Stemin

According to the actual game save files I have 429 hours on PC, but Steam is saying 460. If I had to guess, I'd say that accounts for times I didn't save as well, while testing mods I was working on. Taking that into account and adding my 823 PS3 hours, I get 1283, which is actually less than I thought I had by a mile. I bought the PS3 version about 2-3 weeks after launch. No idea when I got the PC version, but I think it was after xmas. Also taking into account my first character I deleted and some other characters deleted on ps3, (along with the rental) I'm going to give my final number at about 1500 hours on 8-9 characters, but I can't verify the accuracy of some of those numbers.

The 100 hours are on the xbox as I got fed up with the crappy UI on PC and lack of gamepad options. So I don't see how there could be a setup issue unless you're referring to my in game choices. I spent most of that time doing the quest to cure myself of vampirism, since to my annoyance just sleeping a few times progressed my vampirism to stage 4 without warning. Just some vague messages about shadows and whatnot. Took me a while to find the exact information in the menus.

Show you how to do what? Copy a slaughterfish? That would be a mod, not stock, which is what I was (clearly) referring to. I don't have the time, nor inclination to keep track of all the mods out there.

If you're using 3ds max, the .nif exporter has issues. This should help: I _think_ that's the right video. If not, check his channel. Two things come to mind. Either there's a problem with the .nif export (which is covered in the video) or you had an issue with the weight slider, but helmets supposedly don't have weight sliders. I say supposedly because I've found a lot of the stock .nif's do indeed have a _0 and a _1.

If you find out anything please share it with the community. I keep searching, but I've found very little information on this. The major issues seem to stem from using a new skeleton, and while I'm sure there are people who have done it, there is very little information on HOW they did it. And that's just on the graphical side without worrying about scripting. I don't think the scripting would be as bad as people are making out in the thread unless you want some type of new behavior. You really could copy everything from the slaughterfish for those animals and just use your own animations for each event. Also, just to add, you keep making aquatic type animals, but I remember reading somewhere that there are issues when placing creatures in the water... Something about if you put them too far away from land it freezes up the game or slows it down or something? There might be something to that since I don't ever recall encountering slaughter fish in the actual ocean in game. I could be wrong.

The search engine has been screwed up for a while, I noticed. You can do a search for the exact title and things won't show up. Popular stuff like UNP (yes I know you search for Diminized), Deadly Dragons, etc. It turns up all kinds of supporting mods, but not the exact mods themselves.

I'm not certain what takes priority when creating a potion, since it doesn't even seem to matter always what category you're in either. I suggest you simply keep track of what ingredients you're using before you hit the create.

The bugs in the stock game are not keeping you from finishing anything and they're mainly minor things. If you're not playing without mods, then you really can't dispute this.

It was fun to watch and pretty well put together. Some of the poor folks at the PS3 board I frequent got all excited thinking this is what they're getting when they finally get dawnguard. Kinda amusing. Dawnguard is awesome, a lot of fun, but hardly like the video. Bethesda would have gotten sued in a heartbeat if they showed that video as a trailer since it's so heavily modded.

How did you determine that these things all fell under "economy" ?

Ok, that worked good. I didn't think it was going to. Not because I doubt you, but I didn't think I was doing it right when I didn't make all the layers visible. Now that the shininess is gone I just have to play around with it and get it to be roughly the same brightness/contrast as the stock robes I was gonna wear it with. Pretty disappointed with the amount of clipping I'm getting considering this is a stock .nif. One more question... When I created a new channel (which took some playing around to figure out), I got a dialogue box which I'll attach an image of. What settings should I use here? What do these settings mean?

Ok. I never worked with alpha channels before.... I loaded the normal map in PS and looked in the channels tab and it has 4 separate tabs. RGB, and then separately, red, green, blue. While the RGB shows the whole image, my normal map, the red and green channels are almost completely gray, while the blue channel is almost completely white with the exception of the silver trim on the edge of the hood which is gray. So could you explain to me what I'm looking at and how I should separate the gray scales that you explained in your first post?

So I'm trying to make my latest character build (pure mage) a little more fun by doing a few little changes that require minimal amounts of work for the most fun. One of these is doing a few custom textures. Basically I'm copying some existing .nif's and textures, retexturing them and then using the CK to add them as a new item. I'm not sure if there's a more efficient way to do this, but it works. The problem I'm running into is all my new textures are very bright, even black. I'm using photoshop, cs5, and I took the mage hood .nif, desaturated it, and then turned the brightness down until I basically had a black hood. Small change, but fun to play an evil wizard. I later attempted to add some silver trim and runes. I'm not crazy about how they came out... Anyways... A black hood and yet in the game it shows up shiny, almost like a satin finish. I could almost live with it except it doesn't match the stock black robes. I think the problem is partially related to my file format. I've done a little bit of custom mesh work following Nightasay's tutorials and one thing I remember him saying was to pick a color darker than what you intend because they show up bright in game without an "alpha property". He went on to say that alpha maps were more advanced stuff he wasn't teaching at that point in the tutorial. I've never used the .dds format before modding Skyrim and I'm using the NVidia tool plugin. I generate my normal maps using the provided filter and save them as a DX1 RGB, No alpha. It sounds like this might be one of my issues? How can I start making my textures better. I don't really know what an alpha map is. I know what a specular map, normal map, and glow map are, if not exactly how they work, but I'm not sure about an alpha map or if that's really my problem.

There are things like Quarl's Texture pack that are supposed to improve the graphics, but there's no fixing the horrible face renderings I don't think. Everything I've read indicates that the game engine uses the facegen software to build character faces and, IMO it makes everyone look like they're a distant cousin of shrek. There are also some bug fixes like the unofficial official patch or the unofficial official mod patch, but unfortunately again there are some side effects. I couldn't get the UMP patch to install on my game, even after consulting the author (who gave up pretty quickly after asserting that the patch doesn't normally install without errors). After install the game would crash at startup every time until I removed it. Many people use it however, so I'm certain it's some kind of conflict with my system. The downside is, after reading the changelog, you're always going to be at the mercy of the authors interpretation of just what a "bug" is. For example, from the UOP, changing a character's health level to match existing characters, like: "The lich Erandur-Vangaril will now have proper health (15x the player's level, as is standard for all liches, instead of merely 15 which made for an anticlimactic battle) " Or changing ai behavior: "All of Sakeepa's (Aleswell) sheep will now properly follow him during his shepherding, rather than just the rams " Just two examples I pulled real quick from the version history.

I also never use followers unless playing a pure mage character, in which case I don't know how you survive without one unless you're using some kind of mod that buffs destructive magic, but I don't have any of the problems you're suggesting with stealth. I have a feeling your sneak rating is too low when this is happening. Yes, followers do draw enemies to them because they're clutsy as hell and yes they do set off traps, but once your sneak is high enough, NPC's will still generally dash right passed you after your companion. I never bothered to look in the CK, but I think some NPC's are more "alert" than others as well.

Dawnguard isn't that buggy. Your mods are causing it.

This isn't the first time this question has come up and I'm going to give the same response I gave before. I think 90% of the people in this thread are bias because they played Oblivion first and they're not really qualified to give a fair answer to the question. Nostalgia has a way of clouding judgement as well. From someone who played Skyrim first, I've tried to get into Oblivion about 6 times now both on PC and Xbox 360 and I just can't get into it. I've logged over 100 hours, enough that I feel like the game should be taking off, but it's just not happening. All I ever heard was how much better the side quests and story was in Oblivion, but so far they're the same fetch quests as Skyrim. In fact, a lot of them are worse because the game makes you deliberately wait 24 hours before getting your reward as the NPC "prepares" your potion, or what not. Lots of things are timed, so you have to really pay attention to the hours. Not a big complaint actually, but not really anything special. I'm having a real hard time finding things to DO in Oblivion. Skyrim lets me walk around an I can find random encounters constantly, but all I see is the occasional wolf or imp in Oblivion. The leveling system is horrid. In over 100 hours I'm about level 4 or so IIRC, and yes I'm aware their are mods to fix things, but we're not talking about modded Oblivion now are we? I could go on, but like I said, this has been discussed before.

Define a "real fan" and then explain to me what makes you so qualified to define it. :rolleyes:

What does any of the above have to do with the question? You're not seriously suggesting that the reason you can't skip dialogues is because the game was designed for consoles? Sounds like just another excuse to get in a personal rant.

I highly recommend Nightasay's tutorials: http://www.youtube.com/user/NightasyTutorials But the whole .nif system is just a PITA, IMO. A texture replacer is simple. You just edit the dds file and make a normal map or whatever is required. But if you don't want a replacer, then the only way I know to do it is copy and rename all the .nif's associated with that item and then add the item with the CK. Lots of redundant stuff like editing the blocks in nifskope, 2 for males, 2 for females, 2 for argonians, 2 for argonian females, etc. etc. It's a time consuming, PITA. Making your own mesh is actually kinda fun, but then you have the same problem. You have to edit the mesh for each body style to make sure it fits and then play in nifskope for each one. The redundant parts keep me from getting anything done because I only feel like doing a little at a time.

The runes don't bother me how they turned out. They're ok.... just the style. I think maybe I would have gotten better results with either going with the greybeard mesh (instead of using the mage hood) or else completely doing a different style of runes. I think I would have been happier with something like this: http://www.minecraftforum.net/uploads/d424a80f76e16bf552a09fae02fee808_130661.jpg?_r=0 But I'm not a good enough texture artist to pull off that level of detail, so I went for this: http://images.cosplay.com/thumbs/33/339785.jpg But like I said.. I'm not sure that's the right mesh for that kind of design. That hood is too sleek and I'm also not sure I like the overlap at the bottom (although _that_ I could fix with a texture edit). I could make a custom mesh, but it's so much more work.

Not sure I like how it turned out.... Not exactly what I was going for.

Oh wow. Yes. That's exactly what I needed. I was looking for something that worked the same as the "clear" command under edit, but with a brush, and the eraser does just that. I never used it before and honestly wasn't sure how it worked. Didn't even think about it. Thank you.

Is there a tool that acts like a brush, but instead of leaving a color, it clears whatever you run your mouse over? I'm trying to do some runes on a hood, but they're very small and the thought of outlining them and making them look like cloth is very intimidating and I thought it would be easier to just duplicate the layer, change the color of the upper layer and "clear" the runes using the original cloth texture underneath. Using CS5

This has been asked before. I didn't know the answer then or now, but I do know that what I would do if I didn't get an answer here, was look at the scripts for the stock game for the quests that I know are repeating.