Skyrim modding in 2015 still not as good as oblivion modding in 2010?

[YngvieMalmsteen]

Thank you for the vouch on PerMa though lofgren. been thinking about requiem as well. i want a very challenging game, and i thought skyre was not that much harder than the vanilla game which was very easy in my opinion so i wasnt sure on PerMa.

Edited April 15, 2015 by YngvieMalmsteen

[YngvieMalmsteen]

Let me clarify. Before you think i was doing the merged patches wrong when i said i was doing them by hand, i actually mean i did the merged patch feature of tes5edit like most people do, and then went through every single line by hand to make sure the outcome was what i wanted, like it has been suggested to do by people that apparently know their stuff.

Edited April 15, 2015 by YngvieMalmsteen

[BigBizkit]

I'd say the reason why there is no huge mod compilation for Skyrim is because a) you don't need one and b) Skyrim's scene is still active, read not dead yet.

 

To explain:

 

a) -> I take pinpoint customization over "one size fits all" any day. You just seem to shy away from the """work""" of finding mods you like. The assumption that the mods would need hours of trouble shooting to ensure they won't conflict is just plain wrong. Game breaking conflicts are the exception rather than the rule. Obviously, if you use two mods that do the same thing they will be conflicting in one way or another. I run 255 esps, big and small mods, overhauls, selfmade mods, a lot of merged stuff, and my game is just fine. Also: even before I was paying attention to what I am doing I never had a corrupt savegame. So this is 99% on your end.

 

b) -> When TES 6 will be out and people will abandon Skyrim, the time for an "I don't want to spend time looking for mods, just give me one megapack so I can experience TES 6's predecessor"-mod will come.

[YngvieMalmsteen]

This is true BigBizket. But FCOM is hardly enough to fill a whole load order, so i have done plenty of work finding mods i like with oblivion, granted another good bit of my load order is filled with other "must haves" like race rebalancing project, LAME, supreme magicka, better cities, unique landscapes, and a whole slew of patch .esp's to make them all work together. there is other stuff. but i guess that makes sense why i had a much easier time with oblivion, even if im at 200 active esp's with oblivion. Another issue ive got with skyrim modding that i forgot to mention is the fact that uninstalling mods during a save is such a big issue with skyrim whereas older bethesda games didnt care AS much, so when trying to make huge load orders it suddenly becomes that more time consuming. i feel like every time i remove or add a mod, if i want to test it properly im going to have to start a brand new save game. and that takes way too much time because - heres the downside of mod organizer in my opinion, even though its great and amazing, i agree - i have to set my settings for each mod every time i start a new save, which is quite often when testing mods. if there was a "mod setting export and import" option that would be great.

 

In fact, many/most oblivion mods had specific ini files per mod to change settings and compatibility like MCM lets you do, honestly i think that would make more sense in the long run for skyrim even if it is handy to be able to change it ingame, since obviously your settings are getting saved in an ini. probably not the best solution since you are missing out on the UI but there has to be some kind of way to save your settings because it really is one of my largest gripes when trying to install mods. I'm sorry that i keep bringing up new things out of the blue, its been since last fall since ive tried doing anything at all with skyrim including playing or modding it, so things are just coming to me.

 

Getting back to shying away from the work of finding mods i like, of course i'm shying away from it if ive spent god knows how many hours downloading and installing mods, then making a merged patch, going through each of the conflicts by hand, then having to scrap it all because of crashes for unknown reasons (since ive resolved all of the .esp conflicts). I've already done the work, i'm just extremely burnt out on how much it is with skyrim compared to oblivion.

 

And of course once i start getting crashes, i can't just remove the mods to find which one it is due to skyrims screwed up save system that doesn't like you removing mods mid-save, which will probably cause more crashes. So i have to start a new save, set up MCM all over again. Stuff you never had to do with oblivion, or at least i never had to.

Edited April 16, 2015 by YngvieMalmsteen

[Nephenee13]

Skyrim is not Oblivion

Skyrim modding is not Oblivion modding

This is not a complicated concept. So why are you being so insistent about it?

[YngvieMalmsteen]

Why do you have to be so negative?

[BigBizkit]

Skyrim modding is not rocket science. There are so many tools that help you.

 

Anyways what you are saying is

 

1. Oblivion is the better game

2. Oblivion has better mods

3. Oblivion script system is better

4. Oblivion has all in one mods

5. Oblivion does not force you to make new saves

6. Oblivion is more stable

7. Oblivion tastes better

 

Now the question is what you should do... hm... I really don't know. I'll feed your findings to the computer and see at what conclusion it arrives...

 

Ah, there it is. It says "Try to find more things that suck about Skyrim and do not play Oblivion". There you go.

[simtam]

Maybe because it is expected that the person who brings up a point also provide the evidence, rather then demand it from others. I for one have rather vague idea what and how this FCOM and other three letter acronym mods for Oblivion feature. It is up to you to list the functionalities provided by them and point out which Skyrim mods correspond to them and why do you find them lacking. You might be right (I can't say, I'm not into gameplay overhauls), yet fail to be convincing.

 

A tip for troubleshooting mod collections: disable/enable them by half, instead one-by-one - binary-search style. This way the number of iterations needed to pinpoint the conflict will be in the range of 10, not 100.

[YngvieMalmsteen]

simtam how have you not heard of FCOM? anyways its a quick google search away. i'm not going to sit here and list every feature because it is a huge mod. OOO is the main mod that FCOM is built around. Its the most popular overhaul for oblivion.

 

And thanks for the tip, but i already do that. its still way too time consuming due to requiring you to make a new save every time and set up a hundred different MCM menus the way you would set them up when actually playing to make sure you test it with those settings. Is anyone working on anything that lets you save MCM settings into a loadable config file or at least an .esp file?

 

Being in the range of 10 different iterations would be a miracle. once you find the chunk of mods where disabling them prevents whatever issue you are having, you still have to continually divide that single chunk by half until you end up having to disable the remaining ones one by one.

 

 

BigBizket, what tools? there is a tool to find papyrus script conflicts? getting tired of people mocking me like they know everything instead of being helpful. Wyre bash, of course, tes5edit, of course, mod organizer, of course, Loot, of course, only a complete novice would miss those and i am not that.

Edited April 16, 2015 by YngvieMalmsteen

[cdcooley]

And thanks for the tip, but i already do that. its still way too time consuming due to requiring you to make a new save every time and set up a hundred different MCM menus the way you would set them up when actually playing to make sure you test it with those settings. Is anyone working on anything that lets you save MCM settings into a loadable config file or at least an .esp file?

MCM comes from the Fallout series and the concept is newer than Oblivion. Yes, being able to save settings into a file would be nice, but that's not how the MCM was designed. More importantly the exact same folks who created OBSE created SKSE and they chose not to implement file reading and writing features this time. So that's why there aren't ini-based configurations. There is an SKSE plugin called FISS that some mods are using to allow saving configurations across games, but it hasn't gained much support from modders for some reason.

 

BigBizket, what tools? there is a tool to find papyrus script conflicts? getting tired of people mocking me like they know everything instead of being helpful. Wyre bash, of course, tes5edit, of course, mod organizer, of course, Loot, of course, only a complete novice would miss those and i am not that.

There has never been a tool for any of the games that could detect script-based conflicts. Scripts have always been the black-box problem. But as I said before, in previous games the nature of the scripting system meant that errors were obvious and immediate. Performance killing mods would do so all on their own. Papyrus is actually much more robust and powerful than the previous scripting systems. It is better at tolerating bad scripts, but if there are enough of them eventually the system gets overwhelmed. The side-effect of the more robust script system is that it appears less robust and more prone to supposedly random failures. But the fault lies almost entirely with modders who simply haven't learned to program with this new object-oriented, event-driven, multi-threaded system.

 

Why do you have to be so negative?

Actually, it's everyone else in this thread wondering that about you. You started a thread in the Skyrim section stating that you believe Skyrim modding is not as good as Oblivion's. You asked if other people felt the same way and have found that the majority of people responding disagree. Instead they are being quite positive by focusing on the things that make Skyrim better. The games are different so some things will be better and some will be worse. It's not as if Oblivion has been replaced with Skyrim, so it doesn't really matter if Skyrim doesn't have all of Oblivion's features.

 

I'll grant you this much. Skyrim's modding scene is more like Morrowind's than Oblivion's. Oblivion modders did almost everything faster than Morrowind modders. Mainly because many of the Oblivion modders were experienced Morrowind modders and the methods used were very similar. The learning curve when switching from Morrowind to Oblivion was much smaller than the one when switching from Oblivion to Skyrim. And even for those coming from the Fallout series, Skyrim is new. So continue playing Oblivion and check back in a year or two. By then Skyrim might have the types of mods you want.