snapmoderator

Ok that is brilliant! Soolie mentioned in his post above that he can help out with potentially doing a series of alphas for trees, so lets just make sure we have good communication on what we are doing :) As far as compatibility goes, we have to serious weigh up what that means. Because we are altering models and textures, the answer is probably not, as quite often these overhauls are specific. Also we are really controlling our own looks to get the seasons right, so trying to make them meld to other peoples overhauls is sounding like too much. Better to make most of what people like about those overhauls and incorporate them into this mod as best as possible. Vurt's Flora Overhaul we use the resources as best as possible for our spring/summer or whatever, so people feel like they are not missing out. Full credit of course to Vurt and others with permission.

Yeah of course Soolie :) Added you to the team. Maybe before you do anything we should establish what trees we are actually going to use. It might not be that we choose the vanilla trees. I was saying in my first thread that I want at least one tree that would blossom in summer and spring. What do people think about tree selection? Default or use modders resources?

Because this is a recruitment thread we are going to need somebody to help out with creating a series of alpha changes for trees and plants for removable of leaves. If you can imagine doing a sequence of these for each tree so that eventually there will be no leaves at all. Very easy but we are trying to spread work load, so please sign up to become part of the team. http://i.imgur.com/efDweRE.gif

We also might be able to change alpha opacity variables on models using SKSE, which will be excellent for grass, trees and plants for varying levels of dying and growing. Here is an example of aspen tree minimum and maximum opacity, so although not a huge difference, enough that we have another tool up our sleeves for gradual changes. http://i.imgur.com/5Lvv1xJ.jpg

Right, silly me. Yeah it would be cool, but unfortunately changes won't kick in until a load happens, so unless they walk outside into stormy weather, they wouldn't notice any changes running around outside. Its possible to have an MCM option that forces game reloads (like cut to loading screen) to happen so that people who want these types of things to happen like heavier snow fall settling on surfaces during snow storms and trees grass blowing more wildly can happen. But that is a bit immersion breaking so probably won't be that popular. Understand about the colour and height variations and limits we have with using these too much. We should be able to change the colour of grasses using SKSE shader functionality as one tool, but this is a global change to the entire texture. So we can make the whole model greener, browner, etc. But of course we will have grasses that have multiple colours, but still will help with having to create less textures. Also a we might be able to manipulate sizes of grasses, bushes and trees using SKSE (NiTriShape.Scale) so that we can do this via programming rather than physically creating multiple models with different sizes. The power of Papyrus and SKSE is actually pretty amazing once you look at it more. But this is just me speculating at the moment. At this stage assume that we have to make multiple models for sizes.

There are 2 variables "leaf amplitude" and "leaf frequency" that we could change on the tree group. I don't think its that dramatic a change, but a little experimenting tonight will hopefully prove how useful this will be altering these.

I think snow and grass will change daily. I can even change the snow into subtle moss/grass shaders for a bit of growth on rocks during spring and summer. Grass values like density, colour and height changing daily means we can make it grow/die gradually, before we transition to potentially another texture or even model. It not that much work to make it daily as opposed to every 2-3 days. My post here has specifics to periods of tranistions and yes we will have MCM so user can change timing :smile: http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/1210819-wiprecruitment-the-changing-seasons-of-skyrim/?p=10123792

The plan is to have many transitions between the seasons :) That's what we are trying to do. Some will be daily like grass and snow changes. Other will be less frequent like ground textures and trees. Actually my first thought when doing this was to actually check lore to see if Tamriel might have other seasons, but didn't turn up much on it. The calendar months of Skyrim give away the seasons. I mean to be realistic we should probably look at Scandinavia seasons for best looks? I was thinking about the weather, and obviously what we want to do is change the chances of certain weathers frequencies depending on the time of year. But also the switches between them tend to happen rather quickly, especially if you run from one end of the world to the other. So I was wondering if we should tone down the rate of change by a lot? Snow storms that actually last a couple of days. Need to check out Climates of Tamriel and see if they have built in much logic as far as frequencies and even how weathers transition.

More scribbling; I was thinking about how we define periods of when transitions happen. I'm thinking rather than by calendar date we go by time. Seems odd, but you know the first thing people are going to want to do is to see the changing of seasons in a short period of time, just for curiosity or testing. We will be the same for testing. If we have transitions and cycles based on time then we can set intervals via menus with SkyUI. This will mean that seasons are out of sync with the calendar, but users will know this will happen, and we can have a menu option which is sync with calendar. By default transitions are monthly and daily. So we set monthly transitions at 24(hr)x30x1(frequency)=720. Daily transitions at 24(hr)x1(frequency)=24. We can just have a frequency number that can be lowered or raised to times these amounts to trigger times when transition events occur. Now what say if we try and do 4 seasons in one day literally :-P Of course most liking is that when a load happens (interior to exterior, fast travel or even a start game load) that we are going to check if interval is within a certain period. The "problem" being that if a person runs around for half the day without a load, then the season will potentially swap to opposite seasons. Like from summer straight to winter. No problem in my opinion, setting a frequency like this is not exactly gaming immersive anyway, so gamers will have to expect that.

More from SKSE

I got a quick reply from ianphatt I've posted requests into the forum, but it might be a case of decoding stuff ourselves. Tinymight are you up to the challenge of looking at SKSE source code? Properties we are looking for: Miscellaneous->LandTexture: Texture Set, Material Type and Grasses WorldObjects->Tree: Tree Model, Leaf Amplitude, Leaf Frequency WorldObjects->Grass: Model Path, Density, Min Slope, Max Slope, Position Range, Height Range, Colour Range, Wave Period WorldObjects->Flora: Model Path Miscellaneous->MaterialObject: Change all the properties in this group

Done any modding gokuGX? Always good to make your dreams become reality.

Maybe contact some of the better know new race mod authors? Ones that actually have new models.

Seriously Sensational Sublime Seasons o Skyrim and Solstheim or S5 as the code name

Oh yeah, what do people want to call the mod? I was thinking the "The Changing Seasons of Skyrim". Others maybe "Seasons of Tamriel", "Seasonal changing Skyrim" or to be decisive because of other mods already out there "Dynamically changing Seasons".

I thinking (guessing) SetNthTexturePath(int n, string texturePath) will only change the texture, so this is not changing the Landtexture itself which holds the associated grasses, so I'd say not. I think we will need to have some SKSE functionality either change the grasses for a LandTexture, or actually change the model path of the grasses themselves. As for naming conventions I was thinking going with the calender months of Tamriel rather than seasons, so that would be 12 transitions for ground textures. Morning Star, Sun's Dawn, First Seed, Rain's Hand, Second Seed, Mid Year, Sun's Height, Last Seed, Heartfire, Frostfall, Sun's Dusk, Evening Star. But if we want more than we can go with: "meshes\seasons\MorningStar1", "textures\seasons\MorningStar1", "meshes\seasons\MorningStar2", "textures\seasons\MorningStar2", etc We can keep model and texture file names the same, its just the folders that separates them. Even if we choose 12 or 24, or whatever number for ground textures, other changes can happen on a daily basis still. For example grass can change density, height, colour on a daily basis. Snow directional shaders will be updated daily. Most models can go into the "meshes\seasons\" (or whatever we decide), except the grasses. Stupid engine limitation means that you have to put it into the "meshes\landscape\grass" folder. So maybe go with "meshes\landscape\grass\seasons\MorningStar1\", etc? The textures can go into the (for example) "textures\seasons\MorningStar1\landscape\grass\", no limits there, and I want to keep files as tight as possible.

I think out loud in post, so scribbling is not a problem round these parts :) Yeah, I'm looking at LOD at the moment for another mod. I think the object lod is pretty much ok. If we can get a SKSE call to changes the Material Objects, then we can change the SnowLODMaterial and SnowLODMaterialHD to change to have lighter and heavier snow in the background. Haven't looked at tree lod or landscape lod yet. As you say might have to be a new SKSE functionality to read in different textures (sets). Hopefully tree lod is as simply as being able to change the tamrieltreelod.dds Granted we will probably only have the four seasons for landscape lod. At about 120mb for each one, even though we could do as many transitions as we want, we need to be considerate on actual size of the download. Lets use default Skyrim as autumn for saving space. So at some stage you'll get a switch over. If its too obvious then we might just have to bite the bullets and go for 8 sets.

Hey Soolie, will let you know what he says. Would love for you to help, or think of it this way, we'll help you :) Can you quickly tell me how you change terrain textures? Like is it via LandTexture or the TextureSet, or something else? The reason is that I want to know if we can just use changes in LandTextures to also change the grasses at will.

Decals could be used, we discussed that briefly. I'm starting to investigate now. The advantage of having a set of decals for say leaves on ground for example is that you can apply that to many ground textures. It just means less textures to download, so actually just creating textures during these transitions is also very legit. Particles are not quite the right system to use. There are particle effects like rain, snowing, and falling leaves, but these are not permanent changes to the environment.

I've contacted ianpatt author of SKSE on the Bethesda forums for the possibility of writing some low level functions to the game data. So for example if we can get a call to changing the "Directional Material" and "Max Angle" on Statics for snow, then we can alter this according to the season and even weather. Or alternative change the Material Objects themselves to have new values. Other low level calls I think would help us are: Miscellaneous->LandTexture: change the Texture Set, Material Type and Grass --or-- Miscellaneous->TextureSet: change the Texture via Map and Filename. WorldObjects->Tree: change Tree Model, Leaf Amplitude, Leaf Frequency WorldObjects->Grass: change Density, Min Slope, Max Slope, Position Range, Height Range, Colour Range, Wave Period Potentially changing model paths on these Groups; Flora, Static, Moveable Static, Tree. There is already a mod called NetImmerse Override (http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/37481/?) which can change Shader properties of models, but at the moment it might just be specifically for armour, although author thinks it might be general. We need to do some testing to see if it can be extended to any model type. If its not I'm positive that something can be written to extend it to other groups. Being able to change textures, and other shader properties at runtime will give more flexibility to being able to get results we want. Interestingly there are two main ways we an approach this. Either we look at changing the model paths, or we look at changing the textures. We could have a set of models which all point at the transitional textures that we create. This would obviously require more meshes to complete the mod, but allows manipulation at the Group levels. A more elegant solution would be to change the textures within the models themselves, as you can in theory just have the one model, but obviously you need to manipulate the model itself.

Great Tinywars. We have thought about a few ideas on how to do aspects of this but we haven't actually done anything yet. joshezzel is the mod author of Unique Grasses so he will be handling most of the grass variation types. tinymight (related at all :-P) is going to try out some methods to texture swapping. Using either SKSE or some other means.

This thread is intended for modders to extend ideas for a dynamically changing environment of Skyrim in accordance with the calendar seasons. Essentially transitioning between Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn. The idea is to build a team of developers to create this and brain storm using this thread. Please no requests unless you intend to join the team and help with any possible implementations. So far the team is snapmoderator, joshezzel and soolie. But we (above) can only spend short amount of time on it each week and such a mod requires a number of people ranging from all sorts of talent, including Creation Kit, Scripting and Modelling/Texturing. You can almost never be finished with such a mod as well, so expanding it and a team will be key. I personally do not propose to be a project organizer, as I already have a number of modding commitments. The idea is that like minded modders will be able to get this technically thought out and implemented together. I believe the scope of the project should be divided into a major first phase which is aesthetic environmental changes only. Further ideas and development for other aspects of changing seasons can be done after the first phase is complete. This will be things like creature seasonal looks and behaviors. NPCs content to be correct, including dialog, behavior, clothing, etc. Just generally make content correct for a given season. The full scope is huge, so these can/should be discussed at a later stage. Unless of course a modder specifically wants to work on these, then discussion can be open. Bethesda during their Game Jam in 2011 had a team create a seasonal foliage “mod”, but was never released. If you look at 1:45 I believe we want to do something similar, as one aspect of this mod. I believe that the aim of the seasons is to be realistic, not over the top with extremes of each season. I’m happy to be out voted on this, but I find some of the environmental overhauls are too much. I think making default Skyrim basically beginning of autumn is a good base to work off. The idea of this thread is to plan exactly what we want. Technically how we are going to achieve it with research and then development. I’m going to break it down into aspects that I think we want: Ground textures having varying levels of foliage and/or snow to reflect seasons. This includes changing colour of leaves.Trees to have varying amount of leaves and changing colours. Amount of snow coverage also changes.Objects to have varying levels of snow. Possible different snow and ice, like soft to icy.Weather and lighting to reflect seasons. Don’t want to re-invent anything here, so adapt for vanilla and CoT.Changing levels of fog and clouds. Again look to existing mods.Grasses to change, from almost dead brown grass to full bloom flowers.Possible models changes. Like glaciers “melting”. Ice and snow object removed or added.Distant terrain to be correct, mainly trees and mountains.Some questions and thoughts I want to raise initially: How do the transitions actually happens period wise? Do we see a change every day? Does this only happen when a load happens, like fast travel or moving into an interior or exterior? I think seeing transitions happen before the player eyes is a recipe for glitches. However the whole idea of this got me started when I thought about varying snow levels during snow falls. So let us discuss this. Skyrim uses directional shaders for snow on objects, so changing these levels dynamically is something that would really need a solution to make this mod truly successful. I’ve already done a lot of work with the snow directional shaders, so this will be my main task. I’ll try and figure out what can be done. I would be very appreciative if anybody has ideas on this however. As far as textures or models go, looking at overhauls like “Season of Skyrim – Summer and Winter”, and the resources created by modders, we will have all that is needed in my opinion. No need to reinvent the wheel on this one. Hopefully these modders will actually become part of the collaboration, but certainly will seek to use them with permission. So far snapmoderator and tinymight are investigating methods for possible texture changes and other dynamically altering methods to achieve some of the above goals. But both of us have little experience with scripting at the moment, so members with know how will be greatly appreciated. joshezzel is the mod author of Unique Grasses so he will be looking at what to use and potential transitions of grasses. Roles that we want people to take ownership of at the moment include: Any modding experience :-PSKSE codingCreation Kit ScriptingTexturing of ground textures for transitions. Adding leafs and snow to ground textures to show gradually changes between seasons. Number of different textures to be determined as yet.Somebody to take ownership of aesthetic of trees and/or plants. A tree changing through the seasons includes textures going from more/less leaves, more/less snow cover, and changing colours. We might be able to change the colour of the textures via model manipulation so this might save time and number of textures. Although we want to remain faithful to Skyrim, being as that its mostly Aspens and Pines, it would be nice to have at least one set of trees that blossoms flowers.Somebody who has worked with weathers before. We don't want to reinvent anything here, so more of a case of tying up existing mods to best use weather patterns. I'd say Climates of Tamriel would be best to incorporate, rather than rewriting the default weathers to better suit seasons. I’m sure I’ve missed a lot. As ideas for aesthetic environmental changes come in I’ll add them to this top thread. But again I'll emphasize that we are looking for help with the collaboration, rather than a lot of ideas.

Does anybody know what tool or how to get a complete list of objects used in a world space with the count of how many times they feature? I want to find out if there are any unnecessary objects used in a big mod and just general analysis. I can do it by individually going to each cell in the creation kit and doing an export "Ref placements for current cell". But that will take forever!! I couldn't find the option in TES5Edit, but that's not to say the functionality is not in there. Help please!

Sharks, coral, can't wait! New water, why not. Tropical waters need something a bit different.

I'm so bored with the vanilla interiors that any work in this area would be much appreciated. Also might be good to make a version of your mod that doesn't include the textures/meshes. Its quite large otherwise and broadband can be at a premium in some places...like where I live! As long as you list what is needed then users have the choice of grabbing the files them self, as they may already have some of them. I'm keen to check out Solitude, Whiterun and Windhelm. Anything else in the pipe-line?