Erisine

I'm wondering then if it would be possible to "undo" damage by creating a "Uninstallation Mod" that swaps the offending new script out with the Vanilla Original (thus hopefully overwriting any changes) and then a savegame can be made? I really rue many of the changes made by Bethesda to the way modding now works.

I want to work on what should have been an extremely simple mod. Using the guides at the wiki, I made a change to one of the game's scripts and compiled it. I then was able to use the new compiled script to run the mod in my game and I could distribute it. However, I've found that uninstalling the mod isn't nearly that simple. Even if you remove the compiled script, objects it effects in the game-world are not updated. (And there are a LOT of objects - it alters all ore nodes.) Is there a way to force an update, or better yet, insulate the mod? Or is there a way to alter scripts without doing so much damage that I just haven't discovered yet?

F2P just makes it even worse. "Free to play" games are never actually free -- they're just gimmicks where they let you download the client, but in order to actually ENJOY the game, you are perpetually doling out cash in micro-transactions. Instead of paying 15 dollars a month and having access to all game content and being an "equal customer" with equal potential, you are more likely to be paying 60 to 150 dollars a month to get access to all the content. F2P MMO business models aren't going anywhere because they are cash cows, but they are NOT the friend of the consumer. Honestly, I am horrified to see a TES Online game. I see it as the end to the immersive, single-player experience. I think we'll need to host a community-wide funeral event for the series once the Online game comes to fuition, since, at that point, it'll be setting the stagnant point in TES's timeline (you can't legitimately have games "go forward" in history as they have always done) and it'll be generating new and likely contradictory lore.

I concur with this. There's actually already keywords that you can vote up and down on for a particular mod (like, "anime", or "horse mods") -- but my experience with this is that the author can lock out votes from this, and there is no way to use these in order to filter mods into or out of searches.

Honestly, if you want to crap a brick over the fine print in a EULA, go read EA's Origin's service terms and be mystified as you discover you've given them the right to not just snoop about what games you are playing licensed to you through them, but also the right to track every piece of software on your PC, how you got it, where you downloaded it from, whether it was key-genned, cracked, or legal, how often you use it, and more, right down to your hardware specs... I wouldn't be surprised to see little goodies appearing in those EULA's in a few years giving EA the right to turn on your webcam remotely and spy on you live. EA sells software through Origin that isn't actually able to WORK on Origin (and you can't start it without), and they do so without telling you and they don't offer refunds -- when it comes to deciding who's more evil, the choice is clear. But seriously, the EULA for Steam isn't that dangerous. It covers their butt in the rare case that they need to fully lock down your account -- normally, if you've been very naughty, they're just going to lock you out of the multiplayer functions for a particular game, though. If Steam makes use of this power inappropriately, and too often, people would notice and they'd likely get some hairy lawsuit, bad publicity, and an uptick in pirating (which means, loss of sales). All very bad juju for Steam, so they're not going to go around taking away your games. Besides -- all DRM is flawed, but it's not inherently evil or bad. I think Steam is thus far the best attempt at it, since they at least provide a service that most of us Steam users enjoy.

It would not work at all like it did in NWN -- the armor and weapons in Skyrim are statically textured. To get armor that is customizable, what I imagine a modder would end up doing is painstakingly go through the armor list and make a new static armor texture for every single dye color, per armor, and create a new instance of that 'recolored' armor. In the game, they would have to create a scripting event that would change out armors on the fly, which I'm not even sure is possible. That's just me guessing, though.

I noticed in the game that the developers appeared to have gotten lazy, and just assigned the fox the same sounds as the wolf -- worse yet, they are even at the same volume. Foxes don't sound anything like angry growling wolves, or any other 100-pound canid for that matter... I'm hoping someone could release a fix or provide it as a modder's resource? (If not that... if anyone knows of a tutorial that deals with setting new sounds, I can try to do it.)

That virus shouldn't be blocking the Kaspersky tool -- what error are you getting when you try to open it? Or is it straight-up closing on open? Are you working in Safemode? If not, restart your computer. As the PC begins to boot, hit F8 repeatedly until it stops booting and gives you the option to start Windows normally or start in Safemode. Don't be alarmed if things look really weird in this mode if you've not used it before. In Safemode, go ahead and run MBAM first (the Malware Bytes software) since it'll just suck up everything tedious that may be on your system. If, while MBAM is running, it just automagically closes on you, or refuses to open without even giving an error to explain why, it's probably because you have another type of virus that knows to kill to antimalware. After MBAM runs (or fails), try and run Kaspersky TDSSKiller again. Google around and see if you can find a support forum if that doesn't help. :( I hate doing wipes, so I feel for ya.

Before the kit officially comes out, I decided to go ahead and spend some time learning the basics behind creating custom textures. I've started by reading through some of the tutorials found on the construction kit/geck wikis and watching some YouTube videos (which proved to be far, far more valuable). However, almost ALL of these are specific to retexturing armors or weapons -- but my interest is actually in retexturing critters (and later on, as is required in my mod plans, creating all new ones -- but one step at a time). I've noticed that almost all of the animals actually have multiple files instead of just one neat little texture file. For example, wolves have: wolf.dds wolf_b.dds wolf_n.dds wolf_sk.dds wolfblack.dds wolfred.dds I've figured out that wolf.dds is the default, and wolfblack and wolfred are just variants. I also think I've deciphers that wolf_n.dds actually stands for the wolf's "normal map" (something that is also incredibly alien to me, but I'm patient). What I can't figure out is what the _b files actually are for, or why wolf_sk.dds is a smaller version of wolf.dds -- what is its significance? None of the tutorials really go into these kind of questions, so that's why I've decided to post here. I'm hoping someone could also explain how the game knows where all these textures actually GO on a model (they look like horribly complex sewing patterns, without any of the markup).

TDSS is a particularly nasty strain. As of a couple of weeks ago, I was finding a few that would identify like TDSS (3 and 4) but behaved more like Zero Access on steroids. A sign that you've got the nastier one is if Malware Bytes gets shut down or you can't run it a second time. Kaspersky has a tool called TDSSKiller: http://support.kaspersky.com/faq/?qid=208280684 It has some moderate success in removing TDSS.