nerdofprey

Short answer is, don't. Replacing vanilla head parts is a generally bad idea and can easily cause tons of bugs including crashes. Facegen files (meshes and textures) are the actual files read by the game for individual NPC faces. If you change any racial head parts, these need to be regenerated for every NPC of that race. This includes NPC's added by other mods; that's the main reason it's a bad idea. Patches would be necessary to use your mod with just about any other mod. If there is any mismatch between the race's head parts and the head parts present in the facegen files, you get the gray face / black face bug or possibly a crash. The flipside of this is, you don't need to change the race's head parts to change them for individual NPC's. Since you need to regenerate every NPC's facegen to make this work anyway, you can swap head parts from within each individual NPC record and then export new facegen with that change included. Different races' head shapes are determined by the associated tri files; they all use the same head mesh and just distort it in different ways. So you could do something like, duplicate the Nord head with the Nord tri files, set your duplicate to be usable by elf races, then in the NPC record you assign the new head type and design a new face based on that and export the facegen. Of course if you do that, you lose all the elfish features, no pointy ears or anything. There's really no shortcut for changing the facial features of an entire race. No matter what you do, it will always come down to editing each individual NPC in the end. The question is just how much work you want to put into that. The end result will be proportional to the labor you put in. There are easier approaches you can use to make elves/orcs look a little less weird; the #1 easiest is you could simply use head textures designed for humans on all your elves and orcs, which gets rid of the weird wrinkles and stuff and instantly makes a big difference. One step more difficult than that would be to individually edit NPC face sliders to make their facial features less weird through the CK, save those changes and export new facegen. If you want really beautiful results, the thing to do is design each person's face individually in RaceMenu, export the head mesh, and merge that with facegen data from the CK. This is how most sexy custom followers and are made, and some top-quality NPC overhaul mods, and you can find a bunch of online tutorials that outline the process.

Use an environment map, not a specular map.

You always ragdoll on death, it's not unique to falling. Death isn't something like a spell where I can just copy the script, unfortunately.

Maybe somebody could help me with a specific scripting thing... I want to give this guy some kind of passive effect where getting hit with anything will make him ragdoll and get knocked around. Seems like there could just be an on hit script on the reference, but I can't figure out how to parse a knockback effect in reverse... every implementation of it in the game is active, and assumes that the thing doing the hitting is initiating the knockback, but I want it to be reactive and built into the thing being hit.

If you make your activator box the right way (might be some trial and error and tutorial-reading involved), seems like you should be able to set it as the activate parent of the pull bar, and then hopefully you'd still get the sounds and animations and stuff as if you had activated the thing itself.

I was actually just thinking about letting him misplace your items... Let the player trade stuff to him but his inventory gets wiped at random. I'm not actually sure how to make him wake you up when you try to sleep, but that would be hilarious and perfect. It's worth pointing out that "worst follower ever" isn't 100% of what the mod is about, the dude has story reasons for existing and not every idea will be applicable to the character, but I just want to make sure that as a follower he is more a liability than anything...

I've got this little mod in the works that's really just for laughs. Without spoiling too much, the idea is to make the worst follower ever, one that actively makes the game more difficult. I've got a lot of plans already, and there are some obvious things that are really easy to do like terrible stats... I'm adding a perk that puts his stagger chance at 100% so he can't take a punch. I'm going to add random chatter lines that only fire when you're sneaking that have a "detection event" script to alert enemies to your presence. I'm making him super aggressive so he will run around starting fights you can't finish... I'm making it so he can't equip basically any gear (custom race where the default "skin" is an ugly outfit) and has next to zero carry weight, and probably won't even add a "let's trade" option... His primary weapon is a wooden sword. I'm trying to think outside the box a bit. I want it to be impossible to dismiss him, but if possible I want to go beyond just not adding dismiss dialogue. I'm trying to think if there's a good way to block other follower management mods from giving the player more options. I think maybe just putting "reserves reference" on the quest alias and locking his AI into the alias will block most mods from taking control. I'm trying to think if there's a clean way to stop him from even being console disabled, it might be as simple as an on-load script on the reference that enables it. Like I really want to make sure you're f--ked forever unless you uninstall the mod, haha... I'm pretty proficient at modding in general at this point, and I'm not really asking for "how-to" stuff here, so much as just more ideas for "features" I could add, or better ways to handle any of the above. Suggestions are welcome!

In response to post #60349487. Giving somebody 50% of the reward for doing 1% of the work is insane and absurd, as is trying to calculate "what percent of this quest mod is a rabbit?" This goes both ways. I've been the dude who made the rabbit in this type of scenario. I had already set 100% DP from one of my mods to go to somebody else, before I shut it all down. If somebody did more than half of the work on something I'm cool to let them take credit. If somebody else grabs one thing from my mod and uses it to build something totally new, I'm never going to chase them down demanding royalties. It's petty and crass, and it does nothing but discourage sharing and collaboration. I'll be a lot happier getting nothing out of this deal than getting into slap-fights with my collaborators over who gets how many pennies.

In response to post #60346482. Assuming that dozens of people have contributed in equal measure, when their assets have been chopped up, remixed and repurposed as TINY parts of a HUGE mod that took months for me to make, is absurd. Trying to apportion credit fairly would be futile. What percentage to give someone who, say, made a whole separate program that I employed extensively as a modding tool to create original designs... is not uncomplicated. If I'm working alone to create something wildly original that incorporates a few little scraps of other people's work, and end up with 2% of the reward for it, that's not uncomplicated. I'm happy to give every single one of those people credit. If I build an epic quest with new locations and fully voiced characters, I'm happy to say the rabbit that hopped past in the background at one point was made by so-and-so, but anybody that says so-and-so thus deserves half of the credit for my work is insane... and I'm not even going to put myself in a situation where I have to dignify that kind of argument with a response. Opting out, though, is very simple.

In response to post #60345712. Modders are like, "sure you can borrow my bike... but I better not catch you working a f___ing paper route!"

I saw this today and thought "oh, that's nice" and set all my stuff to opt-in. I've made some relatively popular mods and I thought hey, maybe between all of them this could pay for a premium subscription to the site... Then I thought about it a bit and... some of my best and most well-liked mods borrow little elements here and there from other modders who have kindly given permission. I certainly wouldn't see this arrangement as "profiting off of someone else's work," - not when I take into account the tremendous amount of work I have personally put into my mods, and the insignificant "profit" I might see - but there very well might be somebody out there who DOES see it that way, absolutely flips their fricken lid, and starts causing huge problems for me. I don't really need the money that bad, and I don't need that kind of drama in my life. I've been turning off donations on my mod pages for a while, and I'll go ahead and turn this off too. Really nice idea. It's just a shame about... people.

Rather than try to make this from scratch, it might be a good idea to download it from somebody who already did it, and go from there.

I think if the initial move is only triggered by one specific button activator (as opposed to a spell or something) it shouldn't be necessary to move that second xmarker to the player; it can just sit in front of the button.

There is an "IsSnowing" condition function that works perfectly well, for what it's worth. Ditto "IsRaining" and "IsPleasant." You could add those to any mechanic you're creating.

I always use human skin textures in place of elf ones, and I can tell you why. To me, most vanilla-style elf skin textures, even if they're nice HD ones, come across like a person wearing rubber prosthetic makeup, because of the weird wrinkles and stuff. They look like old Star Trek aliens. When you replace the textures with human ones, they just look like they have a different bone structure than humans, and to me it's way more realistic and immersive.

Mannequin is actually a word with a lot of accepted spellings including "manikin" and "mannikin," which are generally more old-fashioned spellings. But oddly enough Bethesda did not choose one of them. "Manakin" is a type of bird. Anyway, good job with that fix. Seems so obvious now, it's weird that they were not the way to begin with.

I feel like it would be much easier to put a regular enchantment on just one piece of the set, then put conditions on the magic effect so the player has to have all the other pieces of the set equipped for it to be active.

You have a lot of options, really. You could add a script to either the base item, the object reference, a quest alias that points to the object reference, or some combination of those. If you're already planning to create a unique weapon, putting it on the base item is probably the simplest approach. I'm pretty sure this would be a really simple script. I think an OnActivate script would probably work, then you just need to look up how to script giving the player a disease. I don't know it off the top of my head but it shouldn't be hard, just google "skyrim script disease" and go from there...

I actually did that recently; created a perk that reduced an NPC's stagger to 0, to make a boss fight more challenging. It's pretty easy!

This is what happens in the CK when you install HD tintmasks. The actual game can use HD tintmasks so you can have pretty, smooth makeup on your player characters, but in the CK they get messed up and stretch over NPCs' heads. A big red band across the forehead from a lip tint is the most common symptom. The fix is to delete, move, or rename your folder that has HD tintmasks in it before you fire up the CK. (data/textures/actors/character/character assets/tintmasks) Personally, I do enough modding that I just don't use HD tintmasks anymore in or out of the game. Or you can replace the messed up facegen texture with one you export using racemenu. You need to be really careful about matching skin tone if you do this, though. Their body color comes from the plugin, but the head color comes from the facegen texture. (Hence no facegen texture = gray head.)

Since the world map only shows points of entry for cells, it seems like a way to work around it might be to create phony points of entry that are not actually accessible to the player (behind walls, under mountains, or whatever) that show on the world map and correspond to different locations in your cell. Though I'm not 100% sure of the best way to set that up.

Force greets require a force greet AI package to work properly, and they can also be a little buggy; you can't have a bunch of dialogue under one topic for a force greet, so it's best to stick to just one line of dialogue for the greeting and then link that to another topic to continue that conversation. I can't really give you definitive answers to creative questions like "should I make a quest like this," because it's really your call. If you want to know if it will work, the answer is usually yes, it's just a matter of figuring out exactly what you want to happen and then figuring out how to implement it. To add furniture via dialogue shouldn't be too difficult, it would just be a matter of setting a bunch of furniture as initially disabled, setting one X-marker (also disabled) as the enable parent for each group of objects, then putting a script fragment on the dialogue to enable the X-marker (as an object reference property, or you can make the marker a quest alias). You could do whole rooms at a time that way. Optionally, you could use quest stages to gate each option, either to build things in a specific order or impose outside requirements like gathering materials. Or you could just list the options up front and charge a bit of gold for each, like how player houses work. There are a lot of ways to make that work.

I don't know if it's just me reading that wrong, but do you actually have "NewScript" in there instead of the name of your script, and "NewProperty" instead of the names of the spells? Cause that would definitely be a major problem...

WOOHOO! I was ready to get in the CK tonight and start taking screenshots if it still wasn't making sense... To make something a quest item you have to put the object reference in a quest alias and tick the box, I think it's "quest object." Optionally you can point a quest objective to that alias to get a map marker at that stage. You can do this by rooting around in the original quest, or by making your own quest, depending on what you're going for.

My post WAS a tutorial... You're making this too complicated. You keep going back to trying to make these unnecessary scripts. The enable parent function does all the work of a script for you, and in fact it cannot be overridden by a script if you try. When you're editing the reference of Malborn, your copy that you dropped in the game world, in the exact same little edit window where you ticked "initially disabled," there is a tab called "enable parent." That tab has a check box to use the opposite state, and it has a spot to select another reference as the parent. You just need to find the original Malborn reference that's being disabled at the end of that quest, and select him. That's it, the game does the rest for you. There are no extra steps to figure out here.