Books an bokshelves at Outposts

[Pellape]

I made a bookshelf i Oblivion that holds and show the books up front, 16 books at each rack. In Oblivion they are static. The books on the shelf are placed we with scripts from a book sorter.

 

I started to build an outpost for the first time yesterday and I guess that we can add buidable items to the crafting table with CK2. So then we need to make an attach a Papyrus script to the shelf with a menu.

 

1. Place the shelf from the outpost manager

2. Target the bookshelf and choose slot 1-16

3. Let the player choose a book from a list from the inventory or a book chest.

4. Add the book with coordinates related to the stand. This will require a sinX,sinY, distance calculation and to get that one right will be pure hell and a lot of trial and error. We could also choose to allow the placement of the shelf in max 4 directions, then we do not need to calculate the angles

 

Most bookcovers in game are ugly and not suitable for a bookshelf like that. A book can become a beautiful att item and I made book covers for 18 years now and I also did publish a tutorial 2007 if I recall right. It is so cool that we can make screenshots that looks like bookcovers in game but I will use my style, the same I used in MW and Oblivion. My painting frames will go the same way, into the outpost building system and we we need to figure out how to exchange canvas from within the game but I do love a challenge. I am not sure that will be possible as I guess the textures can only be used as dds and the screenshots are jpg or png. In Morrind we were able to use TIF but those got ugly

[Pellape]

Some of the posts I do here is more or less to debate stuff with myself    A form of reminder about what I need to think about and also a way to stay insane as when I write stuff, I usually can clean my mind from those thoughts and go back and read it later.

I do however want your opinions about what is possible or how to optimize the workflow or how to make stuff as effective as possible as I do have plenty of ideas. I did spend 2 years making my last mod and honestly, I do not have that kind of unlimited time over for modding these days.

I have been thinking some at the bus from school, how to implement dynamic bookshelves easiest. You know, when you start to turn around objects in CK in other axes than Z then stuff starts to get very messy. If we rotate an object first in Z, then Y and later X, or in any order, trying to place that object in game, it will become a bloody mess.  If I wanna make it possible for the player to place the bookshelf in any angle in Z and later add books to it and make the job as easy as possible for myself,  so I figured out I need to export 4 different book cover meshes. The are set in X (or Y depending on their Z axis) in these angles: 75, 65, 55 and 45 degrees, All to face the player in the best angle. So the top book is set to 75 and the bottom book in 45. So, yjis means that the script that will place the books in game, with trigonometric formulas so they end up at the right spot inside the rack and also to make them solid so they actually stay inside the rack or shelf.

Another thing I wanna do this weekend already, if I can find the right tools or exporters rather is to fix the UV at the books as i guess they suck as all UV Bethesda is making sucks always or rather, they bake their UV maps to fit with Substance Painter or similar programs and that is not the kind of UV I really want at my objects as I love to make textures from the View, well what you see is what you get. I make texctures with gimp mostly but now I also have access to PS and Substance products through school and I will use them but not for book covers. I might use them on the shelves really, to make the textures more modern looking as they are wood today, which fits well inside Oblivion but if we make the shelves with the Outpost tools, do we then really have access to wood? We can easy implement wood cutting or lumberjacking if that is not part of the game already as that has been done in many games and we do have the animations for axes and that is all that is needed really and we solve the rest with scripts. What I want is then to use different kind of woods to make the shelves more or less exclusive and also make them with plastics and metal.  Maybe we can even color them in the same way we color the ships in game and that would had been so cool, so the player can choose exactly how their books shelves should look like to fit their interior liking. I do know all my ideas are not possible, because of game limits, but we do not have a clue right now what is possible or not. The game is overhelming and complex as it is. 

When it comes to object rotations, I do recall Qarl made some cool stuff with that in Morrowind. He introduced me to Blender as he started to experient with it within our community around 2005 if I recall right. Well for you that do not know Qarls work, as he did pass maway 2012 already and never had the chance to make anything for Skyrim, he made the famous Qarls retextures for Oblivion and was also involved in the Vibrant texturing of Morrowind if I recall right, which made Morrowind to look awesome. There where many different texturing projects running and some where good and some where not.      What is good or bad is more or less a matter of taste really.     For myself it is what my future boss will think, who will pay me for producing graphics and illutions. and fake realism as that is what pays most these days. game productions does not pay as much as faking graphics for the web. That is really pointless if you ask me, pointless and boring. 

Edited December 8, 2023 by Pellape

[Pellape]

Another thing about the books that I found so far is that they do lack content. They have max 2 pages with a description of the book, and not the actual book. Most books are old classics and if we look at one book that I now know is public domain, well totally free to use as we pleases, is Alice in Wonderland. I do recall that I found Moby Dick, Oliver twist, Frankenstein and all those are free books. I am not sure how many books the game has but one modder wrote 250 different ones so that is almost the same amount as in Oblivion. Most modders that makes quest mods or houses or villages mostly make books as well and those should be textured cool as well i think so I will publish the new book meshes as a modder's resource as soon as they are remade. I want to be able to collect their books as well and store them at my book shelves, but only if they look good, well edited in some way without Bethesda's boring common covers. When it come to the sceneries for the books, I did had an idea to use pictures from the films, but I do think they are all copyrighted, which means I have to build sceneries, either in game, Unreal or inside Blender. It all depends om what resources are available but the 3D libraries with freebies is huge. Lets just peek at Moby Dick as I do think that cover will be easy to make. We do have ship models inside the Constellation that looks like old Whale ships and finding a sperm whale is not hard and recolor the texture white. Add them in a sea somewhere and take some photos. Voila, a new book cover 

I will be very careful what I add, well what pictures I add to my projects and add the sources in the description and present how they are made as they will look realistic. In Oblivion, you would see that it was screenshots from TES 2-6 but can we actually do yja in Starfield as everything looks so realistic, like real photos, therefor it will also be hard to see the differences in my future photos at the book covers.

What about fan stories? We did have the TES Imperial Library which also had a section of player stories. I did plan to take those stories and implement them into my library in Oblivon, to expand the library above 260 books or whatever and COBL did also add all other TES books that was released in TES 1-3 and I did plan to also implement TES 6 books later on, the forbidden books, and also make a quest story about how they did come to Cyrodiil at all. Well shortly, the Book Burglars in my mod, an organisation that want to steal all knowledge, did in some way manage to open a portal into the future, well get to Skyrim, steal a lot of books, bring them back to Cyrodiil. My job or the job of my fictional good guys or good faction I added to my house mod is the Imperial Book Agency and their main job is to prevent these future books to actually be spread around Cyrodiil. Their job is to keep the secrets of the future from the public, not to cause any panic that the Red Mountain will explode and force the Morrowind citizens to flee to Solstein or make Cyrodiil to fall apart. Just look at the weak Emperor that we kill as the hand in Skyrim, as he is pathetic. We actually do the humanity a favor by removing his head from his boddy. Did you know that in the bow of that ship, there is a very cool epic sword  I did learn about that sword from the mod the Legacy of the Dragonborn, where you get a mission to retrieve it to the museum. I love that mod, as it has inspired me to do this one. We also collect all books to the museum and that is where I wanna start. When no more books are available in 2-3 years, I wanna make a museum for the rest of the stuff. I do think it will take that time to make the book museum or library as that is what it took to make it in Oblivion.

So what about the legacy of the Dragonborn?  In the long interview that Tod Howard made a while back, the 3 hour interview, he did mention that some modders got hired by bethesda and i do think, if I am not misstaken that the author of the Dragonborn is one of them. Constellation are really similar looking to the museum i Cyrodiil but it lacks the functionality. The library is dead, well just static book cases, nothing else. The library inside the Mages guild has all the books in containers and that also prevent lag as that library is huge. To prevent lag in Starfield, I will limit each room between 100-250 books. Each cover will only use max 512x612 textures as that is enough as you never get closer to the books than you can see them as bright as possible anyway as we have to be realistic. It is also faster and easier to make 512 textures really. My game lags so much with my old NVDIA 750 ti card that I can hardly move but as I am a poor graphics student, I do not have afford even a second hand Asus card right now anyway. LAG is a pure hell, so we have to keep that in mind. We also need to edit the collisions at the books as I am convinced they do su-ck as they always do. The need to be perfect so the books do not eject them selves from the shelves as they will. This video I made 2020 is proof how the collisions at objects can make them to eject themself from anywhere. The collisions at many player resources are not perfect either, both in COBL and at other objects, stuff that I needed to edit but every Item I edited, i also sent to the authors so they where able to implement the new versions into their mods. I will only do that if I like the obect and like to use it myself or if it is an object that many players like to use, that is a good reason for me to actually make it useful.

Lets see how bad the Bethesda weapons collisions are in Oblivion. The thing is also that the collsision at a weapon needs to cover an area, as it is when the collision meets a target, when they collide, that the game will consither it as a hit. In Oblivion, it is not meant for us to dio like this with weapons, nort in Skyrim as there we do have weapon racks but we lock the wepons inside the racks, making them solid and that is how I later did in my weapons display room in Oblivion. It tool me 6 monthes to actually fix this, until Drak the Dragon told me, (The Oblivion forums moderator) Make the weapons solid when you add them to your racks, and damn, that did work.    So frustrating to solve this by myself...  I did use players resources and the hooks did have 512 textures and that room lagged a lot until i found the problem and remade the textures to size 64 or 128, I do not recall which. FPS went up a lot by doing that. So FPS 11, weapons rejecting them selves from the walls as soon as you touch them.   

 

This is how I want to show of my weapons inside Starfield. The hooks here are perfect in their collisions. I do not trust players resources to 100% as i seen to many bad meshes, meshes that do look good no doubt, but lack something, mostly good collisions and the only way i know of o edit an collision and make it work when exported, is to edit it inside Nifscope by changing the coordinates by hand. i do which it will be possible later in blender. As collisions are not real 3D objects, I doubt it will be fixed ever. NifTools are cool no matter what.

I am thinking about making a door inside Constellation, to the museum and add it in the basement of the Constellation HQ. If i do find a better spot, the perfect spot for a museum as it has to be close to a city as it is meant that you wanna make your library to a public place. I wanted my library in the Anvil area to be public, to allow some citizens in Anvil to visit the museum by changing their AI and also make them essential but that would not been implemented until the player had finished all the quests in Anvil. The house where so big and had so much space, that it was possible to implement this without issues. The Dragonborn museum also have visitors but they are dedicated, maybe 6 NPC that lives at the inns that visit the museum daily and more or less woreship the Dragonborn like the Adored Fan do, well almost. They never had anything bad to say about the museum as they all like to visit it and that is how I want it, making it public. Spread the knowledge, well not the forbidden books of course, books that will make more harm then good. Is it not so that you want to get amused by reading a book, not terrified and get into a panic state?

Why am I writing so much, this textwall instead of playing the game? It is friday and I am at my GFs flat, and this computer is useless to use with Starfield, so I play the game 4 days a weak after school and here I either play Factorio, building cool factories in 2D or some Oblvion or do my homework as my brain is about to explode anyway. I am extremely tired but that is normal i guess. When you get so many impressions daily, both from school and now the game, well my brain cannot take much more right now. As I wrote in the beginning, these notes are also done to just clear my brain from all this thoughts.

Only way to get the grasp of my style of making stuff, both qiuests and items, trying to make a dynamic HQ, is to test it, if you are bored that is but maybe you return to Cyrodiil one day for nostalgia and then you use this mod as your base.     Once again, here is the Legacy of the Champion.     I do repeat again, as I made almost every mesh and texture inside the interiors, I will also be able to export it all to Starfield and add it somewhere. The Hobbit home is a free resource and available in both Skyrim and Oblivion. If I cannot use a specific resource, I either made a similar one with Blender or contact the author and mostly they all gave me permissions to use their stuff as I pleased and that is what a good community do, we share our stuff between us 

It might be so that the textures need to be edited to actually work in the Starfield game, with the lights there as they are very bright in Oblivion. The colors of stuff in Starfield are softer and more realistic mostly. Only way to see this is to export and try the stuff in game and if it does not feel realistic, or misfit, I will do something about it. It must look perfect, anything else is out of the question.

[Pellape]

Lets peak at Constellation and ask our selves. Is it suitable for a museum? Well yes, but as they do want their base to be secret as it is a secret society and therefor unsuitable to become a museum. I bet that the Atlantic City will be full of doors later on, added by the community, so the chance of mods that will conflict with each others will be huge. Okey the Wrye Batch may prevent a lot of the conflicts but it cannot make wonders, not if the modder also make changes to the landscape, breaking up the pathing as that is never good but sometimes nescesary, as I had to do with the stable that I added outside the mages guild in Cyrodiil in my mod. I have never seen any other player using that area, so I took it.    Well now I will see what I can do this weekend. I do wanna start to make the 4 book meshes to start with and a test texture, from the cover of the real Moby Dick book, test my style to see how rusty I am and also see if I can add it in game with Xedit.    I will do it in gimp, blender and nifskope, if possible that is. Lets find out how far the NifTools has come to allow us to edit the Starfield meshes. I can always export obj files from Blender, import them to Nifskope as objects and export them as new NIF files to start with as we have to do that anyway, to clean up the meshes from stuff that gets added from Blender. We do want themeshes to stay as clean from rubbish as possible and so far, NifSkope did this nicely. All we need is simple meshes with collisions, nothing else.  and good performance