volnaiskra

Axlrocks is spot on. There is no doubt that it's a good thing for the community. Just how much remains to be seen, but it's certainly a good thing. The fact that it expands on the main game, rather than shooting you off to a distant land like most dlc, means that it might end up having a greater ripple effect on mods in general.

Thanks steve40, though I've already seen that page, and it makes little sense to me. It mentions <Alias=AliasName>, which is what the vanilla assassin note uses, but it doesn't really say where or how to use it. Since this Alias already exists in one of the main quests (since it works on that assassin note), is there a way to reference that quest in my quest? Would you know how to do that?

Does it happen when there are spells or shouts being cast? If so, deadly spell impacts is very likely your problem. Un install it or use the low res version

It's an ENB. Try a different enb (i recommend skyrealism - enb evolved), or look for a mod called "green water fix"

The assassin letter in vanilla skyrim inserts your name into the text, using <alias=player>. However, when I put that note into one of my mod's character's inventories, it no longer works. It displays text up until the first <, then everything else is blank. I guess I need to somehow create an alias for the player within my quest or something? Any help appreciated

Look inside the injector files. If there's something called "weird steam hack", set it to true and see if that solves the problem

I have a different question, though I won't start another thread. How do I insert the player's name into a note? There's in item already in the game that does it using <Alias=Player>, but when I put that in my note, it refuses to print anything past the first < (ie. it doesn't work, and the rest of the book remains blank) I don't really get why this is happening, though I suspect I might have to make a new alias for the player in my quest. If so, how do I do that?

Wonderful. Thanks very much, steve40. I haven't got to the cleaning stage yet, but I'll make sure I do it cautiously.

I'm in the Creation Kit, and in the area I'm working on, there are giant red cubes everywhere. Their IDs are things like "fxcameraattacheffectsACT" and "defaultEnableEncLinkedRef". Because they're so big, they make it impossible to select many of the things that happen to be inside them. I can turn them off by pressing M, but that hides all the other markers too - and I want to be able to select some of those markers! So, I have two questions: 1. what are those giant red cubes? 2. How can I hide them so they stop getting in my way?

Not for me. I tried disabling lush grass and settings grass shadows to 0, but I still get a CTD every time I approach roadside ruins. Anyone else have this problem?

Ok, thanks for elaborating. Oh well, I guess it just won't happen. I was hoping this could be my contribution to the community. I know a lot of people would have enjoyed motion blur, and though I don't have any coding skills, I do have a bit of disposable income, so I figured I could help make it happen. But I guess I should have guessed that if it didn't happen by now, it wasn't because of a lack of motivation :(

Thanks for your explanation! With camera based, is it possible to leave alone the player (arms in 1st person or whole body in 3rd person) and indiscriminately blur everything else? Or would that require object based blur?

UPDATE: Ok, judging by IndigoNeko's educated explanation, decent motion blur is just not going to happen. Unless someone knows something that IndigoNeko doesn't, please consider this offer closed :( I consider motion blur to be almost essential in a top-tier game (especially one with variable framerates like Skyrim), and I'm shocked that no one's modded into Skyrim yet. Both Fallout 3 and FalloutNV had decent motion blur mods, and I loved them. I really want motion blur, so I'm offering $250 to the first person to make a decent one. There are a few (very reasonable!) requirements. Don't worry, I will not try and use these as loopholes to avoid paying up. I very much WANT to pay you, because I very much WANT motion blur. But I require that the motion blur mod: 1. does not break or cause CTD's on my machine (extremely unlikely, but just saying) 2. must work well with a gamepad (this simply means that the blur should activate at moderate speeds as well as very fast speeds. For example, it takes a second or so to do a 180 spin with a gamepad, whereas it can be done in almost an instant with a mouse - the mod should work well for both types of movement). The Witcher 2 is a good example of motion blur that looks fantastic with both mouse and gamepad. 3. Must be to a decent level of quality. Don't worry, I'm not expecting Crysis. However, it must function effectively and look significantly blurred. Two examples of poor motion blur are Half Life 2 Episode 2 (it's barely noticeable, yet increasing its intensity via the console makes movement become very jerky and delayed) and Alpha Protocol (looks weird and glitchy rather than blurred - instead of a softening of the image, it looks like a series of sharp ghosting effects). Like I said, there were motion blur mods for both Fallout3 and FalloutNV that did the job quite adequately, so this should be possible for Skyrim too. 4. May be uploaded elsewhere, but must also be uploaded at the Nexus. 5. Must be done within a reasonable amount of time. I'm not expecting it next week, but neither do I want it in 6 months. PM me to work something out. All copyright, authorship, publishing rights, etc. etc. will belong to you, the author. I just want to use it! If interested, please respond via this thread or PM. (Also, if anyone else loves motion blur like me and is willing to contribute to the reward to make it even more enticing, let me know)

Thanks for the link, DefiniteIntegral

Agreed. But just more noticeable wind in general would be good, in just about any weather.

I can never for the life of me figure out why this feature is missing from most (all?) RPGs. It should be a standard. In a game as full of exploration and questing as Skyrim, it's easy to lose track of places you want to visit, things you want to do, and information you learn. The default journal and map system are there to help you make sense of it of course, but sometimes you need to make your own notes too. I often end up writing a few things down with paper and pen when playing RPGs, which strikes me as idiotic, since they all have a journal and map system.....if only they let you ADD STUFF TO YOUR OWN DAMN JOURNAL AND MAP. A mod that did this would be great. I imagine it would just be a simple text entry tool that could modify/add journal entries or map entries. If you still don't know why this would be useful, here are some examples of when this might help a player: -you find a cave with enemies too powerful for you. You sneak out, then add a note on your map: "good loot. trolls. come back with fire spells". -you read about a secret grove in the South Western part of Skyrim (I made this up) where, legend has it, there is a powerful atronarch guarding a great treasure. You don't know exactly where it might be, and you won't be heading down that way for a long time, so you jot down on the southwestern part of your map "secret grove somewhere around here" -You come across a particularly gorgeous vista, so you jot it down in your map "take SSAO comparison screenshots here" -You find a great source of hanging moss in a cave, which is an ingredient for one of your favourite potions, so you make a note on the existing map entry that says "hanging moss in lower chamber" -After a conversation with an NPC, you learn that if you want to meet a master alchemist you should speak to Joe Bloggs from Markhal. A minor quest automatically starts in your journal, which says "speak to Joe Bloggs in Markhal". You know it'll be days before you get to Markhal, and by then you won't know who the hell Joe Bloggs is or why you'd want to speak with him. So, you modify that quest entry to say "speak to Joe Bloggs in Markhal for alchemy info". ...you get the picture.

Gee, you've just selected like 5 of the LONGEST games in history. Good luck getting anything else done. :P Ok, here are my suggestions ---Fallout 3 vs FNV--- Many people will either tell you that FO3 is massively superior to FNV, or vice versa. But the truth is that they are very similar games, and you can't really go wrong with either of them. FNV has slightly more interesting writing and a few improved mechanics, but more bugs and somewhat less interesting locales. They both have great DLC, but overall FNV's are better. On paper, FNV seems slightly better, but FO3 has had more memorable moments for me, on account of it having a more varied and quirky world. ---Oblivion vs Dragon Age (Origins)--- The real answer to this question is "Skyrim". It's better (slightly, but noticeably) than Oblivion in just about every way. Oblivion at this stage is kind of like a 2nd-rate Skyrim - the same continent of Tamriel, but worse graphics, worse combat, worse levelling, worse dungeon design, no wooly mammoths, no dragons. whereas Dragon Age:Origins is still a 1st-rate game in its own right, with its own deep, interesting world and well written characters. You should also consider The Witcher 2.

Just Oblivion and Skyrim. The earlier ones happened to fall into a several-year gaming hiatus for me, so I never heard of them. I'd never heard of Oblivion either, but saw it in a shop one day and decided it looked good. It reinvigorated my love for computer games, and I've been playing games pretty much non-stop since :D

-more NPCs/creatures at once: towns that actually feel like towns, gang wars that actually feel like gang wars, herd animals that actually travel in herds. - A freerer, more open-world approach to the main quest. I hated how strongly FNV encouraged (almost forced, by making most of the sidequests far less interesting than the main ones) me into having to take over New Vegas (what if I don't care for any of the crappy factions, what if I don't give a crap about the war that will obviously end in misery no matter what happens, and what if I don't give a s*** about owning The Strip myself?) -two or more consecutive hours of play without crashes, audio glitches, borked quests, NPCs stuck in walls, objects sinking into tables, animals falling from the sky....etc.

I play a sneaky mage character, so I feel that logically I should be wearing robes or light armour. Apparently light armour makes sneaking easier, and makes you generally faster. But I honestly can't tell any difference between heavy and light armours, apart from the damage reduction aspect. Sneaking seems about the same, and my walking/running speed does too. Honestly the extra inventory weight is the main 'penalty' I feel with heavy armour. I've ended up wearing mostly heavy armours up until now. I've decided to switch to light, just because it feels more 'correct', plus I want the extra inventory space. But it feels like a real downgrade so far. What are your experiences with light/heavy armour, and the differences between them?

I agree that dragons are easier to kill than giants. But I think it works ok that way. Fighting a dragon already feels like a fight of attrition. If they had more hitpoints, it would make the fights incredibly tedious. On the other hand, if they were faster and more aggressive (and therefore harder to hide from), they could become insurmountable on a lot of occasions (eg. when you get caught with low health and no potions). Since they are so ubiquitous, attack on sight, and take up half the map when they appear, that would be a big problem. My guess is that the dragons were harder originally, but Bethesda realised these things in testing and reduced their hitpoints as a compromise. My main gripe is you can defeat many of the creatures merely by standing on top of a rock. Neither the gorilla-like trolls nor the 5 metre giants can get you there. Or if they do, they go the long way round.......after which you simply drop off the rock, and they come back down.....the long way around.

Now that you mentioned it, I didntt really feel like a part of skyrim as i did with oblivion aswell... In oblivion, i always felt as if i was living a second life. In skyrim, not so much. Hell, it didnt even feel like i was a dragonborn. Felt as if i was just a guy with a fancy title. I'm pretty much the opposite. I felt like I was part of a world in Oblivion, but I feel even more so like I'm part of a world in Skyrim. I think many things are responsible for me feeling this - not least the more impressive graphics (esp. with all the mods and tweaks). But three of the main ones are: -much more realistic conversations: People actually talk to you when you enter a room rather than standing around waiting for you to activate them. Once you do actively speak to them, the world continues to turn, rather than everything freezing in place while you talk. -more unique locations. So far, every dungeon, every cave, every guild HQ I've seen is very unique and generally interesting. -This is the first RPG I've played where I feel like I don't want to do EVERYTHING. Don't get me wrong, I do want to complete most of the quests and see all of the map, but between all the fighting styles, crafting types, and gazillion side quests, I feel like the world is not just built to serve my character, but is genuinely bigger than my character, and I'm happy to just find my niche in it while the rest of it keeps living and breathing around me. I love that feeling.

I've had that Dragon skeleton thing happen exactly as you mentioned. Twice. In slightly different locations of the college. I've also seen it in other places in Skyrim. Once, a dragon skeleton fell out of the sky right in front of me during a conversation, which was pretty funny. I've also seen flying mammoths, purple trees, and disappearing (seemingly on super-fast ice-skates) horses. Plus, I've had some crashes, and annoying bugs where arrows won't fire, or where a conjuration spell won't conjure. And then there is the 'water becomes completely transparent if you dip into it at the right angle' thing. But that isn't a bug of course: that's just a limitation of the engine......the exact same limitation as was present in Oblivion's engine, and has now been replicated in their so-called "new" Creation engine. But overall, I just thank God that this isn't anywhere near as buggy as Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas. The list of bugs and crashes I experienced in those games was just obscene: 100+ crashes, objects frequently sinking into the ground, warbling radio that took me hours of experimenting with codecs to fix for F3 and was downright unfixable on FNV (so I could never listen to the radio), stuttering music, blue screens of death, etc. etc. etc. Without any exxageration I had more more bugs and crashes in FNV than I would expect to experience in 20 non-Bethesda games combined. So, in my book, Bethesda have gotten much better. They still have some clowns working for them, but they're getting better. That's hilarious. Heartbreaking, but hilarious.

disabling vsync might help possibly, though I've heard that's tricky and can cause animation problems. Also, consider playing Skyrim with a gamepad. You'll be blown away by how many things (incl. menus) are better with a gamepad in this game than they ever were with mouse&keyboard. Sneaking, for one, feels way more intricate and organic. The game's obviously been designed for gamepads from the ground up.

I'm not the animal cruelty type, so I'm trying to get through my entire playthrough while keeping bunnies slaughtered at 0.