nerdofprey

Custom dialogue is really hard to figure out at first, but it's easy to do a ton of it really fast once you do figure it out. Unlike a lot of things in the CK, your file structure has to be altered to match the plugin, instead of you telling the plugin being where the files are. When you create a new line of dialogue in the CK, it will generate a file name for you. The sound file has to exist in data/sound/voice/pluginname.esp/voicetype, with that file name, then the game can play it. Basically to reuse existing lines without editing the audio or anything, you just have to copy the original sound file and put it in the right subfolder and give it the right file name. (I know this is not a complete tutorial, but I'm hoping that if you are looking at real tutorials this basic info will help make sense of it.) Easy way for #2 would be to use an AI package with conditions that the location does not have any keywords like city, town, hold capital, settlement, and then put a little script fragment that adds them to a faction when the package starts and removes them from it when it ends. When you enter a location like that, the AI package would change and they would stop being hostile. Usually areas immediately outside city walls also have these keywords, so it would be a relatively smooth transition most of the time. Of course, this would involve using custom AI packages on your NPC, which would probably have to involve either using a quest alias or taking them off the standard follower framework. (This is also less complicated than it sounds) This stuff can be complicated, but it can be done. Over about the past 3 years I went from having zero game modding experience and zero computer programming knowledge to making crazy complicated mods with complex multi-stage quests, hundreds of lines of custom dialogue, and complex scripting. It only takes patience to figure it all out!

...Is there an actual reason you can't use object references? Because map markers ARE object references.

What I do is drag the light (or whatever thing) somewhere off the map, or under the ground, and then tick the "initially disabled" box. That's basically what TES5Edit does to stuff anyway, it just saves a step.

Outfit Studio has a function where you can delete vertices from a mesh. Just find any armor where you like how the lower legs look, mask off the lower legs, and delete the rest of the mesh. Best not to try to manually delete vertices from individual 0 / 1 weight versions by this method; if the vertices don't match between 0 and 100 weight the game will crash, and it can be hard to perfectly mask the same vertices on two meshes. Just make one lower legs mesh, then make a copy of that, and then reshape those into 0 and 1 meshes.

I just wanted to report that on my end the issue has gone away. Even with HTTPS Everywhere enabled, everything seems to work.

FYI, I've never seen a mesh that actually requires HDT physics. What they require is a skeleton that contains those bones, like XPMS or XPMSE. A lot of those meshes predate HDT and were actually built for TBBP animations. Again, they did not require the animations. All that's required is that the mesh isn't rigged to a bone that isn't there. You can use the same meshes and have zero jiggling in your game just by installing a compatible skeleton without installing HDT or TBBP. There's really no downside at all to installing a custom skeleton, either. If you install XPMSE you never have to worry about any of this. If I have a mod that's rigged for HDT, I usually just list XPMSE as a requirement and let it go at that. People can add jiggling or not, as they see fit, but just use the damn skeleton and you won't get crashes. It's also possible to just include XPMSE skeletons in your mod archive; they're free to share. Then the user doesn't have to do anything and your mod is still stand-alone. Somebody would have to have deliberately installed an incompatible skeleton to run into any problems.

Yeah, no problem, you can attach a script that opens the training menu to any line of dialogue in any quest, really. Just add this fragment: Game.ShowTrainingMenu(akSpeaker) You can also duplicate an existing line from the trainer quest and then move it to a different quest, and it will come with the script already attached. But it's not a complicated script.

It must be possible, because this person did it! There's also this version or this version which could be edited to change the skin textures to the flame effect.

You can't really remove and replace the original shader, you have to add another somehow. You need the standard shader property on there to get the skin to look right, it is a skin-specific shader and it's set up to change skin tone based on your NPC record among other things. I know from building my Briarheart mod - which has a pulsing glow effect on the briar in their chest as well as a working glow map - it is possible to layer two shader properties on one shape in a body mesh. I don't really remember how I did it, though, haha... I remember looking at a lot of other people's meshes to see how they did stuff. I do know that one shader property is set up as the controller of the other, though. I don't know if you have tried just literally adding a glow flag to the existing shader property... I feel like it won't work right without being a glow-type shader instead of skin-type. I swear I have seen NPC's with glowing tattoos on the nexus before, so I know it can be done, but I never downloaded those mods to see how they worked. EDIT: Boom, right here, glowing runes on the body! Hopefully if you download that mod you can back-engineer it without too much trouble.

I'm guessing you would need to add a separate BSLightingShaderProperty with its own shader type and texture paths. Another (maybe easier?) way to do it would be to duplicate the body object, scale it up ever so slightly, and make it a transparent overlay with glow effects.

A - There are a lot of good tutorials out there for making a standalone follower. You should at least figure out how to get the character into the game before coming up with any elaborate plans beyond that. B - Copyright concerns aside, using dialogue from movies is not going to get good results, because it won't be clean; there will be layers and layers of other sounds in there... score, foley, ambient noise, effects... It will sound like mud. It would be A LOT less work to find a voice actor who does a decent impression. C - You need to start a whole lot smaller if you don't know how to do any of this. Try making a really simple quest where A vampire sends you to fight A werewolf. Don't start making plans for questlines on the scale of Dawnguard until you've got a really solid handle on the basics.

I'm still in the process of figuring this stuff out myself, but I can tell you that oftentimes the parts of building a quest that you don't want to do turn out to be parts that need doing to make stuff work. was a huge help to me in figuring out the basic construction of scenes. The guy is modding Fallout 4, but most of it seems to work exactly the same way in Skyrim.

"In the same way I always have" is not really helpful in figuring out where you might have gone wrong. There are actually a lot of workable ways to change eye textures, and there are ways to mess up each of them. You can edit the texture paths in the eye meshes, which can then be overwritten by applying texture sets in the CK, which can then be overwritten by editing texture paths in NPCs' facegen meshes. Then all your work could be undone if you're using a vanilla texture, because a user might overwrite it with another texture.

Redirecting the textures in Nifskope won't work, you have to make a texture set in the CK and point your new foot armor addon to it. Otherwise the game just applies the default skin textures for that character. This "problem" is ultimately a VERY good thing. This mechanism is the same reason equipping new armor on a character doesn't give them neck or wrist seams. This is how unique follower NPC's can have their own skin textures and still wear armor that uses default textures. Character skin textures override mesh skin textures unless you force them to do otherwise. To give a character or a race a unique skin texture, you have to create texture sets in the CK and create duplicate body parts as armor addons, with the textures forcibly redirected. Since the mod you're using comes with all that stuff premade, you would need to dig in the CK, find the armor addons for the foot and tail meshes you want to change, and redirect the textures to a new texture set that you create yourself. Another alternative would be to simply edit the texture changes you want into the body textures you're using. If the UV mapping isn't different, that would probably be easier. If it is different... see above.

I'm still looking for feedback on this if anybody has any ideas, no matter how outlandish. I've done more experimenting, and I found some solutions that are working pretty well. There's a type of default trigger box that was made for breaking out of The Chill... but a quick test showed that after some fiddling with properties, it could be used for breaking out of just about anything. Basically I strategically placed a couple of trigger boxes in spots where it's possible (with my mod) to break out of Cidhna Mine, and what it does is sets the Silver-Blood guard faction as an enemy of playerfaction when the player steps into it. This is a better solution than "resisting arrest" because it doesn't instantly put them all on high alert; you can still sneak past, but they'll try to kill you if they do catch you. I feel like this is realistic. I also added the default jail door script to the pickable locks, which is a basic detection event of configurable "loudness." Adds a little bit of challenge if you do try to sneak out; they'll hear you open the door. All of this works without the player having to be technically "arrested," which is good. But this still leaves the problem of the guards outside, in and around Markarth. I'm having trouble getting my cobbled-together forcegreet to override their standard arrest dialogue. At this point in testing, they will arrest you... but then all of a sudden you're right back on the standard crime system, and you could just sleep it off... and the quest breaks. I think the next thing I'm going to try is adding a bit to the quest script where it clears all your related bounties at the start, when you get thrown in Cidhna Mine for the quest. In theory you then would not ever be able to "serve your time" or "pay your fine" during the quest when you're supposed to have a life sentence. The game wouldn't technically think you're "in jail" at that point. And if you break out, there's no bounty on you. But I still need the guards outside the mine to try to "arrest" you on sight if you break out... without involving the default crime system. Maybe I can get my forcegreet package to work if you're not technically wanted for a crime. I'd need to make sure that package is tacked onto every guard in the reach. This might involve somehow getting all the reach guards into quest aliases. I'd like for the player to be able to break out of the prison and get thrown back into the prison an infinite number of times, as long as the quest is running. Not that they will... but I want to be prepared for the player making interesting choices.

You know, I have often wondered about this, and I have yet to find a way. It usually works if I start by copying an existing armor that has weight slider enabled, rather than create a new one. And if it doesn't work, I fix it in TES5Edit. At this point I'm just used to doing it that way and I kind of stopped looking for alternatives. But if there is a reliable way to enable it from inside the CK, I'd love to know.

You should get used to looking through your mods in TES5Edit just so you know how it's supposed to look when it's not broken, and to understand how your actions in the CK will show up in the plugin. That way, if you see something that's not supposed to be there like a deleted base object or a cell edit, you'll recognize it as a problem and be able to remove it. You might be familiar with the standard mod-cleaning process to remove identical-to-master edits and deleted references, but not every mistake will be an ITM or deleted reference. Your example of a deleted base object could not be "cleaned" by that method. You would have to actually know what to look for in TES5Edit. Another reason to get familiar with it is, there are a lot of things you can't pull off with the CK alone. Sometimes to get the right result you have to deliberately make dirty edits with the CK and then undo them in TES5Edit later. In short, yes, anything you do can be undone, but it's a skill in itself.

Load the plugin in TES5Edit, find the thing you deleted by accident, and, well... delete it. That will remove the edit from the plugin, so the thing in question will no longer be affected by your mod. You're deleting the delete! It should always be part of your process to look through your mod in TES5Edit and get rid of dirty edits, which include accidents like this. This is assuming the thing you deleted is not a thing you added yourself. In that case you probably just need to add it again. Or roll back to your last saved version.

By the way... If the scripting is too intimidating, a much easier way for a follower to keep pace is to up their run speed. The speed setting is just in the stats of the character record. At 100% they tend to fall behind just from not running in perfect straight lines behind you. Too fast and their movement becomes kind of unnatural. I've found 130% to be a good "sweet spot" where followers can keep up pretty well. This does not solve problems of followers getting lost or stuck or not going through doors with you, but it keeps them from lagging way behind when you run around.

This only works if you've got custom AI packages set up, but what I did is put a "follow" AI package at the top of their stack that triggers on the following conditions: GetInSameCell, player, == 0 GetLineOfSight, player, == 0 OR GetDistance, player, > 2048 (you can use any distance, really) And then added the following script fragment to run on package start: akActor.MoveTo(Game.GetPlayer()) You change cells constantly running around the world, so you don't want this to trigger on every cell change. This is set up so it kicks in if there's a cell change AND either the follower can't see you OR is not close to you. Game.GetPlayer() seems to be the most reliable way to get a script to recognize the player, though there are others.

I was thinking about a parallel quest, a simple version of that is sort of what I set up for testing out the forcegreet approach, sort of a dummy version of regular arrest dialogue, where it uses a simple moveto function if you surrender instead of sendplayertojail. Sendplayertojail is kind of the whole problem; I've had a lot of user requests to allow sleeping in Cidhna Mine, whether for needs mods or for roleplay purposes, but if the player is technically "in jail" and sleeps, it triggers the "serve your time" mechanic, spits them out onto the street and clears their bounties, and it breaks the quest. I was thinking I may be able to work around that by setting up a dummy crime faction where the sendplayertojail function throws them in Cidhna Mine, then if you "serve your time" the "exit" point is also inside the prison, and maybe if it tries to clear your bounty it just clears the dummy faction bounty and leaves you wanted in the Reach. It might even be possible to script an endless bounty loop where serving your time makes you a wanted criminal again... Part of the trouble in testing has been, if I let you escape the mine, any time you get caught again after that it throws you right back into the vanilla crime system with an option to serve your time and be released. I would need to be very thorough in blocking vanilla guard dialogue.

For a good reflective effect, your best bet is an environment map, not a specular map. In order to get environment mapping to work, a detail that's way too easy to overlook is, at the very bottom of the BSLightingShaderProperty settings, you have to set the "environment map scale" to a nonzero number. Higher = brighter reflections. A value of 1.0 usually works, 0.5 for duller, 2.0 or above for super shiny. I usually use this for metal parts, but it's good for shiny leather too; you might want to go with a lower value there. Of course the basic steps of setting up an environment map are necessary too; set the Skyrim Shader Type to environment map, tick SLFS1_Environment_Mapping under shader flags 1, and have an environment map and a working cube map set up in the textures.

In hopes of clarifying a little: Elements of the existing crime system work great and I don't mind piggy-backing on it if there's a way to do it. For example, the send player to jail mechanic seems to be the ONLY way to remove quest items from the player's inventory along with their other stuff. It would be cool if I could use that. (My working build just lets them keep their quest items in jail.) For the purposes of the Cidhna Mine quest, though, the player is supposedly given a life sentence. I cannot allow the player to serve their time or pay their bounty and walk around Markarth like nothing happened. That "life sentence" in the Reach needs to stick until the player clears their name by completing the quest. ANY suggestion for working around that is welcome.

I'm working on a fairly ambitious update to my old mod Blood and Silver - Cidhna Mine Expanded. This time, now that I've learned a fair amount about scripting, I'm basically trying to take the quest apart and put it together differently, and I want to remove some of the "on rails" feeling and give the player a lot more options. To make this work right I can't actually use the game's built-in jail sentence mechanic, which is very restrictive, so I'm having to fake it. It's easy enough to move the player to the jail, take away their stuff, etc. but some things have been harder to figure out. In the base game it's not possible to pick the lock and walk out, but I'm making it possible. Right now the main thing I'm struggling with is having the guards inside the mine actually try to stop you if you do that, in a way that makes sense. The city guards will try to re-arrest you once you leave the mine, which they should, but the guards inside don't care if you leave the designated area because as far as they're concerned, you're still "in jail." Things I have tried so far with limited success: #1, A script on the gates that flags the player as "resisting arrest" if they open it. This works OK but the reaction is a bit overwhelming and violent. Basically this approach doesn't take sneaking into account at all; even if nobody sees you open the gate, they all come running like you rang the dinner bell, and they stay on high alert pretty much indefinitely, and they try to kill you on sight from then on... even if you evade them, close the gate, run back inside and hide, then sneak out later. Plus if you make a mad dash for the front door, the "resisting arrest" thing carries over to the city guards, and instead of trying to arrest you they just murder the F outta you. This might ultimately be the "feature, not bug" approach, because it seems kind of realistic that anybody trying to walk out of Cidhna Mine would face a pretty brutal response. #2, a ForceGreet package on the guards with a fairly large radius and a condition for the player to be detected. This works a lot better for a stealthy character, because it's possible to sneak past the guards if you're really good at it. I slapped this together with some stock "found you" lines and a couple of basic "I submit" and "you'll never take me alive" responses, the latter flagging you as "resisting arrest" so they bring down the fury on you. This has been a bit wonky in testing, as force greets can be, and the guards come across as too mellow; you try to escape from the brutal, inescapable prison and they go "hey, don't do that." Other things I've considered are strategically-placed trigger boxes (maybe to flag the player as resisting arrest IF they're detected?) and a custom crime faction for the guards inside the mine. I'm wondering if I can simply script the doors, or areas you enter, to give you a huge bounty with a separate crime faction... maybe then the guards would have the right reaction to you sneaking out. But this relies too much on the default crime system... As I said before, it's preferable if I can make this behavior work properly without the player ever technically being arrested - just physically moved back into the jail instead - if they're caught. The reason for this is, the Cidhna Mine quest will straight-up break if it's possible for the player to serve their sentence or pay their bounty. I want the player to have the option to escape, but to remain public enemy #1 in the Reach forever until that situation is actually resolved. And I want the authorities to throw you back in there on sight, and NOT just kill you, so a lot of the typical "enemy" mechanics won't work. I really need something that works LIKE the game's crime system but is NOT the game's crime system. I'm really posting this in the hopes of hearing any and all outside-the-box ideas for building a new, flexible system of crime and punishment for Skyrim, that basically pretends the hardcoded crime system does not exist. Sorry if this is all a bit confusing... That has been my experience working on it as well.

Thanks again, this is good info. I'm a little confused about cell "attachment" but I'm reading up, and hopefully I'll figure it out. This seems like a lot of effort to put in to have a werewolf joke in my mod, but it also seems worthwhile to figure it out because it would be a good base for making a lot of interesting stuff happen.