My first quest...

[stars2heaven]

It was a pain in the butt! Just finished it a few minutes ago and tested it the whole way through for any possible bugs.

 

Its a repeatable quest. I have a few more planned for my mod but I thought Id do that one first cause it would be easiest. Turns out, now that I know something about scripting and quest writing, THAT one was the hardest of the three.

 

Atleast now the other two will come along much easier.

 

Any of you make similar newbie mistakes when making your first mods and you wish you had known better?

[bben46]

I had to start over from scratch several times because of mod killing mistakes. You learn by your mistakes - if you aren't making any, you are not learning much. Remember yours so as not to forget what not to do, but do not be afraid to make new ones.

 

If practice makes perfect, then I have made a lot of perfect mistakes.

[Megatarius]

Not with Oblivion modding personally, but that's all part of the learning process for pretty much everything.

 

 

Congratulations though. You have passed a crucial threshold. It's always a good feeling when you've slogged through something difficult the first time and can then do that same thing much more easily from then on out.

 

 

 

I'm working on a website in Adobe Flash. The other night I spent about 6 hours figuring out just how to set up a few buttons and keyframe a few screens. Tired. There was no little amount of yelling at and pleading with the screen. Damn it was such a pain in the ass. That program is completely counter intuitive to n00bs. Well, I just finished linking up a few more buttons and a few more screens. Ran into a few bugs but nothing I couldn't fix. It was waaaay easier tonight.

 

 

 

And I loathe scripting.

[David Brasher]

I hate the fickle nature of the Oblivion game engine and scripting nature. Supposedly computers are logical and not emotional. Last night I discovered that commands such as this no longer function:

If Player.GetDistance MyXmarker <= 2000 and MyDoOnce == 0
 [Do Stuff]
 Set MyDoOnce to 1
EndIf

They used to function! In fact there are lines of code in this mod which are similar to this which do function, but if I try to add any new ones they do not function. (The answer to the "if" is never considered to be yes and the block does not run.) (Nothing happens when Player approaches Xmarker and runs circles around it.)

 

This concept of soft triggers and hard triggers is entirely repulsive to me. All triggers should be hard, all of the time. What good is a trigger if it only works some of the time? It could cause the mod to glitch sometimes and make it so the players could not possibly finish playing it.

 

So I am still making newbie mistakes, but I can't define exactly what they are and don't know how to avoid making them again.

[Pronam]

So I am still making newbie mistakes, but I can't define exactly what they are and don't know how to avoid making them again.

I guess anyone does and when you do find them you can't imagine you've missed them!

 

My first problem was coming from Morrowind, that didn't use the parent-functionality..I stubbornly avoided the 'parent' tab in the Oblivion CS. That way I placed dozens and dozens of persistent refs inside a script. While only doing one and connecting them all with the rest would do..Ignoring that tab also prevented me for using that for traps...sigh.. no wonder I didn't understand them. They are so easy to do! Fun is that I used parts of that script again to use own references, while that's totally unnecessary.

Long story short, I was waisting quite some time using names for all objects and using them a couple of times, so...at least 80 times mentioned in scripts...ref.enable re2.enable. ref3 enable... Not to mention what kind of fps hit it would give in the long run!

[Povuholo]

One of my newbie mistakes when I was working on the beginning of the main quest for Kragenir's Death Quest (at that point only known under WIP name 'Seven') was that I couldn't get the getitemcount function to work to check the player's inventory. I forgot to check the on target box... :P

 

Another thing was when I borrowed an original script from Bethesda to write my own, and when I saved it I accidentally saved it over the original script. That was even longer ago.

 

Sometimes mistakes are just annoying Construction Set bugs. I added a chest to a house owned by an NPC, and locked it with a 'needs a key' lock level. The key could be found as part of a quest. Because I didn't want taking the items from the chest to be considered stealing, I set the ownership of the chest to the player's. Now for some reason this prevents the lock from working, the lock doesn't show up ingame (even though a getlockedlevel check in the console said it was still locked) so the chest could be opened at any time. In the end I used a script as a workaround.

 

 

 

I also made a few repeatable quests (with some variation) in Kragenir's Death Quest, involving skooma or wine delivery.

 

If you get stuck anywhere while making the quests you can let me know, I've learned a lot in the 3 years (almost) that I've spent on the quest mod.