lazyskeever

Character voice sounds, including grunts are in .fuz format which seems to be some special compression format. There are tools available to convert .fuz into .wav and then back again, like Unfuzer. Most of the sounds you want to change will probably have the "dialoguegeneric" prefix in the file name. And thanks for the compliments on my mods ;)

Solitude with custom furniture models, probably from a modder's resource.

I don't see much of a reason to own a console anymore... the last one I bought was a Gamecube, which didn't see too much use. I used to enjoy console gaming on the side of PC, because the market was primarily dominated by Japanese games which offered a genuinely different experience. With the Xbox 360, there was a paradigm shift. Western, former PC-centered developers took over and pushed out the Japanese to irrelevance. The few Japanese games that are left now are usually too niche for me to enjoy. So what we're getting now on consoles are pretty much gimped, watered down versions of what I used to play on the PC 10-15 years ago. Then there's the fact that the convenience and ease of use factor has been gradually chipped away by the console manufacters, so the days of just inserting a game and enjoying it from the get go are coming to an end. Thus consoles have largely become more like PCs, but without any of the real advantages like modding, free online and the open environment.

Maybe it's a tungsten bikini.

This is all very confusing. What's the reasoning behind making it exclusive to SkySummer, and what's even the deal with SkySummer going away all the time?

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/40190/? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJO0Rv_O_YI Major update! Destruction sounds have gotten a lot of attention this time, and I finally got around to creating brand new, unique casting sounds for the mind-altering spells of the Illusion school (which previously just shared the firebolt sounds). Many people had grievances with some of the vanilla sounds, like ice spells being really harsh on the ears. So I tried making new ones that are more toned down in the mid and high frequencies... while still sounding quite sharp and frosty. Flame/fire spells have also been pretty much completely overhauled. I didn't really think it felt right sounding like you were holding an entire bonfire in your hands, so all the burning noises have a more soft, windy nature to them now. Pretty much been in crunch mode all week finishing this... I hope you like it!

I've always been bugged by this particular sound called wpn_impact_generic_lofi. Basically it's a very dull sound with a neutral character that you hear very often when hitting stuff in the game (any object with any type of weapon), even though there is a rich variety of different impact sounds available. Figured out that this sound will play once when you hit a surface different from the last one you hit, and after the initial impact any subsequent hits will start playing the sounds appropriate for the havok material. This is something I've been wanting to adress, so it just plays the proper impact sound straight away, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. At first I thought it was something hard-coded or embedded into the havok data. But when I look at the Sound Descriptor settings for the impact sounds in the Creation Kit, I see that they all have wpnimpactgenericlofi listed as an Alternate (the arrow impacts do not, and aren't affected by this issue so that makes sense). But this is set up in a weird sort of way so you can't change the alternate sound from the Sound Descriptor in question, you have to go to the Sound Descriptor for the alternate sound you want to use and assign it to the chosen sound. So I guess the solution is to just erase the Alternate data from the Sound Descriptors somehow. Only I can't figure out if there is any way to do it in the CK. And yeah, I've tried assigning the same sound as an Alternate for itself, but that didn't seem to do anything. Then there's of course the question of why Bethesda even made impact sounds behave this way in the first place...

The distant land are made up of separate low-quality meshes and textures, so unfortunately it's a bit of an eyesore no matter what you do. You could install the Real Clouds mod to cover up some of the ugliness.

I am asking because I so often run into issues and stupid mistakes that may be so bad it may require me to scrap hours of work because of some misjudgement I made much earlier... Trying to create interiors right now using a hodgepodge of different styles of statics, from Solitude, Whiterun, Castle Dawnguard, etc etc. These statics are typically much more divided into smaller pieces than what you usually find among dungeon statics and the likes, they require much more precision in placement and I have to set my snap-to-grid to 16, or sometimes even at 8. Usually I end up with stupid errors down the line because I'm awful at measuring distances properly and may be off by just a few grids, then subsequent statics will be placed according to that inappropriate placement which can really ruin the symmetry. Hopefully there are some veteran house modders active here that can share some tips and techniques to avoid these headaches.

If we assume that the majority of visitors to the site are American, then I would place a safe bet on the afternoon and evening hours for American time zones. Of course, that may also mean a spike in uploading activity so your mod may just be lost in the fray.

In Oblivion NPCs that were marked as essential would simply enter a temporary ragdoll, impervious to harm if theiri health reached 0. What came to mind for me was that this mechanic could be used on NPC followers if you prefer to play without risking their death. In vanilla Skyrim, followers will simply kneel when they are near death and enemies will completely ignore him/her. But they can still be killed by you which can get extremly annoying (for example their hitbox still acts as if they are standing up, which has fooled me many times over when trying to shoot enemies behind them). I think a cool alternative would be to make your follower unconscious instead and remain a ragdoll for the duration of the battle.

Make a named save for your character by opening the console, then "Save inserttexthere". Then you can safely create a new character, and then load up the old one again when you wish.

Download here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rkrr3ylwb1ws93v/ismagic.zip This is just a hastily thrown together preview for feedback purposes. Just replacements with no .esp so far. It's part of a larger project where I'm overhauling many of Skyrim's sounds. Eventually I decided it would be better to split the project into different modules. I've been working on archery, melee weapons, world interaction (doors, looting, etc), footsteps, UI and of course magic. Magic is one that I feel needed the most attention. Skyrim's vanilla magic just sounds so thin and homogenous, most of it being little else than high frequency sizzling and crackling. It's also one of the hardest aspects to do sound for given its abstract nature. That's what I recall the sound guy saying in one of Skyrim's Making Of videos and he was definitely right. I'm also doing this as a learning experience since I'm very interested in sound design but have next to no experience with it. In particular with magic sounds I learned a lot of cool tricks on the way like EQ automation to shape the "swooshes". So instead of everything sounding like a frying pan I've tried to make the sounds meatier with a bunch of drones and such. More in line with what you'd expect from classic high fantasy magic. Each school of magic should also have its own set of drones to help set them apart more. Restoration for example has dissonant choirs which is pretty typical of "holy" magic sounds. For conjuration I used a lot of whispers and rhythmic gates (this is a very popular "modern" sound design trick which I think is blatantly overused, so I try to use it in moderation). While I was working on this I ran into some obstacles though. It's not something you really think about since the vanilla sounds all sound so alike, but there really isn't much coherence in where the different school sounds are assigned. All of the staple illusions spells like fear and fury use the firebolt sounds, for example. I haven't gotten around to remedy that yet. I plan on creating some new unique sounds for those spells, then I'll have change the assigned sounds for them in the Creation Kit. This will likely cause conflicts with popular gameplay mods like SkyRe though so I'll also have to make compatibility patches. In addition, most of the new sounds are in stereo but are still assigned as mono in the game, so I'll have to make some edits in the sound descriptors for them.

You mean something like the shared stash from Torchlight?

I encountered the same problem when working on my sound replacement mod. I think what I'll do is assign completely different sounds to the firebolt/fireball spells, then just replace the original firebolt sounds with more well-rounded magic sounds which affects everything else using it. Of course, when editing that stuff you're going to run into conflicts with gameplay mods that change magic, including overhauls like SkyRe.

The easiest way to replace a sound is to do it just like texture replacements, have the new sound as a unpacked .wav with the same name and folder structure and it will override the original. The sound files are loaded into "Sound Descriptors" in the CK, and in turn these Sound Descriptors are assigned to their corresponding things in the game. There can also be multiple sounds loaded into the same Sound Descriptor, making it cycle through them in a round robin for variety. What you need to keep in mind here though is that the firebolt/fireball sounds are very often used as catch-all magic sounds. Illusion spells like fury and fear use the exact same sounds, for example.

I need some help with this. I know that the sounds are stored in the ".fsb" format which is common for many games (however it seems not all of them are identical formats?). I've googled around a bit and found that the most used tool for converting is FSB Extractor however the website doesn't seem to work. It may be abandoned and gone forever for all I know! I've tried some alternatives like Game Extractor, and even went so far as to grab one specifically made for Need for Speed Shift but neither worked. If anyne has a working mirror for FSB Extractor or an alternate extractor which does the job properly, I would be grateful.

You know, I was thinking lately if it was somehow possible to make the player able to interact with the grass somehow, so you could cut it down just like you can in the Zelda games.

I am currently working on a project to expand the length of vanilla dungeons with additional cells, together with viltuska, the author of Skyrim Sewers (hopefully will also manage to recruit more talented modders down the line). Dwemer ruins have been getting a lot of attention from me, with some new tiles for more flexibility and variety in architecture. Alftand is being significantly extended to actually make it somewhat feel like an epic journey down to blackreach instead of an afternoon stroll. Here are some screens I took last month Large Cavern Frozen Hallway Leaking Pipe Junction Alternate Path Docile Centurion And here are some mockups rooms with the new tiles for testing purposes http://imageshack.us/a/img10/1350/od53.jpg http://imageshack.us/a/img834/3889/cycw.jpg http://imageshack.us/a/img96/638/cy56.jpg http://imageshack.us/a/img594/6705/mkwg.jpg

Bump/normal maps usually require a good deal of manual work to actually look good though. There are some tutorials I've found here and there by googling, but that's mostly for brick wall textures. I'm having a lot of trouble creating normal maps for rock/cave textures that don't look like crap.

Now, I know LoL can be quite rage-inducing, but to quit Skyrim modding over it...

I'm curious on how feasible this is compared to previous Elder Scrolls games. Morrowind and Oblivion simply had the UI made up from many little bitmap images that could easily be edited and replaced just like any other texture. All I know about Skyrim's UI is that it is Flash-based and the graphics are probably made out of vectors. I would like to create a different look for the UI but I have very little experience with Flash compared to traditional 2D design. What are the files that store the UI graphics like borders, icons, etc and what do I need to open/edit them? Would editing them conflict with mods like SkyUI? I'm honestly a bit worried since I expected someone else to have tried this by now.

You'll have to buy the game.

Apologies for the late response, but thanks for your help. Managed to change the havok material, however I wasn't counting on the icicle mesh losing its original collision data just when making those changes in NifSkope... suppose I'll need to spend time on that too. On a related note I still haven't figured out how to remove that blue/purple shine on the mesh which persists even though every listed texture has been changed. Is it some kind of specular map?

Let's say I've switched textures on a model, like having a wood floor instead of a brick one, or changing the icicle meshes into stalagmites. But they will still play the sounds related to their original texture material on collision, like footsteps or weapon impacts. How would I go about changing that? Is it done in the Creation Kit or in NifSkope, or with something else? When browsing in NifSkope I came across some HavokMaterial parameters, and I have a suspicion it's related to that. I have no idea how to edit those properties though.