose. The only reason I can come up with, for having such a feature, is the fact that the inventory screen doesn't have a "paper doll" anymore, and you need it to look what your character looks like. And why have the camera behave differently depending on what you are doing? I think it should be over the shoulder or behind the head all the time. This default system just causes odd situations and your "alter ego" getting spatially displaced when changing camera modes. Personally I would prefer it to be behind the head all the time, but understand that some prefer over the shoulder. But the thing I find really perplexing, is why not let players choose themselves and to customize the camera settings to their liking? The engine obviously can handle it. Why can't I have that? In fact, why not have multiple camera settings? Racing games have them, why couldn't sand box RPGs? You could have a set of customizable cameras, some tweaked for functionality, others for cinematic purposes, others set to your custom preferences, and you could switch between them at your will. That's what I'd like to see. Oh well... At least I managed to "fix" some of these issues by tweaking my ini files, but not all. And thankfully the game doesn't have forced head bobbing. Far too many games force you to have head bob these days.

Chuck Norris used to be invincible, then he took an arrow in the knee...

You really should edit your post and add some paragraphs. As to the content or your post: Yes, that's the way it is. Some like it, others hate it and most just don't care about it. From a modders point of view, it's annoying, for it makes modding harder - harder than it needs to be. Losing all those stats and stuff means we have to create our own variables on which to base our mechanics. Not saying it's impossible, but having a general set of stats would sure have made things a lot easier. Having the broken system from Oblivion would have been better than not having it at all, for at least a broken system can be fixed. But Bethesda's philosophy on fixing things is cutting stuff out. Rest assured, that you are not alone with these feelings. There are literally dozens of such threads on this forum alone. All we can do now, is to wait for the CK, and see how much of such features we can re-implement ourselves.

For me, it is all but impossible to name one game above all others. Like most matters of taste, my choice depends on whatever else is going on in my life at the time of the answer. At the moment I'm playing Skyrim, and like many others, feel that Morrowind was the greatest thing ever in gaming history. But is it really the best? I can't say for sure. I did immerse in it, in a way that has been rarely matched since. Oblivion, fully modded, came close, but in vanilla state - no contest. Oblivion loses. And so does Skyrim. While I can't name one game to be the absolute favorite, there are some games, that I feel to stand head and shoulders above the rest, and this is (in no particular order) my list of such RPG games: Ultima Underworld - the first one. While Labyrinth of Worlds was bigger and looked better, it didn't have the same impact as the first one. Suikoden 2 - I like Suikoden games, each and everyone of them, but it's the second in the series that feels the "best" for me. FF7, FF8, FF9 - was for me, a magical sequence of games, a time when It seemed Square could do nothing wrong. Each have their own reasons to be on my list, very different reasons, and it is really hard for me to say which one was the best. Planescape: Torment - It's Planescape! What else needs to be said. And as and added bonus, it's also a really good game. Morrowind - for reasons I doubt I need to mention Daggerfall - is still the king of game space. over 60000 square miles of game world! Kingdom Hearts - yeah, it's silly and cheezy, but so wot? It's also criminally charming. Jagged Alliance 2: While some might not consider it to be an RPG, I feel it's about as much as any of the others I've mentioned, and it is a great game. Ultima 7 part 2 - the high point of Ultima series in my opinion Ultima IV - if you weren't there, I honestly don't think I can make you understand what is so great about this game. All I can say is that it was revolutionary in it's day. Alternate reality: The Dungeon - Kinda like Ultima Underworld, just years ahead of it's time, coupled with that alien feel of Morrowind. That game rocked. Xenogears - The one I tend to pick as my fav if I am forced to only choose one. It has everything. Exotic locales, truly epic storyline, great characters and a smashing soundtrack. I'm sure I forgot some, but not listing Oblivion is intentional. Oblivion does not make the list. Modblivion does, but that's like saying your car model is the best car ever made, since you've customized yours out of the wazoo. And the same goes for Skyrim. Oh, I quite agree! It's just so heartwarming to watch. And I really liked how it gave a sense of closure to all the principal characters. Something that many games fail to do at all.

For non-mage charactes I have always preferred the Atronach sign in TES games. In Skyrim I find it even better than usual, since all it does is slows your magicka regen, which really is not an issue at all. All I really use magicka anyway is healing, and since I use 2 handed weapons, and the way spell casting is set up in Skyrim, it's not something I can do with spells in the middle of a battle. Healing happens between foes and when standing in a dragon's breath. I really find it a bit over powered to be honest. The 50 point magicka boost is 5 levels of attribute gains, and on top of that you get a partial spell absorption. And since magicka regenerates way too fast as is, you really don't even notice the down side. However, for mages In Skyrim , I'd suggest the Lord stone.

I feel voice acting is over rated. It is not a must have feature in any game. It saddens me that it is considered to be such by the game industry. I miss the olden times when there was no voice acting at all. I could project my own interpretation onto every character, and have them sound the way I thought they should. With some characters, that I really connected with, I found myself voicing their lines myself. Having dialogue as text just means that the way you experience differs from the way you experience voiced dialogue. When reading dialogue in a game, you are using the same techniques that you use when reading a book. It is more subjective and personal experience. Having them voiced is like watching a movie. It is entertaining and gives you an experience you would not have created on your own. Both approaches have their merits, and uses. Of course, they do also require bit different approach on the part of game design, and mixing them in the same bag will lead to... well mixed results. If a game has good voice acting I like it, if it has bad I dislike it. Same goes for text. I can't say I ultimately prefer either approach, but wish that not every game had voice acting just because that's the way it's done these days. One thing I'm sure of though - I like silent protagonists. When the characters you play have their "own voice" it is jarring for me, because I am supposed to be that characters voice. But I'm a roleplayer and get pretty deep in character with the characters I play. I develop a certain personality for all the characters I play, and if the in game voice acting starts spouting stuff that goes against this perception of my character, I find it an immediate immersion breaker. I'm sure this is just my personal opinion and there are plenty of folk who feel otherwise. Just noting that there are some pros to having a silent main character.

That's a perfect example of a broken record. And it always comes up when someone is criticising a game, any game. The other broken record is "the ones who like it are too busy playing it". To me it seems, these are taken out of the book "trolling 1.01". Hear, hear! My thoughts exactly. Skyrim has a nice engine, and is mostly a good game. But it is not the greatest thing on this planet since flan flavored soap. Most of the criticism piled against Skyrim are quite reasonable in my book, and have nothing to do with hating for hating's sake. We, the customers, were promised a dynamic and rich world, a clear improvement over the previous titles. We did not get that. Sure it's pretty, but what game isn't these days? And of course it's tech is better looking that it's five year older sibling. That does not make it automatically the bestest thing evar! And stating that thing, does not make one an unreasonable git who just can't appreciate the awesomeness that is Skyrim. As for what is bugging me about Skyrim, is it's shallow nature and hollow dialogue options. What I was looking forward in SKyrim, were all those much hyped improvements in the way the game handles AI, quests and dialogue. And the way it was supposed to track all your actions, and to use them to mold the playing experience. But so far I've seen none of that. In fact I keep bumbing into really sloppy oversights all the time. Stuff that even Oblivion got right. A simple example: I recently revisited Swindlers Den (Since my Map didn't label it as being cleared for some reason. I thought I had missed some treasure chest or something and went to check it out again.) When I got there, much to my annoyance and total breaking of immersion, I found that Kematu was still hanging around (with his five mates) in that last chamber. Even though I finished the quest with Saadia weeks ago, weeks in real life. Couple of months in game time. The cave had reset while I had been away, and was full of bandits. Had no problem with that. An empty cave in the wilderness? Naturally a new band of brigands will move in sooner or later. But why was Kematu still there? After all, he was supposed to have returned to Hammerfell with Saadia ages ago? It's like the developers assumed, that I would never bother to revisit that place ever again, so no need to clean up those character refs. All they'd had to do was to include one line of script that turned those refs off after having finished the In my time of Need Quest. Not doing so is sloppy design. Another event that really rubbed me the wrong way, was when I finally got around to joining the companions. I marched in the hall in a full suit of enchanted Orcish mail, lugging around Volendrung on my back and wearing one of those Dragon Cult face mask artifacts. The dialogue was utterly ridiculous, and was clearly written under the presumption that I would join the companions at the start of the game. When I really was a just a whelp in rags in need of proving myself. It made no sense for them to speak to my level 42 character that way, especially when I was a frigging thane in their town. Now, do keep in mind, that I am not saying the dialogue was bad. It was actually fairly well written and quite entertaining. It just made no sense in my situation. The thing is, if you publish a game, that touts the go anywhere, do anything be what ever you want to be aspects of it's design the key selling point, then you really should design your games quests and dialogue to be more adaptable and better mold itself to the events that have taken place in the game. The way these things are implemented in Skyrim, is as they would have been done in a fully linear game. Having an open sandbox world and quest lines that assume you do them in a certain order, and never revisit any place for any reason, is just a stupid combination to have. And again - do note that I have never said that the game is bad. I'm just saying it has some rather serious design issues. And it could have easily been even better.

Sorry, but not gonna vote on that. While I detest anything Zelda, I've heard enough about the latest installment to admit it's a good game. And if it wins over Skyrim, then so be it. I like Skyrim, but I like many other things too, and far too many features in Skyrim feel half-assed and frankly too sloppy, for me to start carrying it's banner in a fight.