nuska

The minute you start making mods the console becomes your best friend. Mod testing without console use is tedious if not totally impossible in some cases, and results in better screenshots. No reason whatsoever to not love its existence.

Yeah if Skyrim Nexus will also lose repping it'll make said attitude adjustments much harder to do. I'd rather let people know acting like an arse and using slurs is unacceptable without turning it into a huge argument.

..Gone? It still shows up for me. I never noticed it missing and I'm a standard user currently. What do you mean gone?

You *can* do that! Fire up the CK, make a copy of an existing staff, edit the stats to whatever you want and place it in the world. Done :) This is one of those cases where you really genuinely can do it easily, and don't need to rely on someone else to hit the right note on what you want out of it.

If your mod ideas aren't getting responded to, it's probably because of one or more of the following: -Modders already have their own backlog of things to make (thinking up an idea takes a minute - implementing it can take months of hard work) -Your idea might be too big in scope to be feasible, or run into game engine limitations -You might not be eloquent enough about the function and purpose of your idea -It might have been done already, or in a similar way enough that it doesn't warrant a new project -It might be such a small and specific thing that you could do it yourself easily -Your idea might not be considered fitting into the game Instead of wondering why no one else is swooping in and turning your thoughts into modding gold, it might be more productive to be proactive and look at some tutorials and guides on how to do it yourself. That's how every modder gets started - and it lessens the frustration of having no one make what you want, when you can just pull up the CK and do it yourself. Or at the very least you'll get valuable perspective on what things are feasible to do and what aren't, and how much work it can take to realise even seemingly simple things. :)

EEO IS NOW RELEASED. EVERYONE GO GET IT GO GO GO

That's a big relief then! I almost got suspicious when I wasn't able to root out any bugs on my end. That usually means I've missed something and someone else is going to roll in announcing there's a gamebreaking glitch in the mod 10 hours after release. And I'm glad the noses are that visible of an improvement! I spent many hours reverse engineering symmetrical base shapes from the trainwrecks that are the basegame noses and tweaking and refining them.

I know I'm taking a well deserved break. I've had around 4 months of almost uninterrupted modding spree and it's starting to wear me down. This will be a low-support-demand release anyway since there just isn't much that can break with EEO. I haven't had a single tester report anything not working, no crash issues, nothing. I just packaged the release-state mod. I just need to set up the mod page tomorrow and I can let these babies out of the gates. Whew! http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_magq2nFGuv1r3e7wgo1_1280.jpg

http://static.skyrim.nexusmods.com/images/675468-1347831324.jpg http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_magp7pCzLy1r3e7wgo2_1280.jpg Yup this is release ready. The more I test it the more this feels like something I'm genuinely happy with and glad to let loose to the masses. I'm preparing readmes and documentations and troubleshooting guides and such.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_maglogBBdC1r3e7wgo1_1280.jpg One month in a mod's evolution. Staring at the current, release-state elves for so long has made me completely blind to how far they have come. Here are the final player presets: http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mae839Ciuq1r3e7wgo1_1280.jpg http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mae839Ciuq1r3e7wgo2_1280.jpg http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mae839Ciuq1r3e7wgo3_1280.jpg

This will work with any face/body texture you have in place - it supplies its own normal maps in a separate path and places the original normal as an alternate texture. This will be compatible with pretty much every body/skin mod out there. :) In some great news, I can now officially confirm EEO will affect ALL elf NPCs in the game (excluding Dawnguard content for the time being) and supply an extra 6 recruitable followers. I'm very excited about this! Skyrim will be a whole different experience now! http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mafvpswmbe1r3e7wgo1_500.jpg Ethereal is also now feature-complete - I've reached all of the goals I set for the mod at the start of its development, and I'm most pleased to announce this is scheduled for a release within one week!

EEO is now in closed beta! Builds have been distributed to those who have so far signed up for testing :) If you're interested in providing feedback and checking the mod for functionality, PM me and I'll get back to you with a download link!

The Altmer skin is unchanged actually. That's just the ambient lighting and ENB. :)

I'm pleased to announce there will be a round of closed beta builds going out this weekend! We're nearing release state - the only last major missing part is NPC appearances, which I will tackle through the coming week along with general polishing and preset preparation. A small selection of male player presets to show how much progress has been made! http://i.imgur.com/rtmUE.jpg

Turn off Depth of Field and Ambient Occlusion for a starter and/or switch to a better optimized one. ENBs are massive performance eaters even for really beefy rigs.

..Seriously. Play what you think is fun, that's the extent of that rocket science. What character you choose in a game isn't a reflection of your integrity as a person nor is it somehow degrading for a guy to play a female character. It doesn't need excuses like "well I like looking at butts!" like it'll dissolve your masculinity in a puff of smoke if you just play a woman for the sake of it. I'm a lady and play ladies because I relate better to ladies and enjoy being a tough badass fantasy lady.

Nope, don't get a premade one - learn to build your own from the pieces provided, all the wall parts and floors in the CK objects. That's what you actually learn from, and that's the important stuff you need to know in order to later be able to construct bigger narratives and experiences. The groundwork is everything! Do study the existing dungeons and nudge them around to figure out how they were built, then use that knowledge to construct your own. That's the best kind of learning you can do. You're not studying to impress your instructors or peers, you're doing it to gain the building blocks to comfortably build your own stuff and eventually blow minds when you've matured and gained expertise. Seriously, showing you can take the provided bits and put them together into something functional is far more important than any fancy dialogue scene or epic story at this point in your studies. Those are what you can start thinking about once you've mastered the groundwork. You can start by going on the Creation Kit wiki at http://www.creationkit.com/ and looking up world editor tutorials on Youtube, just search for Creation kit. Dig around. There's a wealth of guides out there, and most of all, don't be afraid of the toolset. Mess around, see what happens from which thing and just reload if you screw something up. That's why you should not even start on anything substantial until you know the world editing tools from muscle memory. Make something REALLY simple like a small hut interior a few times, look at item data and see how stat modifications work, scrap it and then start making a dungeon. I personally haven't done world editing since a few years ago in Oblivion so I'm not a good source for it. I'm occupied making custom races which is a whole different part of Creation Kit sorcery. Be proactive, use google a lot and work your way up from the very basics.

If you've never touched the CK before, I'm going to warn you right away that you're in for a bumpy ride with a scope like that. Being a game school graduate (in art, granted, I'm writing this from my desk at an MMO game studio :) ), my first advice is you need to stick to a much more tight package you can be SURE to be able to complete in a polished state and then add frills and bells and whistles when you have a solidly working core. You need to count in time spent trial-and-erroring the CK side work and learning the extensive scripting a project of that gravity would require, in addition to writing, recording, processing and arranging voice acting (assuming you can find yourself actors). You want to make scripted events, but if you're unfamiliar with and intimidated with the capacities and limitations of the CK, you should be prepared to spend at least 3 or 4 weeks intensively learning the tools and best practices before even starting to make content. ESPECIALLY if your intention is to do all that by yourself. Depending on how much time you have available, I would suggest something closer to the following: -One interior dungeon with a simple associated story, possibly triggerable by an item found in the world -POSSIBLY a few different levels within the dungeon -Traps, triggerable items, doors, loot, all placed interestingly and some hidden doodads - use the game assets at your disposal creatively and efficiently -Decorations, plants, gatherables, atmospheric lighting -Enemies and a boss fight -Item that you pick up at the end of said boss fight to complete the quest Making even that kind of a mod takes a good chunk of time and effort, especially if it's built to live up to the standards of base game content. Your instructors aren't likely to care about how many cutscenes or interactive dialogues you can cram in. They're most likely more concerned about seeing that you can make a project estimate, put it together, make it engaging and playable and finish it on time. Don't even think about doing story bits more high-level than "recover ancient artifact" to keep yourself focused. As a game designer your focus should be making a fun play experience that's consistent, sensible and plays well.

By the way! If you want your story mod to be compatible with Ethereal when this releases, you'll need to make a separate ESP with NPC faces rebuilt to use Ethereal assets. I've found that most NPCs have baked-in features and will only start using models and textures from Ethereal when they're manually placed. So be prepared for that if you intend to recommend this mod for your users :)

There's a board for Skyrim mod requests, you'll have better luck that way.

Ahh, I toned it down a little to be less saturated, now it's more grey but has hints of the vibrance left :) It just doesn't stick out as much. Skin tones are really tricky to get just right since they show up so differently between texture sets and ENB configs.

Yes, I've added a few extra skin tone options for each race. :) I personally love dark skin and thought it a shame the elves were restricted to pale tones only.

http://i.imgur.com/eBvFv.jpg And a bigger sampling. I configured my game to match vanilla textures quite closely to see how well the mod fares even without totally prettified skin.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ma8z2aASWL1r3e7wgo1_1280.jpg Old lady skins for player presets - this won't be solely about pretty young faces :)

Looks like flipped normals to my eye. You might want to pop a 'Normal' modifier on top of your stack and tick 'unify' before you export, see if that redeems the problem.