Modslave

I took the opportunity today to try to get a first hand view of how I felt about the situation by traipsing out to Windhelm and then all the way across country to Solitude...simply to try to get a better view on both parties.

Is anyone else feeling a bit confused as to specifically how this civil war fits into the overall pursuit of things in Skyrim? I'm not talking about the Dohvakin main quest but just the rest of the world in general. I feel like I'm experiencing the same level of sense of environment confusion I had when I translated all my experience from Morrowind into Oblivion....coming from Morrowind I viewed the Empire as a bad thing, after awhile I became fairly pro-Empire as the story revolves around it. Now we have Skyrim and I get that same sense of direction confusion because now I've got the Empire, which is apparently in shambles (and I'm sure this is covered in the books in game but whos had time to read them all yet?) and pushing people around apparently sorta being dicks....big surprise they were doing that in Morrowind. And we have this Nord rebellion popping up that about 2/3rds of Skyrim appears to not support. I just don't quite understand how this plays into the overarching situation in Skyrim...is it going to matter extensively whether I side with one side or the other? Will the Imperials get driven out if I join the Stormcloaks? Will the Nord cities loyal to the Empire break off into a second civil war once I've driven the Empire out of Skyrim? Should I drive the Empire out of Skyrim? I really don't know...its so hard to even get a read on what I feel is "best" for my character because the current timeline doesn't have enough available information to give me a good feel for what I feel is best for Skyrim and whether I should get involved at all.

I'm not really a proponent of "nude mods" I prefer to call them "natural mods" I just don't understand a world where everyone has the same underwear on. Its a little easier to deal with people being naked than trying to figure out which old granny in Tamriel is churning out the same set of underwear in the hundreds of pairs a day to supply the apparent mass usage of them. So I guess for me, eye candy aside, its more an immersion thing.

I am just curious what you would want it adjusted to, obviously real time wouldn't make sense but what would you want? Bethesda default timescale is 30, which means 30 real minutes = 1 game day. I generally drop that down to 10, I prefer a "day" in a game to last around 8 hours of real time. I've tried setting timescale to 1 in previous Bethsoft games but full "real time" days are for people that have more time to commit to a game than I currently have. But 30 minute days are annoying cause by the time you've gone out and killed a few things and need to find a merchant to sell off the stuff in your bags half the city is heading for bed by the time you get back.

Simple timescale adjustments. Really. Bethesda has an annoying habit of assuming I want a full game day to pass in about 20 minutes.

Given the body models have mass scaling, nothing currently available is rigged to work with the Skyrim CC, so you couldn't just dump a popular Oblivion/FO mesh in as a body replacer, even for personal use. Even if they are using nif format, its far more complex than their previous games.

FNVEdit is having more serious issues after the HH install today. Fatal: Could not open registry key: \SOFTWARE\Bethesda Softworks\FalloutNV\ Apparently something about the registry key has been altered with the HH install but I really can't be arsed to dig into my registry to try to make it work again. Which sucks as well cause Wrye Flash, while very powerful is extremely obtuse software and I hate working in Python.

First of all big ups to all the modders in the Nexus network, some of the finest game play never included in a retail title is largely due to all you guys so kudos to all of you. Now me I'm a pretty skilled 3D/2D artist myself though I've got a real life project that takes a lot of my focus so I've never committed to a large mod project for TES engine games or the DA franchise. But I find myself constantly modding and tweaking stuff for personal use and I've sort of hit a snag on something I find pretty illogical. Ergo, lets say I wish to use say BlackBlossom's BoG D Cup Perky as my base female body model for FONV. This is just an example theres lots of great body mods but I love her texture work. Anyways now I run into the mesh fitting issue for all stock armor meshes and I've been going through the process between Blender and NIFTools and it seems to me that there should be a batch operation script to conform armor meshes to the body mesh polyface dimensions, but I can't seem to find any documentation in regards to batch conversions for a base body model. This leads me to believe that people are literally hand resizing mesh sets, mesh by mesh for conversion to "type 3" body styles and what not or Breeze body styles and that seems, well, a lot like unnecessary work. Anyone got a good link explaining how to run batch mesh conversions between Blender and NIFTools? Cause I can't find one and seems like from the top level view I've got now if I wanted to convert all base FONV female/male armor meshes to use a specific body I preferred I'd either have to do it all one mesh set at a time (which I doubt is the efficient way to go about it) or I'd have to write a script from scratch in Blender that automated the processing of each mesh but that seems like it would render a lot of inaccuracies in the final export. Anyone got any info on this slightly more arcane area of modding? No worries if no one does, I suppose I could do them individually but that really seems like it should be unnecessary.

After getting Fallout New Vegas I sorta realized I never really got to play all the DLC and really squeeze everything there was to squeeze out of Fallout 3. So I reloaded it and all the DLC's and grabbed a few mods I considered fairly critical from my previous Fallout 3 play through. Heres my current load order. Now heres the deal I love the additions FOOK2 brings to the game its made it a much more lively and vibrant game full of variance and new things I didn't experience in my first play through' date=' plus the weapon additions and what not are fantastic so overall I've always liked FOOK2 and I'd love to keep using it. Only problem is the installation process for the "latest" version of FOOK2 is well, a bit cryptic at best, install 1.0, apply hot fix patches in some arcane order to ensure all assets are in the game (I did the 1.1 hot fix then 9/06 and the 9/10 hot fix only to turn up with an assload of red exclamation marked characters so I reinstalled the 9/06 hot fix again and that seemed to work), then apparently there are a few .esp's that are installed that are no longer needed and cause massive duplicates and there is no documentation on that I had to work that out via the Fookunity forums. And now I've hit their dreaded end all be all bug which is the game freezing up on level up and apparently there is no concrete fix for it some things work for some people, other things work for other people. Not to mention the game is literally freezing up and crashing about every 30 minutes of play regardless of leveling or not. I should probably mention than I'm running a Pentium Quad-Core 3.2ghz with 4GB of RAM and an Nvidia Geforce 470 GTX card running the latest drivers on Windows 7 64 Bit. I've done all kinds of ini tweaks to try to maximize my chances of good performance such as adding iNumwThreads=2 to reduce cores used, turned on threaded AI, increased cell buffers, memory allotted, the works, I've tried running FO3 with the Large Address Aware enabler modified exe, I've tried running it with the downgraded d3d9.dll, I've tried running the exe with administrator privileges and in compatibility mode for Windows XP SP2...and...well...nothing works. I mean right now my options are pretty much not play Fallout 3 because of the bugs I believe that come along with my small group of chosen mods, FOOK2 being the most intense of them all, or simply not install Fallout 3 and play it at all. Both pretty much mean don't play Fallout 3. Which sucks. Anyways I should mention that after the 1.2.0.285 FONV patch I've had very little problem playing Fallout New Vegas for long stretches, it occasionally crashes but not like this, but granted the mods I have in use in FONV aren't half as intensive as FOOK2 is for FO3. Simple facts are I love FOOK2, I love what it does for Fallout 3, but, I don't think I can play Fallout 3 with FOOK2 any more and I guess I'm looking for suggestions for less complex content overhauls that allow for new weapons, armor (lore friendly is cool but modern arms is okay too, not too into the whole "lets make women as sexually depraved as possible style armors") and backpacks (There ARE backpacks in FOOK2 but god knows where they are, I sure haven't found any) that allows FO3 to be a better experience than it is just as a base install but doesn't introduce all this craptastic buggery that makes playing the game impossible. [b']Short Summary for TLDR's:[/b] I love FOOK2 but I think its making FO3 unplayable, does anyone have a suggestion for lighter weight mods that achieve something close to the same overhaul of FO3 without all the associated headaches and annoyances?

While its absolutely non-lore friendly and completely purile....I find the mish mash of attempts to make female armor more....fantasy based, such as TNT Armory and A Little Leg...as mods, to be...well, largely...bad. No offense to either at all, but TNT's retextures and model manips have been extremely low quality and illogical, and A Little Leg, while nice, has so many compatibility errors in regards to LOD maps and what not its just not worth using and even then...making the base armors try to fit a "sexy" ideal is probably the wrong way of going about it. TNT on the other hand has gone completely 100% the other direction and have started to introduce simplistic custom models...which don't fit the atmosphere at all, much less the lore. So with that in mind and looking at the work ChiZ has done, which has really been some of the best designed self contained retextures to date....I present the following: http://members.cox.net/pr0/RedSonja3.jpg Can we get there? I'd love to see it. And again no offense to Thor and Motseer and Firinneach, but the approach to making female armors more visually appealing on their end have really turned up less than professional results. I haven't even begun to try to do modeling work in the DA atmosphere yet so I probably shouldn't disrespect their efforts, and in truth I'm not, I'm just finding that whats being presented isn't really of a quality I'd expect, not to mention the installation problems, compatibility errors and outright variants of texture quality to stock model quality...its really rather..eh. You can find any amount of inspiration in the artistic works of Frazetta, Royo, R. A., to point towards areas of inspiration. Just some thoughts.

Just something I noticed, I run a lot of mods, and no real issues with them. I've used AllSpeelCanLearn and what not but I find its a bit too much so I stopped using it. But I appear to have another mod running in my override thats got my character basically set with Templar tree skills available at character creation, and I've got no idea what might be causing it. I'm pretty sure this is related to some kind of NCS file addition that might be a loose addition from something else I've removed but I'm not entirely sure what to look for. Anyone else seen anything of a similar nature and have any clues as to what I should start poking at? I mean...its not breaking my game, I just find it odd that its there right from the get go and cannot recall anything I've installed that actively makes the Templar training tree available from creation. Thanks to anyone who might have a heads up.

Perhaps just the Kocari/Ishal, corridor then? Maybe keep the Origin story intact, finish that, arrive at Ostagar, level up, speak to Alistair, skip to after the joining, do the war council meeting, last meeting with Duncan, then skip to the Tower of Ishal/Loghain betrayal cinematic, and the overwhelmed by darkspawn cinematic, then plunk down at Flemeth's hut just after rescue? That would be a limited amount of items and codex entries, I'd think somewhat less than the Fade sequences actually. And would basically kill off a large chunk of linear repetitive game play between the Origin and the actual less linear main game. Basically cutting from Origin to Loethering, which can be completed in about 20 - 25 minutes.

So I checked out Skip the Fade and I have to say that after about my eleventy-billionth run through DAO it really nipped a slogfest of a game section right in the bud. But since I'm always replaying DA:O I look at it and wonder....home come someone hasn't closed up the Origins with a mod that basically lets you create your character and plunks you down at the end of the Imperial Highway, exiting Loethering with all potential levels, points, and items gained from Origin/Ostagar stories? I mean I get that the origins are part of the replayability, problem is we've all played all the origins. Ostagar/Kocari/Tower of Ishal makes me want to gouge my eyes out every time I replay it and just when I thought it was all over with, its Loethering and its 'newbie" zone approach to teaching the player the basics of open world questing and its just once again eye gougingly boring at this point. In fact the number one thing that keeps me from wanting to replay DA:O at this point is the Origin Story/Ostagar/Loethering corridor. Its literally 3 hours of really annoyingly boring game play at this point, seeing as we've all done it at least a dozen times now. Would be interesting to see a way to basically create your character and get to the actual "gateway to the rest of the game" which is the end of the Imperial Highway at Loethering, without having to bother with all that stuff in between..cause at this point in the titles maturity, its whats really retarding the game's replay value, rather than helping it.

On another tack I tried editing the tints.erf entry for t3_arm_drb and changing the vectors there and saving the file, it didn't appear to mean much to the core resources though so a standard overall edit of the tints.erf doesn't seem to be the way to go either. Maybe I need to export the changed tints.erf and chuck it in the override directory? I figured changing the diff/spec vectors for the core resource would work and be the "simple" way around this but that doesn't seem to be the case either. Oh and maybe this post needs to be moved to Builders Help at this point since its not generating much in regards to response from people who could do it.

I'll just keep talking to myself here. Anyways I went through and beat myself to death on the toolset and started to get an idea of how complex this request is. Its not terribly complex the issue mostly lies with creating the new tint file then applying it to every object using stock resource Dragonbone material then basically creating a Dragonbone override mod....which is a substantial investment of time. I'm also a little stuck on the GDA creation for the tint_override.GDA as it did accept my tint_override name, but the matproject name used as the saved tint, that name didn't actually change the tints of the armor models. So I ran aground there as to what the issue was. Anyways making steps myself here to try to take care of this distaste I have for the Dragonbone tints in use but, largely, still running aground on complexities and confusions in regards to the toolset. This really isn't as straight forward a process as it could be.

Or....if someones kind enough you could point me at the appropriate resources in the core resources and I'll give this a go myself I'm hardly Photoshop incompetent as I do texture art as part of my real life work just DA's resource structure is foreign territory for me, Even a vague hint of where to start looking would be helpful, I've checked some of the modding tutorials in the builders section and not found anything I'd say fits the information I'm looking for.

Could someone make a new DA:O armor tier tints mod which changes the Dragonbone material tint from the ugly red as rust color that it is? I've always found it really annoying, especially using Winter Forge (2.2 version, not the 4.2 version which is stupidly over-complex and I'd really rather not have to search all over the world to make ONE weapon look like I want it to look using the material I want to use..thanks) when I can start using Tier 7 gear, I like to make fairly balanced sets of Heavy Dragonbone armor because I tend to run DW Warriors and Heavy is better on fatigue than massive, and I like to add some helpful stats with the WF 2.2 mod that allows me to play the game a bit more to my taste (no god items really, just some focus on +stamina and in combat stamina regen so I can use my abilities more). Problem is the Dragonbone tint is freaking AWFUL. Silverite looks great, Even Verindium and Steel and what not are tolerable for their material class but for The Tier 7 tint to look that awful...I just can't stand it. I've been attempting to work out how to change this myself but the resource base for DA:O is pretty complex and it would take me a long time to even work out where these tint files are, when theres probably someone out there that could make the tier 7 tint at least like...I dunno, gunmetal blue, gold...anything but that stupid rust red that saps all the detail out of everything its applied to would be really...really awesome.

It did turn out to be Awakening in the OC, I took a slash and burn approach to my overrides and addins this morning and finally after doing the manual deletion of the Awakenings erf's and that mod, everything went back to normal. Lost all the Awakenings content, but it was mostly just skills I couldn't get yet so no big deal. I'd like to see a cleaner cross port of the Awakenings stuff into the OC, at least the expanded skills and what not, but, regardless, once I got rid of it everything went fine from there. Thanks all for the help.

I've been getting back to playing Dragon Age's OC again after running through Awakening and I'd have to say that I'm having a lot of fun with the various mods that have been produced as they've really given the game a far better feel. Theres been a few mods that I just can't load up, they're installed correctly but the items don't appear, apparently thats related to the 1.03 patch, so I'm not worried about that. But...just recently I've turned up the following problem. http://members.cox.net/pr0/wtfhelm.jpg The following mods and overrides are installed and appear to work, this only started recently after installing the TnT Armory (Which is a fair mod, but seems a bit too over the top for my taste), which I then uninstalled completely but the Duty/Soldiers Helmet continues to look like that. http://members.cox.net/pr0/installedmods.jpg I've gone in and hunted around my Addins/Overrides folder like crazy and can't seem to work out where the issue is here that would be specifically affecting that model but it affects every suit of Massive Plate that uses that helm. Cailan's armor, and Juggernaut plate both, as well as any NPC armors using that helm model. I've tried force loading my save with the no helmet hack mod off, doesn't help the situation either. If anyone has any ideas what I should be looking for specifically in regards to what would override that specific helmet or strip its texture, I'd appreciate a heads up.

I have, of course, heard every argument in the book in regards to DA:O's intention to be a strategy based pause and play RPG. Thats great, far as the game goes from base install it definitely gets that job done. Problem is, most RPGs now back to TES3:Morrowind have moved on to a more action oriented dynamic. Which many people, especially people that have been retrained to RPG play by MMOs over the last decade, prefer. So the idea here is looking at the way the game is set up, there has to be a simple way to take the "click to attack this target" function, in the XUI scripting, and remove that and split its functions between a pair of introduced key binds, one of which on key press selects the nearest target, and another that says "attack what I have selected". Frankly, an addition of this kind of XUI functionality, which take a ton of frustration out of the combat in DA:O, removing the frustration of having to shift camera angles to efficiently select the appropriate target in a huge press of enemies, and also gives the player the freedom to play the game in a more action oriented style at any difficulty level because of the removal of the stilted and inefficient targeting dynamics. This is not me saying pause and play is inferior to action RPG gaming, but, largely while DA:O's strategy play is well done, once the combat actually begins it really becomes a mash of annoying dynamics that are simply not responsive enough to deal with situations in real time forcing an immense amount of pause and play orientation to play the game well, when simply a more robust system for binding keys would allow for more flexibility and freedom in regards to the flow control of combat situations in the game. The expansion of bindable key elements in the XUI is something that needs serious consideration, potentially as a patch or potentially as a mod. But I thought I'd throw the idea out there here and see if it interests anyone.

I have not been able to install the toolset due to using a Steam install, theres been any number of SQL errors trying to install. But regardless I was looking at the female models in the game, and while most people might actually be looking for ways to make them more and more naked, I'm actually requesting a way to make them more female. I think I've actually figured out how to do it with available resource meshes, the only problem is of course the skin texture maps. And the fact that I can't do it myself because the toolset simply will not install for me. Largely if you take a look at the female player model, and the body model mesh for the Lady of the Forest, you can see the difference between the model meshes is astoundingly different. The Lady of the Forest is much more feminine in design, the female player model which is used for 98% of the females in the game, while of course smaller than the male model mesh, is too broad shouldered and the proportions are all wrong...other than a slightly more shapely torso and the addition of breasts the general female model mesh is almost exactly the same in skeletal design as the male mesh. So what I'm wondering is if its possible to for someone to experiment with swapping the Lady of the Forest body model as the primary female body model, and seeing how the skin maps differ and potentially adjusting those for accuracy as well. Between that and potentially making females walk like females, I think it would help a lot for the feminine visualization of the game.