A couple of small reflections

[Pellape]

So what I like or dislike so far, stuff that I might wanna change:

I do dislike when Sarah keeps reminding my char to stop horading everything. I am a hoarder and I will use all that stuff, sell them, buy materials and give her better equipment, she must understand what I do is not only for me but rather what I think is best for the whole team.

I gave her some ammo as I wanna see if Starfield is working like all other Beth games. If we giva a companion one single ammo of any type, they will not spoil them as now they will have unlimited ammo. What we need to give them is different wepaons and they will use them. I also gave her med packs, so she can get back to fiht faster but I do not know if it is the same with heal stuff as Ammo, as I gave her a lot of them. I have to remeber that she has 87 med packs and yes, I gave myself a lot through the console, 200 as I was in deep need of them. I gave her aproxly half the stack.

I love the misc items and hoarding them as I love to peek everywhere, examine everything and honestly, some of the misc items are damn cool but useless, like hammers, fire extingers, wrenches and stuff like that. So how are we gonna increase the immerse by actually using that stuff when building or making stuff? Should it not be a requirement to use a wrench when building a Starship or editing our outsposts or do crafting? Use glas vials when making potions? Well or whatever? In the old game Ultima Online, we needed to have hammers for smithing, sewing kits for tailoring and so on and we needed to click at those items to be able to make anything.

Another modder I had a lot of contact with in Oblivion had many cool ideas about crafting and he implemented more or less the Ultima Crafting system into Oblivion and I also built a whole working shop in my house mod based on his mod, so for the player to actually see and use that workshop, his mod was an requirment. Lets see what he made as I based loads of stuff to require his mod, like mining, cutting trees, area gathering of plants and all his monsters that also had resources for crafting. It was a big very damn well made Overhaul that was entirely Script based. is scripts did touch the game world as little as possible to not conflict with anything else and that is the way I try to mod as well, butit is not always practical but then it will also be easy for the player to uninstall the mod without any concequenses and I think that modder is the one that has impressed me most. It is not easy to backtrack his scripts as he added loads of functions and most scripts use either subscripts or loads of different calls and I bet he include maybe 500-2000 scripts or something. But what does it matter, as we do have all the time in the world to actually learn stuff, making them better and to cooperte to make stuff even cooler and better. Let me point out his cool Oblivion mod and if you have Oblivion, then try it out if you get bored of Starfield and also try to combine it with my mod to get more advantages over his system and get easy access to use his stuff. The differens between us is that he loves to keep stuff retro and true to TES, with so much original meshes as posible and I love to make stuff beatiful and good looking and less retro, well honestly, is my house not extremely luxury compared to many bmid eval houses in the reality? TES is a med eval game and many things I added to it is more modern, but I do not care really, not if it looks damn good and fit anyway. It is only a matter of design and taste and I do what I want anyway. 

All links is in my description as I point at all his cool mods and I will not add everything here but I wanna show off his main mod as that one, is extremely well made and you should all peek at how he solved so many things to make the game better and run better. If we fool around to much with the landscape editor, we will cause conflicts with other mods and no one wants that really. We want to combine all mods that appeal to our taste without thinking about the consequensesmas all we really want, is to have fun and not getting frustrating over other modders mistakes and we will make mistakes and we will break something when we mod, no doubt.

The modder is called Maskar and here is his overhaul, that makes Oblivion to become extremely fun to play

https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/42780

He also made it so you can combine different overhauls at the same time, so he loads different ini files depending on your modlist and his scripts looks for modnames in your data folder and try to pick the best choices for you and you can also edit his ini files to microedit your own play style and taste. It is all so extremely brilliant made. We might not expect him to join the Starfield community as he do not like to Papyrus and I do not blaim him as Papyrus is much harder to understand. As the Oblivion scripts runs constantly, and Papyrus not, I am not sure how to really do a lot of the stuff he implemented.

I wanna make some dungeons dynamic in the future, well every damn dungeon that is not quest related to start with. When we are done with a questdungeon, then I wanna use it as well for my projects. So here ís how I want to edit every dungeon and we see how to do it with Papyrus. I doknow how to do it in Oblivion but to say it was easy to make it work, then I lie as I spent months to get everything to actually work and my system is unique and that did not make it easier really as I had noone to ask for advices.

So if we add stuff to a dungeon, we also cause conflicts with other modders editings of the same dungeon and many modders will edit the dungeons and change them as soon as we get CK2.

I want to be able to add 6-12 leveled NPC enemies to every cell in the dungeon, without adding anything inside the cell. I want thm to spawn there from a script that initiates from a quest and as long as that specific quest is active, the dungeon will have everything acivated and repared for the player. I want to spawn in a chest with specific items to the dungeon, without add ing the chest to the cell physical with CK2, but added there from a script. In Oblivion I use the same bloody chest that I empty and refill between each mission and I put it in a temp cell when the quest is inactive and add it back to the proper cell when a quest gets activated again and it initiates with quest scripts.

Thsi way, with these scripts, we can easy make changes to dungeons and resuse them and also change the feeling of the dungeons by adding custom made enemies and a proper story to it. So in my case, I made 2 factions. The Imoerial Book agency and the Book Burglars and the goalfor the player was to try to rebuild a library from scratch and later I wanted it to extend to included misc items or whatever, the limit of what tpo collect is huge and also to make use of dungeons that are not so interested to vist really. I do think Oblivion had 250 dungeons but only 100 that had quests conected to them but these 150 dungeons without quests was so damn boring and pointless to visit and I bet Starfield has that too, loads of places that are useless more or less. I do think we wanna make them more interesting and appealing and also extend our game play as optimized and interesting as possible without building or making new dungeons as many will do that too as that is also fun and creative, but why build new dungeons when there already are so many to use or edit or just make them more interesting to visit. Think about it.

Right now, I just love to follow the main stories and do the different factions but later, when that is done, I sure wanna do something bigger but in such an effective way, that I can spend more time in game and less with CK2 or whatever. Well making modding more effective and faster that is. What really made me to get tired of Oblivion in the end was that I had to edit every dungeon by editing stuff so my smaller companions could move at all. Adding ramps and editing the pathways as so many pathways where bad in Oblivion and made my small companions to get stuck so I also added a lot of new collisions into them to make the game play as smooth as possible. I do hope the Starfield dungeons are better planned for companions ut it does look that way so far.

Most modders that made dungeons did forget to add pathings, so I guess I edited 70% of all dungeons I dowloaded from Nexus and played. Companions cannot move properly if you ignore to path them and in bthe end that did become frutrstaing. Why should I edit other players dungeons because i want them to work perfect? Darn, you have tomake sure you make a dungon that works perfect before releasing it     Maybe this should be added to a thread called, what we must think about when we create mods.  

I bet all of us do want to make high quality stuff, the best of the best for the best game ever made. We do have the opoptunity here to learn from eachothers so therefor we must really remember:

Do this, build stuff this way to make it cooperate with other modders stuff

Do not do like this, or you break stuff or cause conflicts

Well think about it.      Making the dynamic system will take a lot of time I guess, but when it works, I bet we hace a cool frame to build a lot of stuff around so the frame should be a esm file, a common file and hav a pedagogic description attached and tutorials made. We see where this may lead. Maybe it is so that no one here will be interested in anythng  of this and then the whole idea gets pointless really.     What are your thoughts about this?

 

[Pellape]

We shall not forget the main reason why Maskar built this system in the first place. Oblivion is really a mess. It crashes still very easy and if you combine mods in the wromg order, the game gets corrupt and your save games useless. Before i did find the right combinations of mods that actually works together, I had to restart the game all over 3 times. Delete every mod that may was caused the issues. The thing is that so many made mod packages called Better ths and better that, but they did nt knw what they did and could not support it because the auhors did not play the game any longer and lost interest in the support. All modds knows how to fix their own misstke mostly but not everyone can backtrack what other modders made nor fix others mistakes. I managed to fix many broken mods as I really wanted to play them but I rarely did publish my fixes as I really did it quikly, so called quickfixes. The hazzle is then to debae it with the author and re-release his work, and that is time consuming. I do think you know what I am talking about 

[Pellape]

Another thing I do like with this game is all the small posters everywhere and small notes, like this one

It is so immersive and also so typical human, I mean we add notes when we get pissed off, like your mama does not work here or clean up the laundry when you are done or this fridge does not clean itself and stuff like that and I do love this note a lot.

Another reflection is that I have not felt so much lost inside a house or dungeon as I do now, not since Daggerfall and that game was meant to be hard for the player to know where he actually was in the vast  labyrinths but it also got annoying after a while to never actually find your targets and I did start to cheat to get to the Quest Target with the command console in the Unity version of the Daggerfall game. I think I started to get a bit convenient before I stopped to play that game I guess. But what was the goal with each mission? To find all loot or to find your target as fast as possible?  Well that is a good question. I do not really know the answer, but completing the mission must comes before looting stuff I guess as that is what everything is about really. To complete a mission, to complete a job you are hired to do, not the way of  completing it. To get your graphics ready for release to your customer or repair their broken computer so they can use it or whatever. The goals, not the way to actually get there 

Try Daggerfall Unity if you have never played it as it is really good and that game made this game possible if we forget about Arena that is.

https://www.dfworkshop.net/

If you wanna see the difference between the original game and the Unity version, peek here:

Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim had the design of  the dungeons to be very straight forward. My Morrowind mod the Caldera Ancient Mine was built with Daggerfall in mind, to be as complicated to navigate as possible, to let the player to be as confused as possible You did not only go in X and Y directions as it was more like Daggerfall, as you also had to go up and  down at several locations and it also had  8 cells if I recall right. Well check it out your self if you have not played it and do not claim you did not have problems  finding your path there    But honestly, I do love  to not know where I am as I do have a very good location sensibility in real life as I am also a navigator and educated skipper but still I do get lost in these labyrinth dungeons or buildings in Starfield. In Daggerfall, we did had maps and in all other games but we do not have any maps in Starfield.

The Caldera Ancient Mine, Morrowind.

https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/48774

I cannot claim it was fun to make that mod as it got repetitive after a while and really boring too, to build a dungeon that big by hand. I did start 2004, taken loads of breaks from it and released it first 2006, one week before Oblivion was released. But it was worth it and it was reviewed and was tested in this video and the narrator did claim it was hard and that he  died and that is what a dungeon should be really. It should be challenging and damn hard to play as otherwise, what is the whole point with it? He did complain over a lot of stuff, things I did correct 2020 and  fix some bugs and add a better pathing for companions as  I did forget to do that 2006, even if I knew about the pathing system and why it was there in the first place as it is really important to do it. Pathing a dungeon is extremely boring but really necessary as that is how games works, well at least until we find a proper AI that build the dungeons for us. In Oblivion we could auto-path but I did not like that feature as I do not think that CS did a nice job with it. When we do a perfect job, lets say, we do build the greatest and coolest dungeon ever built, then we maybe should go all the way and also add all boring stuff manually, making it more perfect, well that is how I try to do stuff anyway.     Life is not always fun and modding is not always fun but the result can be extremely fun to use though. 

Lets listen to what he had to say about it...  Maybe it might also inspire us here today about how to build a cool dungeon, well a dungeon I would love to play. And honestly, after all testing, I have never spent so much time in a single dungeon like this one and I do not know how many hours of my life I spent in that green and muddy place. Sometimes it did feel like a real prison    , giving me nightmares even...    I never gave it up anyway...  I almost did really...    It was blood, sweat and tears honestly...  A bloody hell to just get the elevators to work properly, so they stopped at the right spots, so I did spend many many hours going up and  down in the 2 elevators that you can find in this mod. The elevators are a bit original in their design as well and I guess I was bored and  wanted to make them a bit odd and unique...  Well s#*! happens 

Back to Starfield reflections: I can loot an whole area, well I think I looted everything, go back and still find stuff that I missed as it is a bit hard to see what is lootable and not but after a while I bet we know which misc items or stuff we can loot or not, I guess.

All the games Beth made did had secret switches and other secrets that we needed to figure out in one way or another, which is fun as I do love minigames.  

Edited December 10, 2023 by Pellape

[Pellape]

The base editor do need an overhaul as it is not easy to get access to the overview of the base as it seems only to be available from the build menu. It is not easy to build when you are under attack either . I might get used to it later. I did place a water pump inside some bushes but how do I find it so I can connect it to a power source? It seems that the scanner do not see the buildings or do I need a peek for that?

Edited December 11, 2023 by Pellape