flossoraptor

Since nobody appears to have answered the OP's specific questions (although you're not wrong.. the legendary edition is just a bundle that contains TESIV as well as all three DLCs): "and the added features like combat cameras, mounted combat, Legendary difficulty mode for hardcore players, and Legendary skills - enabling you to master every perk and level up your skills infinitely." Combat cameras probably refers to the "finishing moves" where the camera will change and your character will kill the enemy in an especially brutal way. If you've played Skyrim yet then you already know that this was already in the main game. Mounted combat was included in Dawnguard. It was nice of them to include that, because it used to be annoying to have to get off your horse every time some wolves attacked you. Legendary difficulty mode is probably in the main game (I don't know for sure because I've never changed difficulty). Legendary skills was a feature that was included with patch 1.9 for Skyrim. If you own Skyrim through Steam, it has probably already updated to include legendary skills, assuming that you have logged in and connected to the Steam servers within the past month or two. Like everyone else said, "legendary edition" doesn't contain anything that you won't already have if you bought the game and the DLCs seperately.

My most useful piece of advice is this: the first thing you should do in your game is get The Boots of Blinding Speed and a spell to help you equip them without going blind. The running speed in Morrowind is abysmal and the walking speed (which is what you will want to be doing in battle in order to avoid having no stamina and being unable to do power attacks) is even worse. Honestly, I'm not even sure what the developers were thinking when they made movement speed so slow.. I consider myself a patient person and I could barely deal with how slow you move in Morrowind. Especially after playing games with reasonable movement speeds like Oblivion and Skyrim.

When Dawnguard came out, the first thing I wanted to do was to was be the first to upload a mod that lets you play snow elves exactly as they exist in the game.. meaning it's kind of a lore-friendly, official version rather than some player's imagining of what they ought to look like. It'd be easy enough, so I thought I'd get it done tonight.. it's too bad it seems that trying to load the Dawnguard .esm just crashes the Creation Kit. Is anyone else experiencing this?

A lot of the things people wish were in Skyrim weren't even that good in the first place. I like disposition, but the persuasion system was stupid in both Morrowind and Oblivion. In Morrowind it's like a game of chance that is incredibly frustrating--thank goodness for speechcraft trainers because otherwise I never could have leveled the skill up--and in Oblivion it just doesn't even make any sense. I'd definitely like to see how a character feels about me in Skyrim, but it seems that there's only two disposition choices: indifferent and friend (the latter meaning they could be a possible spouse. And will occasionally give me a thoughtful gift like a pot or 10 gold or something). Actually, I forgot that there's also an enemy option in case you've ever assaulted that person or killed someone in their family. I didn't care so much for stats. I mostly saw it as the game trying to dictate what kind of character I played. Like, why do all of the female characters have lower strength? I suppose that is more like real life, but my character is a wood elf! Is that anything like real life? Quest markers were a welcome addition. It's kind of cool that you have to pay attention and heed directions when you're finding your destination. But sometimes they're too vague (the bandit's hideout is somewhere east of here. And it's not just a straight walk east because there's a mountain blocking your path. Have fun!) and I wish I had a quest marker to follow. Morrowind's dialogue was a blessing and a curse.. it's nice that the text ISN'T voiced so that the modding community has less of a burden when making new NPCs. But why is it that NPCs in Morrowind seem to have less original things to say than NPCs in Skyrim, where absolutely everything is voice-acted? What really ground my gears was when I would explore a new area. I have no idea what the area is other than that it's some sort of building with some strange Dunmeri name. I'd walk around and talk to NPCs, hoping that they would tell me what the area was and what they were doing there. But they don't have anything to say other than "What do you want?", "I'm [name] the [profession]" and recite the same rumors that everyone else in Morrowind says.

It's not quite as deformed as, say, a Spriggan, but here's a nature-oriented race I found on the nexus.. http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/21458

FOMM is Fallout Mod Manager

Hot diggity dog! I'ma play Dawnguard! And I'm not really concerned about my mods breaking.. I go for additional content mods rather than completely-rehaul-the-original-game mods.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this, which I've seen a couple of times: there's WIP mods that are supposed to add more content to the main game. A new area, more dungeons, NPCs, items, etc. It's a huge project and obviously is going to take a lot of work. Then I go to read the description and it goes something like this "Hey guys, sorry but [mod] is never going to be released. The level designer keeps asking for deadlines to be pushed back, the mesh designer doesn't even know how to work 3DS max, the writers are all too busy working on their Twilight fanfiction, the guy who was supposed to do textures isn't responding to my messages or turning in any work, and the voice actors sound like little kids. All in all they are the worst bunch of people I have ever worked with." It's quite hilarious actually. I don't doubt that everything went wrong or that there was friction in between the modders. That is to be expected from such an ambitious project. But the only person you've really shown to be incompetent is yourself (the manager/leader): all you had to do was explain why the mod wasn't going to happen in a civil manner and you ****ed that one up big time! But yeah. People leave communities all the time. It's kind of strange, but some internet users are so committed that we begin to expect consistency from a group of people that has no reason to be consistent. Things come up in people's lives and suddenly they won't have time to do what they used to anymore. A good example I can think of this is Homestar Runner. The website used to be updated often enough until about a year and a half ago (it feels like longer but that's what I think it was) where the updates stopped quite suddenly. People (like myself) began to worry that something horrible had happened to the creators. But it turns out one of the Brothers Chaps had a baby (I don't know if it was his first or not...) and decided he needed to dedicate all of the time he had spent animating towards his new family.

With the announcement of The Elder Scrolls Online, a lot of people hypothesize that Skyrim will be the last single-player Elder Scrolls game in a long time, if not ever. But Skyrim updates eventually being discontinued by Bethesda, and no new single-player TES game being introduced to replace it, are actually the best things that could happen to Skyrim for the modding community. That way modders can develop plug-ins freely without having to worry that an official expansion will break their mod or a new game will come out before they are done with their mod for the old game. In this way, Skyrim could sort of become the pinnacle of TES modding.. Morrowind and Oblivion fell short because modding continued for 4 years or so, and then most people moved on to the next game in the series. Even now, if you were to create a really impressive Morrowind adventure/expansion, it probably wouldn't receive the attention it deserves because nobody's looking for Morrowind mods anymore. But I have to wonder: does Skyrim really have what it takes to become that? As many people have pointed out, the game is much more difficult to create content for than its older siblings.. every single line of dialogue must be voice-acted (I suppose technically not, but I think characters who had unvoiced lines would stick out like a sore thumb), some mods and scripts malfunction for no apparent reason on some computers, and in general Skyrim would take a lot more work to mod for: every time you make a new armor, theoretically you have to make four new meshes: two for different weights of male characters, and two for different weights of female characters. I almost wonder if perhaps the modding community should just take a step back and focus on creating new content for Oblivion or even Morrowind again because they are relatively easier. I'm currently playing through the entire modern TES series now (Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim.. with all currently released official expansions. Wish me luck) but when I'm done I will be focusing all of my RPG efforts on creating new content and I'm trying to decide which game it should be for.

Perhaps I didn't express myself very well. I know that it is possible to use vanilla textures and whatnot without actually including the .dds files in your mod. All you have to do is tell the Creation Kit where to find the texture in the player's Skyrim Data folder. Unfortunately this is easier said than done because the average Skyrim player has not extracted the .dds files from the .bsa so you are trying to use files that are hidden away. It's very frustrating. I even know where I would find the texture I want in the .bsa. The file path would look something like "/Armor/blades/bladesarmor.dds". But the Creation Kit does not let you type in whatever file path you want. You actually have to locate the file you are selecting in the file browser and you can't access the compressed .bsa files with the file browser. I don't think anybody has uploaded vanilla textures to the Nexus.. that is technically piracy and I wouldn't be so concerned with being sued personally but I think the Nexus would remove the file and ban me in order to protect themselves from Bethesda. What everybody else does is what I described: find the file within the downloader's directory, because if they bought Skyrim then they already have the file. EDIT: And I do know how to extract files from the .bsa. I have the Fallout 3 Extractor utility and it works just fine. I'm just not allowed to distribute files that I have extracted from it. I suppose what I could do is include instructions for installation that would force the person to extract the file themselves so that they can access them for the mod.

So I'm making an armor for a mod that is more or less a mash-up of other armors. So I made a new mesh, coping certain parts of meshes, combining them and editing them so that they fit together.. The different meshes still remain as different "objects" in the new mesh, so I can apply a different texture to each of them. That is good. However, I am not sure how to do that. I'd like to use the original textures. There is a very easy way for me to do this: all I have to do is extract the texture from the .bsa, put them somewhere in my Skyrim data folder, and then link a texture set to these .dds files. However, that would make me unable to distribute the mod because somebody who has not purchased the game could get their hands on the unaltered .dds files. How do I use a vanilla texture on a mesh? I can't get at the vanilla texture in the Creation Kit because it's hidden away in the .bsa. Another question: is distributing the mesh okay even though it was modified slightly? It's a mash-up of various other armor meshes that I had to make slight changes to in order to get it to look okay. A third question: where do I find the texture for the skooma bottle? If I can't get the vanilla textures working, I will just extract the textures from the .bsa and make the armor for my own personal use. But I can't find the texture that gets mapped to the skooma bottle mesh anywhere in the textures .bsa. I suppose it is worth noting that the skooma mesh already has the texture on it when I open it in NifSkope.. I need to get it from the mesh though, because the texture's not showing up on the skooma bottle in my custom mesh on the Creation Kit.

It seems to me that it's very much in its beginning stages.. like, in the last video I saw of it, other players didn't have any animations (or clothes, for that matter) so it was basically a bunch of naked people with their arms stretched out awkwardly just floating around. I don't even want to imagine how buggy gameplay must have been. I would recommend enjoying your single-player experience and waiting for The Elder Scrolls Online to come out. Or you could wait for the mod to get more developed (honestly it doesn't seem very promising to me though..). Or you could always play another online game. There's quite a few MMOs to choose from.

My favorite thing about Skyrim is how passionately the fanbase will argue about who is "right" in the Civil War.

I think I may have solved my problem. I ended up having to re-parent the mesh to the skeleton (or the other way around.. I still don't quite understand parenting) which is something that the import implied that it was going to do (the option is called Import Skeleton and Parent Selected! Presumably it was going to do it for me!). So yeah. What I did is I right clicked the mesh, then shift + right clicked the armatures (if that doesn't work try reversing the order.. >_> again parenting is not my best area), then pressed Ctrl + P. I chose "Don't Create Groups" because I already had all of my armature vertex groups and my body part vertex groups already set up. I just imported the mesh into the Creation Kit and everything seems to be working. We'll see what happens when I try and use it in-game though! Also in case you're wondering why I'm talking to myself: it's a huge pain to be google-searching answers to your problem, find someone who had a similar problem, and then see them say that they fixed the problem without detailing how.

I'm fairly new to Blender but I think I understand things that a modder should be concerned with.. and it does help that I've been following tutorials nearly word-for-word. But I've got an armor mesh that exports to a .nif correctly. However, when I open it in NifSkope, I find that it has no Skin Partitions. Which means it doesn't show up in-game. This is odd because I set the skin partitions already. I called them BP_TORSO, BP_LEFTLEG and BP_RIGHTARM (I don't know why I call them left leg, considering that the partition contains both legs. I was just following directions from a tutorial) and am absolutely certain that there are vertices in these groups (when I choose to "select" the vertices within the group they become highlighted, and become un-highlighted when I choose "deselect"). Also, when I export, I use default Fallout 3 settings and the "Export Skin Partitions" box is turned on. Why are the skin partitions not showing up in NifSkope? Any ideas? Here's the .blend file if this helps any http://www.mediafire.com/?m04l2v40eyk7e6k EDIT: Fun fact: apparently this is topic number 5,000 of the Skyrim Mod Troubleshooting forum! woo!