Fistandilius

I didn't mean just quests, I'm talking about general game changes. For example Immersive armors changes a bunch of npc armors, (and in some cases makes it very hard to find the stock armors) some armor mods add chests the armor is in, some deposit them in areas, even the ones that are simple forge recipes sometimes add special types of ingots or use something that you wouldn't generally pick up in the stock game. These things change the game whether or not you think it's a major change. And that's only using armors as an example. I'm not here to tell anyone what to do, I'm giving MY advice on how I did it. If I was doing a youtube video and I couldn't tell the difference between stock and a mod and someone called me on it, I would feel like a real tool. But I see these mod reviewers do it on a regular basis.

Yeah, it's not about being a purist. I LIKE the stock game. And I wanted to be sure I knew it inside and out before I started adding a bunch of mods with no real idea what they do. Even simple aesthetic mods like you mentioned often have little quests or changes to add the new armors to the game. Like I tried to say the first time, adding mods for me wasn't about changing Skyrim, it was about adding to it. If Bethesda kept coming out with more DLC's, I would gladly keep buying them just to explore new areas. There are very few good mods out there that add more content to Skyrim and most of them focus on the aesthetic stuff that you're talking about, ENB mods, or armor mods, player homes, follower tweaks, etc. Yeah, those things are great, but they're not going to add more replay value for me. I want more areas to explore, particularly ones that don't edit the stock map too much, because quite honestly they don't make sense. You're telling me I've explored this continent for 1000 hours, and suddenly there's this cave that appears right in the middle of a road I've traveled 500 times? Unrealistic, and obviously Bethesda is guilty of it too (Dawnguard).

I think if I were into a dead is dead type of play through I still wouldn't appreciate a mod that deleted my save files. What if you died due to a game glitch?

Yeah, sounds like it could be fun. Hopefully the new NPC's will be voiced? And not too generic, or the other opposite, too detailed. One thing I don't like about the Interesting NPCs mod is that they might as well have named it the "NPC's who talk too much" mod. There were extensive dialogue listings where the author put a lot of work into back stories for the characters but the conversation almost never took you anywhere. I like where you're going with it, I think the success will come down to how the idea is presented, i.e. how well does the mod actually function and what do these new NPC's and schedules really add to the game beyond immersion.

I put over 1000 hours into stock Skyrim before I touched my first mod. I enjoy the stock game. For me mods was just a way of adding new features to continue gameplay after I'd exhausted everything the stock game had to give me. If you mod the game before you've even played it, I feel like you're missing out on potential gameplay. As you said in your post (and I'm paraphrasing) once you know the game, it's never quite the same. But with mods, you CAN make it different. Once you've exhausted the game, checked out all the new DLC lands, then you can go back and add Falskaar, Wrymstooth, etc. and give yourself more content and try something different. It's a way of extending the game. If you mod the game without logging hours on stock, you won't even know the game. I hate it when I'm watching a mod review video on youtube and I see the narrator all excited about something they hadn't seen before, and it's something that was in the stock game. They think it's a mod! I was also really irritated with myself when I came across something while playing and _I_ didn't know if it was from the stock game or not after 1000's of hours of playing. If there's one thing Skyrim has its replay value. This is just my 2 cents. Then again, some people will tell you they think the game is unplayable without mods. Btw, you said you're not a hard core pc gamer. You might want to look into getting an xbox 360 controller and using that. It's what Skyrim was intended to be played with, so all the UI functions better with it. Otherwise it's supposedly unplayable on pc without SkyrimUI. I don't play games with the mouse so I wouldn't know.

You're not going to get anyone to help you without first disclosing how your mod works. Are you using the stock Khajit skin? The human skin? Is it one of those weird morph races that uses bits of both? These are things that are necessary to know to get it done, and if it's using a combination of both then that would make it at least twice as hard because you'd have to change bits of both skin textures and get them to line up.

Find the code for the bunnies killed statistic and use that as a model.

System specs for Skyrim aren't a big deal. Skyrim can use up to 4gb of Ram, so depending on how much other stuff your computer is running, 4 will work, but 6 or 8 would be ideal as a minimum. I'm using an old Q6600 pentium quad core chip on my desktop. The problem with laptops is Skyrim requires a pretty aggressive graphics card. You're not going to get away with on board video which is what most laptops have. You need to look at the laptop you want to buy and then do a google search for skyrim benchmarks or see if it's on this site: http://www.notebookcheck.net/The-Elder-Scrolls-V-Skyrim-Benchmarks.66057.0.html You want to stay out of the red, and preferably stay in the green, but I guess if you can live with the slowdown you might be able to get buy with something in the yellow. Depends on what mods you intend to run as well.

I've been wondering this myself if there was a way (and obviously legally) to have two working, running copies of the game on your pc. One that you could use to test your mod with no other mods installed, and one to just play the game. It's bad enough the things a mod does to your save files let alone potential mod conficts when you're trying to work on your own stuff. Of course a dual boot system may have merit. Steam allows you to run the game on multiple systems using the same user account. The obvious downside is stupidly having the same OS installed twice on your system. A program like VirtualBox could achieve the same results, but of course then you're still installing your OS twice.

If you're literally talking about using the sabre cat texture on your new race, it's not going to be an easy fix with the creation kit unless you get REAL lucky. Every texture is UV mapped to the mesh, so if you just changed the textureset from the khajit skin to the sabre cat skin, it's more than likely not going to line up good at all and you'll probably have big blank spots with no textures that will show up funny in game. What you would have to do is create a new texture manually in gimp or photoshop and then you could probably cut and paste the snow cat texture to fit the UV map for the khajit skin, but depending on sizes and how the stripes line up, etc. you might have to do a lot more creative editing with the texture to make it work. It's possible to take a large generic texture, like say a stone texture from a big landscape piece and just link it to say.... a frost thrall and it will look like a stone thrall, but that's because the texture for the landscape is so big and the seams are so generic that it just sortof fills in on a thrall, but for something like a human mesh and a sabrecat mesh, there are too many details and limbs for anything that easy to work.

So I don't know what you'd call it. Restoring files, backing up files, etc. But I'm just looking to see if anyone out there has any good tips or advice on how to restore/move your files when you get a new operating system. Skip to the bottom if you're not interested in the long details, but don't get mad at me if you ask something that I already noted in there and I call you on it. My cousin just got a new PC, their old one is like ancient in computer terms, we're talking older Celeron with Windows XP running slowly on it. Since she and her husband are barely computer literate, I get to set it up for them. I've done this probably about 10-15 times in my lifetime, but it's always a long process. Their new system is Windows 8. I'll run the update for 8.1 of course. The new system is a complete stand alone, so I don't think I'll be moving any hardware over from the old system except the monitor and peripherals. Which is partially good, because I don't have to actually back up files, I can just take them off the old hard drive. The bad thing is, the old system is old, so it uses IDE. I couldn't find anything in the specs to see if the new system has an IDE port or not and it hasn't shipped yet for me to physically look at it. I can get around this, even if I have to take both systems to my place and use the vacant IDE port on my desktop. So I would have to say the two biggest PITA's when doing this would be obviously Windows related. Number one being the number of user based configurations and files that Windows likes to bury in little subdirectories under Users. Locating which ones are important and moving them and figuring out if they're relevant for programs I don't use will be fun. The second problem comes with the way Windows is set up. Back in Dos (yeah, showing my age), or even older Linux systems, you could basically just copy a directory and the program would run. The way Windows is setup, with certain files going into the user directories, and necessary .dll's and external files going into Windows and System directories, you can't always just copy a directory from the Program Files dir, and expect the program to run. Which usually means a PITA process of reinstalling old software, trying to locate disks you had from 5-10 years ago, programs that you didn't have a backup of that were downloaded off the internet, etc. Oh, then I forgot the joy of having to figure out how to disable and/or remove whatever virus scanner the manufacturer put on the system so avast can be installed. So anyways, TL;DR, anyone have any good tips or advice on doing a system update? Thanks

In theory, you're just creating an armor/clothing on an npc, so it should be the same as doing it for a pc, except you wouldn't need the _0 or _1 weight sliders, or need to create one for each sex.

I'm not familiar with blender, but your issue definitely sounds like a weight painting problem to me. I could point you to a video to show you how to fix it in 3ds max, but I couldn't tell you how to do the same thing in blender. Here's a couple of tutorials I found, but I don't know how good they are: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.4/Tutorials/Animation/BSoD/Character_Animation/Upper_body_weight_painting I would suggest you watch this video too. Like I said, it's 3ds max, but it will at least give you the theory and then hopefully with the two tutorials above you can figure out how to fix it:

It sounds like it's possible you could have an issue with your alpha map if it's just a case of the texture being darker than intended.

1. I don't know specifically, but that information is in the actor menu. 2. This has to do with setting up your factions properly, but again I don't know specifics. Look at factions under the creation kit tutorials: http://www.creationkit.com/Category:Tutorials 3. Again, this has to do with factions. I think for what you want to do you're going to want to make a custom faction for your npc and set the player faction as an enemy. Everyone else should already ignore him unless they get attacked by a stray weapon or something. Someone with more knowledge can confirm this. 4. This one I'm not positive on. I suppose you could box it in using navmesh, but this could effect player followers in odd ways. I don't know if there's another way to do this without a script. If you're just worried about it staying in a particular cell, I don't think non follower npc's will leave a cell regardless of if they're aggressive or not. 5. You're going to have to clarify what you said there. You have a major typo. 6. This will probably involve and activator and a custom script, but I haven't done any scripting yet so I only know the theory. There are others here that could give you the exact script needed.

I've actually done this before, so it should work. Are you changing the body texture in an armor.nif or in the actual player .nif? And does the texture show up properly in Nifskope but just not in the game, or is the texture messed in Nifskope? Because if it isn't showing up properly in nifskope, you might have selected the wrong part of the mesh or have a typo in your new texture path.

What are you using to model? Blender? 3ds Max?

There was someone on here a month or two ago talking about making combat turn based. I don't know if it ever took off or not. You might be able to do a search. It was in the skyrim mod related forum obviously.

No, I didn't take it that way, but I was just saying to me, if I had a choice between paying $30 for the legendary version and $25 for the legendary version and the entire ES series, I'd take number 2 just to have it and it's cheaper. BTW, for anyone else interested, they're running Skyrim Legendary edition tomorrow at 9:10am EST. I don't know what the sale price is. I'm guessing $25 or less since they're running it right now for $29.99 Don't know if they'll run the Anthology sale again or not. I'm not really an expert on that stuff. But they obviously still have some in stock. I keep waiting for them to rerun that Lenovo desktop for $300, but I think I missed my chance. :(

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E9I1FPI/ref=gb1h_tit_c-3_7982_47a592a8?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_s=center-3&pf_rd_r=1F112JERG9HEYRXW3WJ9&pf_rd_i=5550342011&pf_rd_p=1673797982

Really surprised when I saw this thread show up this morning that there aren't more posts. This is one of the better mods out there in my opinion. Very much worth downloading. If I had one major criticism it would be too many followers getting in your way.

There's not a LOT out there. There are a few youtube videos... I don't have links to those. Most people will refer you to the following tutorials: http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/809556-from-l3dt-to-skyrim-heightmap-tutorial/ http://hoddminir.blogspot.de/2012/02/from-heightmap-to-worldspace-in-skyrim.html http://hoddminir.blogspot.se/2012/02/generating-lods-in-creation-kit.html http://hoddminir.blogspot.se/2012/05/making-16bit-height-map-without.html None of them are very beginner oriented, IMO, and most of them assume knowledge of a third party software like L3dt or GeoControl. L3dt is free, GeoControl costs $30 I believe, but has a 30 day trial period. Of course you could build yours with photoshop or gimp and skip the 3d heightmap software, but you're not going to have a great idea of your worldspace until you load it in the creation kit. You're also going to need TessAnwynn, which has even less support out there: http://www.oceanlightwave.com/morrowind/TESAnnwyn.html It's command line based though, so you're really going to have to know a bit about heightmaps to get the correct settings or it's just going to be a mess when you import it. The documentation for it basically rundowns what it's capable of and gives a few examples and that's it. Unfortunately the more advanced stuff in Skyrim, working with heightmaps and LOD, rigging and adding new monsters, etc. just don't have good tutorials available for beginners. There are some talented guys out there doing stuff, but unless you ask them specifically, they aren't sharing their knowledge.

Again.. you can get Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind, Daggerfall, and Arena, complete with all DLC's that are available on the Legendary/Greatest Hits versions, for $24.99 on Amazon this weekend. It's re-run about 3 times now that I've seen alone, and it always takes a while to sell out. In fact, I bought one, paid for it, and cancelled my order once already and had another chance to buy it about 6X.

Content added later to a finished mod is not the same as a WIP mod. And bug fixes aren't WIP either. You guys should know the difference. You do what you want to do, but it sounds like you have a nearly finished mod and you want to rush it out so you can jump on another project, so I certainly wouldn't consider adding another feature at this point, but that's just me. You sound like you've been working on this too long and you just want to get it out there.

Depends. What's the steam price? You can get the whole elder scrolls series for $24.99 on amazon this weekend if you watch the black friday ticker. They're not selling very fast.