red33mer666

this is awesome news. just because I am curious how the end product would work and for more info, I have a few questions, do you intend to have mods installed server side? and just have the players run off of a client? also will you be somehow disabling the console? I know that these things are the end all be all here at mod central but in order to have a fair game Cheating should be kept to a min or allowed without restraint. how about moderators, do you plan to have someone moderating full time to assist players? whatever the case I cant wait to try it

we should also consider that Bethesda did all this on purpose. Not only to give the modding community something to do before the CK comes out, but also to give everyone something to *censored* about on the internet :D, I mean what would we do with our lives if everything was perfect LoL

I agree completely with the workflow problem. this is how it should have been done. and yes any guy with a job can buy a machine that will pwn the hell out of a console. That however is not any longer the target market for games. the people who bethsoft and EA and Ubisoft are all looking to grab are 10-15 year old kids who dont have jobs and have to beg their parents for games and upgrades. This is a very smart marketing move by both game studios and sony/microsoft. After All they have been hitting record sales numbers year after year by selling the same product that is, yes, five years old. the nice thing for us to think about is all of the actual innovation is being done on the pc end. Just think, when oblivion was released programs like Zbrush and mudbox had just barely come out and the back end integration of those programs into existing 3d editing software and game engines is where the real revolution has taken place. and look at how much better skyrim looks then oblivion, at least on the character level (I think the environment textures are about the same) but what is possible now was not possible 6 years ago when oblivion was released on the very same platform. none of that could have been done without the demands of the modding community. we are what pushes companies to do better, because we innovate for free on our own time and help shape standards that weren't around at release I agree that Skyrim deserves to be a next gen game, but I am a pc gamer and I realize that I am a minority on earth in that respect. and really isn't reaching for the very limits of what your Game experience can be part of why we are here? We buy and mod and rebuy components because that is what owning and running a pc is all about. I mean if you wanted everything to be perfect out of the box wouldn't you just be happy if the box were an xbox? there is always the next threshold

one thing that hasn't been mentioned really is designing for architecture. I am uncertain if the PC, Xbox, and PS3 versions of the textures are identical but lets face it. When Designing for Consoles you have only to deal with two different types of video architecture which at this point are absolutely known variables. When designing for PC there are as many different cards and different proc/ram configurations out there as there are gamers, and all of them have their up and downsides. It would be impossible to put out a game that ran perfectly on everyone's machine with highres textures. The reason we even have Awesome TES games is because Bethesda has for the past little while been able to walk the tightrope of offering very close to the same game on all platforms and we should be grateful for the console users because it allows them to fund such an ambitious project like Skyrim. In the end I totally understand the gripe but since the Elder scrolls franchise has an incredibly adept and ambitious modding community. its possible that for pc users they knew they couldn't please everyone so they figured they would release as is and let us sort it out. I mean after all its only been a month since and I have an extremely hi res modded copy of skyrim running on my machine, and it doesn't even slow it down. Not to mention that we don't even have the CK yet. But that all comes with custom settings and tweeks that Beth soft probably doesn't have the testing resources to deal with.

just for reference the in game Parthunnax model is 15653 polygons. if that helps at all

this is great stuff and thanks for the upload however my game crashes when I play as a dragon and try the "takeoff" command. it does this if I have the free camera toggled on and off. Any ideas why?

Oh I think its totally possible and I think it will be one of the first things that lots of people work on when the CK comes out. Like it has been mentioned before in this thread, Someone managed to do this in Oblivion and they only had a static model of the Statue of Akatosh. Meaning someone had to rig the model put the mounting node on, do all the animation and sound effects and then figure out controls. I haven't played oblivion in a few years but it seems like the guys behind that mod were also making it so the dragon could attack and use some type of breath weapon, I am unsure if this ever happened, but if it did that would add even more complexity. All of this with out any sort of Beth soft support. Now we have: Fully functional Dragon Models (several different ones I have looked at with 3DMAX) lots and lots of animations for them that look very good if not great(all the movement animations are in the bsa's I checked). animations for attacking from both the ground and in the air, Breath weapon mechanics and a semi cinematic sequence for mounting the dragon (although this is something I would change right away as right behind the head is not where I would want to ride my dragon from). and lovely sound effects. Also about flying, Any 3D engine that will allow for you to fall several levels to your death will allow for flight. Since there is already the functionality built in for you to be clubbed 100 feet into the air by a giant or for a dragon to pick another npc up and fling them hundreds of feet, flight is totally possible. and basically too any where on the map. however things like cities will still have to be entered through the front gate, much like in oblivion, where if you rode your dragon into the city it would look similar but no one would be there. so no dragons in Dungeons or cities I also think the dev's made it so it would be pretty easy as they knew a lot of us would want it. but as a plot device to further the story line kept it out of the game. Remember that it is in a Dragons Nature to Dominate and not be Dominated. So really someone may just have to figure out how to code the collision data so it works while flying (this already might be there in the dragon models and animations, Again this was done in oblivion where there were no dragons at all) Then figure out where to put the bone node for riding the dragon, code in the commands for forward backward left right and such and how to trigger the attacks. pick the animations to use (you dont want them all because they wouldn't all apply) and Viola. Course I could be completely wrong but it seems to me that Bethesda would have known we wanted this and would probably build in partial support for it. It may even be the first piece of DLC, and that maybe why the CK is taking so long to get out is they want to have that done before the CK, so they could get there first and charge for it, I would totally pay for it