adembroski

I've had as many as 11. Once you hit the "limit" they have to be gained through quests rather than just inviting. There's one quest where one of your survivors knows some dude from a bar, and then it sorta hints that person had a crush on the dude's wife. Anyways, you end up meeting their daughter and you can invite her even if you're at limit. The builder quest line features a series of quests near the end (probably after you've killed off all of the plague hearts) that allow you to add 2-3 more. The increased limit seems to remain valid in further playthroughs.

Just disabled ad-block (which I've done before, not sure how it got reenabled for this site:/) Thank you for looking out for us.

I didn't say the mod didn't USE anything from it. I said it doesn't duplicate anything from it. I didn't steal anything and add it to my mod.

Awesome, good to know. Thanks for the responses, guys.

I don't want to get into too much detail here, but I'm just wondering how much effort I should put into contacting someone to retrieve permission for something... or if it's necessary at all. I wrote a mod to handle several things that I'd been using separate mods for. I made it for myself with no intention originally of releasing it, but it turned out better than i expected so I figure it's worth throwing up there. Thing is, it requires the use of another mod that's already on the Nexus. Is it necessary, etiquette-wise, for me to get permission from the author of the required mod, or is that only necessary if I'm duplicating it? There is no duplication involved here... my mod does not include the original mod, it merely requires it. I ask because I'm having trouble getting a response, and I don't want to make anybody angry or use someone's work inappropriately. I certainly would include credit and a link in both the ReadMe and the mod description.

Calling TES dragons wyverns is probalby due to the influence of another game or genera's depiction of dragons. TES has always shown its dragons to have two legs (rear) and two arms/wings for flight. Just because another game or series of books depict their dragons as having front limbs, rear limbs, and wings does not make them more legitimate dragons. For comparison, the dragons in some Asian legends can fly without wings and are more serpentine than their western counterparts. They are just as legitimately dragons, just a different type. Wyverns in some legends are indeed dragons, just another type that are ususally noted for having a poisoned tail. The wyrms in some legends have very stubby legs, a serpentine body, and no wings yet they are also classified as dragons. It all depends upon who is writing the story as to what defines a mythical creature. Dragons do not have to conform to D&D, Palladium, Dragon Age, Tolkieen, Morte D'Arthur, or any particular story or games' standards to be legit for the TES settings. For the record, I personally prefer dragons that have front and back limbs in addition to their wings, but I do not dislike the TES style of dragons as they are what has been shown for this game setting throughout the the years. Just my $0.02 and best regards, Mike I'm basing it primarily on medieval European heraldry, in which Dragons were 4 legged and Wyverns were 2 legged. This, I believe (but don't quote me, as these sorts of things can come off differently from source to sources) stems from Breton (and by extension, somewhat antagonistically, Norse and Germanic) folklore which defined them as such. At any rate, what you're saying was, in a roundabout way, my point. A dragon from Krynn, for instance, isn't necessarily the same thing in my mind as a Dragon from Tamriel, or any other world. Whatever you call them, they're a creature specific to Tamriel. Truthfully, Tamriel's dragons seem to be a mix between the two, if judging by Brythonic folklore (as opposed to the D&D interpretation). They might breath fire (point for dragon), but might breath something else (point for Wyvern). They are quite large (Dragon), but lack forelegs (Wyvern). They can speak human tongues (Dragon), but viscous and primarily evil (Wyvern).

I... may have to add this to my list. Downloading now... thank you for the link.

I'll stay away from the obvious ones like SkyUI and such. LIAT- Lively Inns and Taverns - Cannot live without it. Such a difference. No Death Mod - Increases the difficulty and immersion of the game. Absolutely essential and I'm not sure I can go back to a load-and-retry system again. Sound Propagation Overhaul - Pure immersion. I'm the type that actually turns the ambient music off because it's unimmersive. This mod makes the sounds of the world so much better. Realistic Needs and Diseases - Many props to More Complex Needs, but to be honest, as much of an immersion/realism nut I am, even that's a bit too much. This is a nicely simplified version that retains that survival necessity but I don't have to worry about reading the labels so much.

Skyrim can't ruin dragons for me because there are no dragons in it. Killed a lot of large wyverns though:P

Ok, got it working. Thanks for your help. Getting 30-40 FPS again, on medium settings with maximum draw distance... so the power of the card is sufficient to run the game, even if not great. That said, can't wait to get my damn desktop moved down here from Minnesota:( To anyone else who might run across this thread, here's what I did (Win7 64bit). 1. Go to C:\Users\owner\Documents\My Games\skyrim 2. Delete Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPrefs.ini 3. Disconnect any external monitors 4. Cycle power (power down and disconnect from power sources for 3-5 minutes) 5. Turn laptop back on 6. Run Skyrim from Steam It should now detect the video card. Once you hook it back up to an external monitor, it will still run, but sometimes it wont pick up on the correct GPU if you're connected to an external monitor. I ran through this process a few times to verify this is what was happening.

:/ it's not an nvidia card.

Yeah, Skyrim appears to be the only thing that's affected. The other games I have installed right now (Battlefield 3, Mass Effect 2 and 3, Oblivion, New Vegas, Dragon Age: Origins, and The Witcher) all are running fine and using the video card as expected. I have Norton, but to be honest, I don't know enough to dig into windows, as you say.

Again, the same thing happens on a clean install... and I was getting 30-40 FPS before this started happening on vanilla medium settings. Hell, I once had it heavily modded and loading 7 grids and it still stayed between 25 and 30 fps. This is a recent development on the same machine. Right now, nothing is modified, it's a completely clean install. When I'm running the game, none of my video memory is being used... none, it stays at 0%.

Ok, so I have a fairly low-end lap top, admittedly, but it's plenty good enough to pull 30-40 FPS out of Oblivion at max settings, and it runs most games pretty smoothly at some point. Skyrim is killing it... worse, this is a recent development. I stopped playing regularly a while back and when I came back to the game, I got stuck at about 10 FPS and no matter what settings I use, it never goes much above that. If I spin in place rapidly, it drops to around 8, if I stay perfectly still at minimum settings in a low traffic area, I might get 12-14. This is at minimum and ultra. Going to options from the launcher, the Graphics Adapter field gives me two identical options; NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS... which I don't have, nor ever have I. This same name appears in SkyrimPrefs.ini What I do have is an AMD A4-3300M APU with Radeon HD 6480G. I have edited SkyrimPrefs.ini and added the correct name (I actually had a backup and just copied it directly) and that did nothing. Again, I realize this isn't anything powerful, but it's what I could get on my budget and I needed a laptop for work. I was able to maintain 30 FPS with reasonable settings (above medium, below high, mostly optimize for maximum draw distance, as I care far more about that than texture resolution; buildings popping up 100 yards in front of me is a pet peeve of mine and one of Skyrims more crushing disappointments) a few months ago, and I have no idea what's changed. I simply didn't play it for a while, and when I fired it back up, it didn't work. I have a sizable collection of mods, mostly overhauls and immersion stuff, very little graphical, knowing my system wouldn't handle it. I have disabled all mods, deleted the .ini files (including backups), uninstalled and reinstalled skyrim... all the same issue. I've found this is a fairly common problem for Nvidia cards with a relatively easy fix (set Skyrim to high performance in the Nvideo control panel), but integrated Radeon GPUs don't have nearly the breadth of options in their utility suite and I can't seem to figure out how to mirror this. Any advice?

This is outstanding, a resource I hope to make extensive use of. This should be sticky.

The benefit that a content creator at Bethesda has is the engineers to built the tool available to ask question, and the fact that a given designer probably only works in one small area of the engine at a time. That said, it isn't horribly difficult to learn if you have patience and an aptitude for it. You likely wont be churning out total conversion mods in a week, but if you learn it piece meal, use the available tutorials and ask the right questions on here, a novice can be damn productive in it. You don't need engineering experience at all, but a rudimentary understanding of how code works will help you learn the scripting language.

As someone who works in the gaming industry (and one of my coworkers worked on Oblivion, so I'll ask him when I get in later), I would bet the CK has VERY little measurable effect on the bottom line. Where it's greatest benefit is, I would suspect, is generating brand loyalty. Believe it or not, companies do value you're opinion of them. The concept of "Branding" is a direct result of that, because the long term benefits of wide spread brand loyalty is that you can put out a stinker (Dragon Age II) and people will give you the benefit of the doubt on your next release (Old Republic). Additionally, you want to be a defining name in a given genre. When you think sports gaming, you think EA Sports. This isn't because EA makes the best sports games (I would argue NBA 2k & MLB: The Show are higher quality than anything EA makes), but because they've so successfully branded themselves. Bioware created this with Neverwinter Nights (to this day, the most mod-friendly RPG ever made, to the point where the game itself wasn't as good as it could have been because of it). Bethesda, bless 'em, still values its PC roots above and beyond any other major developer I can think of. The money's in the console game now, but they're doing what they can to let the PC crowd know they're still valued. That in and of itself is impressive.

Ok, I've decided to take something on similar to this. I'm not going to recreate Classics as you request, as that's just too big... rather, I'm going to carve out a section of Ansalon and build it in CK once it comes out. I'll get the basics in... races, cities, NPCs, things like that. I'm going to do southwestern Ansalon... as I described above, with Tarsis as the central city. Now, as I said, Skyrim mirrors Krynn best in the Fifth Age, but being that that's the least popular period in Dragonlance, I'm going to set it just before the Summer of Chaos, post-War of the Lance, but before the Fifth Age. Once I get the basics down, and have proven my legitimacy in this, I'll see if I can recruit other folks to fill in the gaps (models, textures, scripts, etc.)

I liked it better when it was the construction kit.

As a massive Dragonlance fan, this'd be awesome, but it's such a gigantic undertaking it's hard to imagine it ever getting done. A very large group tried to do it for both Neverwinter Nights games, and it never came to fruition despite that team being talent enough that they eventually were contracted by Bioware to produce premium content for both games. Now, build a mod based on a small portion of Ansalon (considering the existing landscapes in Skyrim, the Tarsis area would probably be best, extending from Wayreth Forest in the west to somewhere in the Plains of Dust in the east, and from the south gate of Thorbardin in the north, to the Ice Wall Glacier in the south) might work, especially if you can borrow some other mods to extend it. The nice thing about this is you'd have several of the Dragonlance races represented (Neidar, Hylar, Qualinesti, Thanoi, Ice and Plains barbarians, civilized humans in the various settlements around Kharolis, Silvanesti if you went far enough east) and you'd have the Tower of Wayreth there. The Tower would be tricky. I guess what I'd do is if the individual has a certain number of perks in spell casting trees, you have a messenger deliver a letter inviting him to take the test. He travels west to Wayreth and can wander forever, but unless he actually sleeps, he'll never find it. Upon sleeping, he'll awaken outside the tower (similar to the way Raistlin and Caramon found it in Soulforge). That said, the magic system in Skyrim most resembles Krynn in the 5th Age, after the Chaos War, but before the War of Souls. If you were to set it during that time period, Wayreth would be kind of an afterthought. There'd be no need to go there since Sorcery wasn't regulated by the towers any longer. The trouble is DL fans, for the most part, abhor the 5th Age. If you look at the map from the Tales of the Lance boxed set, there are plenty of locations in that area that it could easily be as big as, if not bigger than, Skyrim. But then, all the work to populate that area... you'd need a hell of a team of content creators, and they'd all have to know the setting and the toolset.

I wouldn't call them more aesthetically pleasing, but unique. Thank you for the link:)

Will we keep the quest indicators on the map? The dynamic quests in Skyrim typically do not have any indication of location except for that indicator.

I'm sure it'd be tough... but even a simplistic version of death replacement would be a huge immersion improvement I think. Anyways, I'll likely get started on this in the next week or so... hoping I can hear from people who have more experience modding this game so I'm not starting from scratch.

Umm... which? The very first one I'll be doing is the economic rebalance. Essentially changing item values, adding items to represent more "worn" versions of the existing ones, reducing the amount of coin that's generated, things along those lines. The idea is that a suit of heavy armor should be damned expensive... and the economy shouldn't be such that "damned expensive" means "a few extra hours of grinding" but a concerted effort to make and save enough to buy that armor. Of course, in the end, it'll work best alongside a combat rebalance mod that gives heavy armor it's due value in combat (along with its drawbacks, of course). Heavy armor isn't the be all-end all of this idea, just an example. I just feel like it should be a struggle, early on, just to get by, and I shouldn't make so much money I feel like I should retire from adventuring:P

This wouldn't be crazy at all... and eventually, that's what I'm planning on doing here. I definitely need to wait for the CK to come out before any of the re-dialogue work is done, as I will easily be able to export the STT (speech to text) / caption data, and then from there give my different voice actors scripts to record. I imagine once the CK is out, this will take very little time to get everything running... it's just going to be gathering Voice Actors that will be the biggest challenge. To start, I plan on simply removing the speech in question, and replacing it with corresponding text. As the mod continues in development, I will add incremental patches that add the voice content to the mod. Finding the voice actors is only half the challenge. You'll get plenty of volunteers... and you'll get people with enough talent to pull it off... what you wont get is people with the necessary equipment to make it sound half decent. Good luck. I'll have to acquire the necessary equipment, but when I do, I'll be on board. I am hoping to do a few mods that'll require original voice talent, so I'll need it anyways. I think I can act OK, and do a couple of decent accents, so I might be able to pull off several roles. Not that I have the best voice for it, but it's just more variety.