Mod Creators Thoughts

[LarannKiar]

On 12/15/2023 at 5:55 PM, HeyYou said:

The city maps won't change though. That was one of the complaints. And you DO get a rudimentary "map" of your landing zone, it is just severely lacking in detail.

A Local Map used to be generated by the engine automatically, mostly based on static objects in the game world. The new Surface Map however only shows the terrain. Whether it's possible to restore the old Local Map is currently unknown.. Judging by some unused settings, the Surface Map might have been intended to be more intuitive.. but it's hard to tell.

[Pellape]

Well i am not after detailed pixel maps really, just making it easier to see the resources at the map and that should not decrease the performance at all as the drawing should be vector based, and all resourcé patches I have seen are circular, so a single dot at the map needs to be put at and X-Y coordinate and the radius of the patch, thats all. Good to know that if I clean up the spot and land again as it will look different.    I tried both the place marker method and scanner method and there are very cool scanning mods available now as well, 3 ones that do different stuff and I want all 3 changes to my scanner so I suppose I DL the new Xedit and see what changes where made and add them all to one esm/esp, I guess esm as no one makes esp and no wonder as the game really do not have any support for them, I guess. The best thing with Xedit is that it is so damn good to show only the changes if we load a mod.    I used it a lot when I played Skyrim as in the middle of the game play, if you need to set stages in quests or similar or see cell info, it loads fast and you find immediate, well almost at least what you need to know. Running Skyrim and CK at the same time was impossible and as I had mechanic discs, it took 10-15 min to load Skyrim and with the new "disc" Starfield starts in 30seconds.

Another thing I do feel is a bit annoying is to find the border between the resources you see when you scan the planet. So I tried to land at the border between Uran and Argon but all i find is Uran and Iridium patches at that spot. Can it be so that it is a bug? That area also show the Uran as a tiny string at the planet map and the Argon as the dominant resource.

If we compare to the reality, finding resources under the ground or finding anything, is extremely hard. A cool and simple scanner for water where invented 20 years ago, a big 20m wide antenna you connect under a helicopter that mainly show where salt and sweet water are located and also on what level the line is between the 2m as in coastal areas, a lot of the ground water is salty and under it pr over it there can drinking water be found, so the software gives a good 3D map over the scanned area but also more stuff as well, as different materials reflect the electromagnetic waves used differently. It looks like we have a lot of drinking water at the moment, but the amount is decreasing everywhere, but it is now possible to find drinking water in odd places, that was less possible earlier. Well, comparing it to the game, well, it should not be so hard in a RPG really as more than I must think it is a bit frustrating, is it not? I love crafting in games and to be able to actually play a class called Industrialist is so damn cool. I usually play Thief/Stealth Archer classes as the main focus in the TES games are fighting or stealing or killing really.    Well I do not say that I do not enjoy running around in Starfield killing stuff as I do but to be able to do so many different things is so realistic. Its almost like combining DOOM with Satisfactory or Factorio and the fighting part in Satisfactory are extremely boring and pointless, well that game was more boring to play than I had expexted and Factorio is funnier, even if it is a 2D game   

The enhanced NPC mod makes it funnier as well, that allow every NPC to develop in the the same way as the player does and I made similar mods, and the latest I made was to offset all NPC levels in all the mods I used in Oblivion and that was extremely time consuming and boring to do but the result was amazing as the game is not to easy for my lvl 100+ something char in Oblivion so it has always be careful and that is realistic. The rats as one examle are set to lvl offset -15 and bosses to lvl offset +20-30, depending on boss type so it is not possible to one hit kill my rats, not with the weapons I am using. Something that are really boring is if you enter a lvl 10 cave in Morrowind when your char is lvl 150. I do not even think Bethesda made a dungeon over lvl 15, well the NPCs had max lvl 15 there in the base game and that is not a challenge at all, not when the NPC is hitting the char and nothing really happens, not even a scratch, is that realistic?    I bet Beth still suck at balancing all game, well Daggerfall was very balanced really if I recall right. They usually made it hard in lower levels but forgot about the middle and end game and hard set NPC levels to much as that is really annoying and makes no sense at all. The lvl offset was possible in TES 3 as well, but I never did anything about it as I used a challenging mod called giants, that fixed that and I still use it if I play Morrowind, which I did a lot 3 years ago, again, mainly to correct some bugs in an old dungeon mod I made in 2004-2006, but then I felt, why not replay it and focus at the mods this time? The thing is that all TES games has so brilliant and fun dungeon and quest mods made by the players, and so many of them has higher quality RP than Bethesda ever made and so damn good landscapes, cities and environments. But the DLC's was harder, no doubt. Well...   The point is really, stuff needs to balanced and so should the scanning process be as well, as it should be a bit easier and the ground should fit the planet data in space. Thats the point.  

Honestly, I do bet that a modder will crack how to make the Ground maps better in the future, with SFSE combined with CK2. Myself, I will try to make a main base with CK, reuse my nice meshes from Oblivion, my favorite ones, as soon as we get the exporter/importer for Blender and a working NifSkope, trying to see if we will be able to SET static resource patches with the CK, so at least we can have 2-4 different resource patches within the base area. Just look at the resources we have on earth, they are not random as they are static mostly, until we dig them up and after that, they are gone forever.     I do not want to cheat to much with CK, but at least have the basic 10 most important resources close to the CK made base, if possible. The downside with the landscape editor in any Beth game is that if or/and we use it, we will produce conflicts within that cell with other mods but how big is the chance that 2 landscape modde'rs edit the same spot in Starfield? Well it is extremely tiny really.    In TES, the only way to avoid conflicts was to make new landskapes in new cells, but that is also very time consuming and also a bit boring in the long run, even if we can copy and paste objects, you still need to micro edit every tree and rock. Damn, suddenly you get a cool idea for a story but to implement it in the games, you need to spend months to make a new landscape, so will you do it? Do you have the time and energy to do a lot of boring stuff???     That's the question really.    I think it is extremely boring to edit landscapes, even to make gardens but I love to have good looking gardens, so I do it anyway 

Edited December 17, 2023 by Pellape