EmuXanadu

I know what you mean SC2 is still £25 on Amazon in the UK. The thing is Blizzard don't exactly churn lots of games out like other companies and when they do release something it stays full price for years on end. Its annoying when you consider that Heart of the Swarm isn't even a standalone expansion either. Still other companies are known for being very infrequent with their price drops, I'm thinking of EA here. :wink:

Yes thats right, whatever texture mod you choose will overwrite the ingame textures for all female characters. To be honest you can't go wrong with downloading them and trying them all. If you only try one at a time you can easily remove it if its not what you want. Dead easy if you use Nexus mod manager and as long as you check with the original file even the manual way is very simple. Mature skin texture and body is another mod worth looking at too, older looking but still very attractive and certainly more natural. Whichever one you choose take a look at The Eyes of Beauty and the Longer Lashes as complimentary mods too. Haven't tried Cute Eyes.

Question is do you want more of a supermodel look? If you do go with Bella's if you want something more natual then use pretty face. Alternatively another supermodel type one is Coverwomen: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/3563

@thebeast505 Yeah you'll be fine with those mods you've listed. As long as you don't download massive texture mods like 2K textures you should be fine and performance should be acceptable.

It depends a lot on how much FPS you are expecting. Some people simply won't play the game unless they get 50-60fps with 16x Anisotropic and 8X AA turned on. I have an i7 processor with 4GB RAM running on Windows 7 64bit but my graphics card is old and lacking (Radeon HD 5670 1GB, can't afford to upgrade at present). Even so the game still runs at a good 30-40fps outdoors and 45-60fps indoors with the official HD textures for vanilla Skyrim. However I can't stand the vanilla look so I use an ENB mod which gives me performance of about 28-35fps outdoors and the same as vanilla indoors. I have anti aliasing switched off. Theres no reason you can't run Skyrim imho but you may need to compromise on some things. For a start I have grass distance at 50% and shadows on high rather than ultra. Besides if you do run into trouble theres a whole bunch of tweak mods for performance on the Nexus, ranging from ATAK to Hlaago boost. Plus theres texture optimisation tools and other stuff. Also not ENB's are created equal some perform better than others so if you want to run one you might be able to. For example Stakado Cinemascope ENB gives me exactly the same performance as vanilla. In short you can run this game but you'll have to tweak it to suit yourself. :)

What about the Stalker games? Well the first and third one anyway. They're pretty good if you use the Complete Mods on ModDB which fix a lot of bugs and improve the graphics. Theres also Risen, I didn't like it myself but then I wasn't keen on the Gothic series, but some people really rate them. Dark Messiah of Might and Magic as has been mentioned isn't bad, old but definately cheap enough to try. The Thief games are also well worth playing if you can track them down. More action adventure than RPG but they have a pretty unique world kind of steampunk/medieval fantasy. For sheer gameplay providing you can look past the age and the dated graphics theres Baldur's Gate 2 which every RPG should play at least once. Planescape Torment is another old but great game with great storytelling. I know you said you're not keen on Star Wars games but Knights of the Old Republic is a great RPG with a good story. Jade Empire is another Bioware game worth looking at.

The one problem with this idea is that Skyrim needs certain NPC's to be essential due to the random dragon attacks and also the vampire attacks in Dawnguard. In Morrowind NPC's never really ventured into danger so it wasn't neccessary for them to be essential whereas in Skyrim each NPC has its own wander package so they can quite easily be killed if not flagged as essential or protected. The easiest way to make this mod would be to go through every "Essential" NPC in the CK and flag them as "Protected". This means the player can kill them but not anything else. However from what I've read the protected option doesn't always work all of the time. So best to try it and see. As for the message popping up telling the player they've killed a vital NPC I really don't have the first clue since I know nothing about scripting.

Morthal and Dawnstar. Morthal would look so much better if there was some more houses and if it had even more of a spooky atmosphere given the surrounding swamps and the local vamps. Dawnstar is just incredibly dull and really needs some work, its a port for goodness sake not a hamlet. Winterhold is rather pointless too beyond the College itself and while it fits with the lore I would have preferred more evidence of the cities ruins dotted around the place for a little more atmosphere. Falkreath which I do like also needs a much bigger graveyard given the locations history.

http://www.nodiatis.com/pub/9.jpg

You could try 2K Textures instead of Realistic Overhaul. For lighting maybe Climates of Tamriel but I'd wait a bit on that since the new version is due out 30th March.

The Dark Brotherhood are way more evil. For a start they get their contracts from the corpse of an old hag in a coffin. They take delight in the pain and suffering of their victims. You are required to kill to become initiated into their guild. They get paid to kill people. By comparison the Thieves Guild are greedy low life scum who intimidate, steal and brawl. They even point out that you are not to kill the target. Sure they're a dodgy bunch but not as much as the DB.

If by distant blur you mean the Depth of field, go into ENB ini and change EnableDepthOfField=true to EnableDepthOfField=false. The black bars are typically under the Vignette setting which is either in a text file called "Effect" or "ENB Effect". What you're looking for is "#define HD6_VIGNETTE" you need to add two slashes in front of it like this //#define HD6_VIGNETTE.

Send me the two meshes if you like. I'll sort it.

Well its a bit hard to tell you without knowing what exactly you've altered. Is the model for the ground version of the helmet exactly at ground level in Nifskope? For example is it exactly on the centre axis or is it up in the air with the white bone lines attached? If it looks like the latter then its set up wrong and its always going to be floating. Are you 100% sure you've set up the model right in the CK? The World Model is where you point the CK at the GO or GND.nif. The armor addon is where you point the male and female biped models to the wearable helmet nif.

@IsharaMeradin: Thanks I forgot about the armour addon. Too used to the old Oblivion way of doing things. :lol: @ArtMurder: This custom helmet model you have does it have a gnd.nif? If it doesn't that would be the reason the dropped version is floating in the air because its set at neck level for a character, the one to wear if you follow me. To sort the texture issue you need to load those textures into the CK as a texture set then edit the helmet as mentioned above. To alter the model itself in nifskope to point at the correct texture path you need to select the object in nifskope then navigate to BSLightingProperty, beneath that select BSShaderTextureSet. In the list at the bottom in the block details list you'll see the little purple flowers. This is where you change textures. If you're really stuck with this I'm happy to help you out feel free to PM me. If you don't have a gnd.nif for the helmet I can solve that problem too since I do a fair bit of 3d work. :)

Its been a while since I did this but heres my method. Hopefully it works. Go into the CK. Go to Miscellaneous/texture set. Now you want to create a new texture set for every variant you want. For example "MyIronHelmetTextureBlue" etc. When creating the texture set, point the diffuse and the normal at your custom textures. Make sure your textures are in their own folder and uniquely named to avoid conflicts. Then open Iron Helmet in the armor section and make changes for each variant you want. Ensure they all have unique ID's so once again "MyIronHelmetBlue". Then in the section at the top middle right where it says Male/World Model. Click the edit button. Then double click the name thats in the section that says 3d Name, for the iron helmet it will be called Helmet:GND:0 then point it at your newly created texture which will be "MyIronHelmetTextureBlue". If that doesn't work you may need to alter the nif files and point them at the textures. Hopefully that helps. If its wrong, well my excuse is its been ages since I did anything like this. Just trying to help.

Sounds like a great project and I certainly don't mind doing some texture work for you. The Grandmaster outfit could be done quite easily by retexturing an appropriate set of robes. The gauntlets in the concept image look a lot like the Dawnguard Vampire gauntlets which could be retextured or you could even use daedric ones. The banner is a dead easy job. Plus I was kind of thinking of retexturing the Dragonborn Chitin armour into a proper Morag Tong version anyway. I assure you I can make 3d models and texture to a good standard and I'm also used to messing around with Nif files.Only real issue I have is rigging which I hate, I can do it but it takes me forever. I don't have any mods on Nexus but I'm quite happy to PM you some examples if you want proof of my abilities. :)

I tried Realistic Needs and Diseases and its a good mod but I found some of its effects somewhat game grippling. Limping around with progressively developing rockjoint may be immersive but it certainly wasn't any fun. I use Total Realism Overhaul- Basic Needs instead. Frostfall is awesome but you've already mentioned that. You could have a look at ASIS I really enjoyed that. Duel Combat-Realism is really great too, makes it a little harder for stealth characters since the enemy will continue to search for you but its really good. Is Skyrim Unleashed any good? The reason I ask is that I typically use ACE or SkyRe but I liked the sound of Unleashed.

Sorry my bad post was for wrong game.

@ShimoOkami Sounds great. If you want a hand with any textures let me know.

I've been thinking of a salt mine for ages so hopefully this gets made. More salt for cooking in Skyrim please. It would be interesting to have a salt mine under Imperial control, you wouldn't even have to mine it you could always have the mine protected by troops and a vendor who sells salt piles to visitors. The reason I suggest Imperial control is that historically the Romans paid their soldiers in salt and the Imperials are very Roman (sort of). :)

I really like this idea. Personally I think more Argonian stuff is a good thing. Great to see some meshes being worked on too but I'm just wondering if maybe a lot could be achieved with retexturing. The Blades Akavir armour retextured could work if maybe the sleeves where chopped off, the Forsworn stuff might also work if the fur was maybe changed to feathers and even leather armour changed to a light coloured snakeskin or a patchwork leather might look the part. Even those Forsworn deer helmets could probably be adapted to Jaguar or Eagle armours, was it the Inca's or Mayans who had those? Can't remember.

Depends on your own interpretation really, all are equally valid opinions. That was just my own personal feeling on the issue. :)

Dragonborn was certainly worth it. I'm pretty sure I got a good 20 hours or so out of it. However in some respects Solstheim feels far smaller than it was in Bloodmoon. Maybe its the fact that I don't have to walk around at a snail's pace everywhere or that it is actually far smaller. A lot of the new locations seem very close to one another so it doesn't really feel like theres a massive amount of exploring. I have to say some of the new dungeon designs were really good such as the one in the mine where you have to get the Bloodskal blade. Much as I love Morrowind I don't really get that nostalgia a lot of people mention apart from the classic music playing in the DLC. Well I do sort of but in a sad way. Its kind of heartbreaking to walk around and see a tiny slice of Morrowind with ash heaped all over it. The last silt strider reduced to nothing more than a tourist attraction. It really makes me miss the colour and oddity of Morrowind, the swamps of Seyda Neen and all the varied plant life growing all over the place. I know its part of the story to move on and have Vvardenfell devestated but in some ways I feel like Bethesda said "Stuff Morrowind" just to prove they aren't ever going back. I actually feel Soltsheim was really depressing to adventure in, since it was either ash covered landscape or frozen wastes. In all honesty I prefer Skyrim and thats purely a choice not a criticism. The ending was a bit of a let down really. I don't like the idea of serving Mora either but maybe its always been the Dragonborn's destiny to serve him, Bethesda know but we don't. However its not very heroic to make deals with Daedra to defeat an evil villain only to end up essentially becoming another Miraak yourself. As for Dawnguard everyone seems to pan it but I actually enjoyed it. I liked the whole artistic style of the Forgotten Vale and although its flawed in the sense that both questlines essentially play the same I don't think its as bad as everyone makes out. Maybe I just got something different for it, boring world if we all felt the same.