novice modder needs a little help

[solidarityreg]

Hi all,

 

I'm going to be doing a TC, and I wondered what the best procedure would be to completely wipe Cyrodil of all existing quests, cities, NPCs etc so just end up with a wild landscape to start with that I can save as a seperate .bsm file to just play with totally seperate from the game.

 

I've read the tutorials on worlds in the TES CK wiki, and it doesn't seem to cover this. At first I thought it was a question of going through the items/objects one by one and deleting them, but I'm not so sure I'm doing the right thing.

 

Any ideas?

[Vagrant0]

TC = total conversion?

 

I think you mean .esm. Anyway, they havn't released any official blank .esm files, so in order to get something from total scratch you'd proably have to start up the CS, don't load everything, define races, classes, and all the basic stuff. However, this would probably require you to have atleast most of the .bsa files unpacked (could probably do without LOD stuff, faces), with their contents unpacked (roughly 5-7GB of files), and ready to use.

 

Now, this probably goes without saying, but doing anything like this REQUIRES a very good understanding of how to use the CS, and all the features of the CS, including idle animations, scripting, world generation, path grids, dialogue, and a whole bunch of other stuff even I am clueless about. Since you pretty much have to manually define EVERYTHING, this should not be attempted by anyone short of maybe BethSoft staff, or a team of highly skilled modders. The reason why the CS wiki doesn't cover this stuff is because 95% of the modding population probably couldn't pull it off. As is, most of what I just said is entirely new ground, and most wouldn't think it even possible.

 

That said, most of the hard coded stuff (statistics, skills, spells, game settings, basic globals, ect) is already loaded when you start up the CS, so putting everything together is just about having more time than God.

 

Seriously, unless you havn't come to the conclusion on your own. This shouldn't be attempted by anyone short of an expert. You need intimate understanding of how all things function in the game, this isn't something you can simply learn along the way. Hell, I don't even know if this would actually do what you even want to do, and since it would likely take a good 20-50 hours of work just to test it, I don't particularly care to try.

 

 

My suggestion is this, instead of creating a new world and everything, just use a new world space, learn how to make the player start there, and most of the basic stuff is done for you. Since the game doesn't actually progress anywhere until the player goes to the normal starting point, there shouldn't be any interferance (might have to disable some things like DB, vampirism, and such though, but as these are controlled by scripts, you'd only need to change the script). Any sort of TC could be done like this instead of starting from the total scratch. This wasn't an option in Morrowind because you couldn't define worldspaces or maps. In Oblivion, you don't have this problem. Atleast doing it like this you have some reference for scripting, and defining some of the more complicated elements of your mod later. Since you define yourself as a novice, this is almost certainly the best way to go.

[Switch]

MrDestructo's post deleted. If you have no idea what someone's going on about, there's no need to post saying as much, as doing that doesn't add anything and is spammy. So please avoid such posts in future, thanks.

[ThetaOrionis01]

You could have a look at Wookiee's blank .esp, and see if that's any help - http://forum.gamingsource.net/index.php?sh...c=21608&hl=

[Vagrant0]

You could have a look at Wookiee's blank .esp, and see if that's any help - http://forum.gamingsource.net/index.php?sh...c=21608&hl=

 

Yeah, looks like he did that easy stuff for you. I still suggest building it over the existing game if only to get the idea together, and make use of scripts, dialogues, packages, quests as examples of how to get what you want to do done without haing to swap back and forth. Start with your mechanics, scripts, systems, and such before doing too much of the world building. Details can be added later easily, adjusting a main script tends to be much less so. Since you can just copy the script over, when/if you decide you need a stand-alone. Just making rooms and placing objects is easy, making NPCs move and interact properly with those rooms or objects isn't. It's best to get the hard stuff done first, if only a framework, so that when you have a problem, you don't have as much debugging. Also, since you'll be using a smaller file for longer, the frequent load/unloading of the game will be quicker. All those empty, currently useless cells take up alot of space. Sure, you need references in cells to do scripting, but alot of that stuff can be moved around later, once you have the kinks worked out. Doing it in this manner will usually tend to keep you interested in the project as you build as you code, so you don't get sick whichever is needed.

[SerpentofShadow]

Wookie's Blank ESP is what we started with for Project Serpent. We had to delete a few extra things (guilds, some spells, and such), but it was a significant help.

[solidarityreg]

Hi, thanks for the replies and I'm really sorry if I wasn't clear.

 

Yes, I'm attempting to do a TC, but the first thing I want is Cyrodill completely wiped of anything to do with the world itself, ie: NPCs, cities, dungeons, quests etc.

 

I want just a wild world covered in trees that I can just walk around. That's what I need to start with. I've noticed if I hit 'delete' on any of the objects in the main data file, it actually removes references to them in scripts and anything else it finds. The trouble is there is a lot of "Are you sure?" dialogues so it would take hours to just remove everything and I wanted to make sure that it would actually do the job before I attempted it.

 

 

Very basically: I want all of Cyrodil as a wilderness.

 

EDIT: Just looked at that blank esp by Wookie, and looks like it could be what I need. Thanks Serpent!