LE Modding skyrim is too damn hard

[gunslinger6792]

Maybe it's because my rent is to high (actually I'm one of those poor bastards living at home) but I'm finding skyrim to be incredibly hard to mod. Now granted something's are the same. My house making skills from new vegas hold up pretty well in skyrim but every thing else seems harder. My main gripe is the armor making process, I can't figure it out. I've tried using blender and 3ds studying both for days to no avail. The missing tools available seem so inefficient compared to what I have available for FNV. It used to be Id just go into blender and snip away at the armor, paste it together and voila it worked. Skyrim is a whole other beast that I can't seem to slay. I know a lot of people have figured it out but it leaves me bitter that this far I can't armor bash and get it to work. It feels kind if like I'm being forced out of missing because the base knowledge needed is getting higher and higher. Well I'm done with my rant but the frustration is real. Does anyone else feel the same or similarly?

[sLoPpYdOtBiGhOlE]

I love to hate modding in skyrim, it blows donkey doodle almost as much as my crappy attitude.

CK is a cruel joke played on modders.

Papyrus scripting is just as much a cruel joke on modders.

 

Add in the cumbersome, "It should work, for the life of me I can't see why it doesn't, oh well I'll write an ass about face work around".

It soon becomes apparent that Skyrim modding is f'n horrible for any lengthy period.

 

But being a sucker for punishment and want something to vent at at, then skyrim modding is exactly what I need.

[scrivener07]

Starry eyed younger self once said "Ooh cool I can do ANYTHING"

The CreationKit said this..

http://media1.giphy.com/media/Qvwc79OfQOa4g/giphy.gif

[Jokerine]

I can't offer any help (I am terrible at modding Skyrim too), but I wanted to say I feel your pain :(

[gunslinger6792]

Starry eyed younger self once said "Ooh cool I can do ANYTHING"

The CreationKit said this..

http://media1.giphy.com/media/Qvwc79OfQOa4g/giphy.gif

I love that gif far more than I should and it's exactly how I felt. I decide ohhh i can build a house in skyrim I did it in FNV and then I'm scratching my head wondering why my follower won't enter the house even though it's navmeshed. I decide I can create armor mashups in FMV defacto it can be done in skyrim. Little did I know it pretty much requires changing or tweaking everything in nifskope WTF. At least I cracked house modding.

 

I can't offer any help (I am terrible at modding Skyrim too), but I wanted to say I feel your pain :sad:

For what it's worth I think you're a great modder and I've loved your skyrim mods. The CK just seams needlessly complicated and I can't believe that 4 years later we're still making do with incredibly sub par modding tools. The simplicity of oblivion and fallout's modding has been striped away. It honestly makes me scared to see how hard it will be to mod fallout 4. I'm sure many a great mod will be made due to the greater number of people attempting to mod it but I feel like I've possibly entered the twilight of my modding abilities. The learning curve no longer requires you just learning the button functions and what they do but a check list that seems so much longer. Eh I'm probably just bitter at having wasted so much time trying to getting something work that would've been simple to do in fallout.

[cdcooley]

Modding is becoming more complicated because the games themselves are becoming more complicated. Skyrim fundamentally changed the paradigm of how scripts interact with each other and with the rest of the game, the story manager is (almost) fully functional, the magic system was made extensible, etc. Fallout 4 will surely add more game improvements and that will mean more complexity. Knowing how to do something in older games can sometimes make it harder to figure out what to do in he newer ones.

[Surilindur]

With the exception of OBSE user-created functions and event handlers for Oblivion.

 

Basic scripting in Skyrim is on a level nowhere near that of basic Oblivion scripting. But after having learned those two aforementioned OBSE features in Oblivion, basic Skyrim scripting was not so difficult at all. Thus far the whole Papyrus thing (the things I have done) has looked like OBSE user-created functions and event handlers with a lot more flexibility. Though I must admit the whole property thing does add an extra layer of frustration - or flexibility, depending on the situation. And one just has to love the ability to add several scripts on a single object! Also Aliases. :D

 

But anything other than scripting? I have a mod that adds a few followers and just getting some custom hair nifs into the game on the NPCs' heads was like the Third World War with an equal ability to cause trauma. All that splitting stuff up into base things and addons and parents and templates and whatever has me confused. Indeed it adds more flexibility, but it is definitely overwhelming for a beginner such as myself. It took me forever to get some hair with hairlines and everything on the heads of some NPCs. In Oblivion, I could just add a new hairstyle in the CS and add it to an NPC. Now I need to add a hair, a hairline, define them as such, add one as extra object to the other, define this, define that and eventually end up with an NPC that only has the hair part and not hairline and therefore that female is almost bald. :wallbash:

 

And I have yet to try building anything in the Creation Kit. :sad:

Edited August 26, 2015 by PhilippePetain

[RGMage2]

 

snip - but I feel like I've possibly entered the twilight of my modding abilities. The learning curve no longer requires you just learning the button functions and what they do but a check list that seems so much longer. Eh I'm probably just bitter at having wasted so much time trying to getting something work that would've been simple to do in fallout.

 

 

 

snip - Knowing how to do something in older games can sometimes make it harder to figure out what to do in he newer ones.

I can totally understand the this line of thinking. My early attempts at putting new meshes in Skyrim went so badly that I stayed away from Blender for 3 years. It was very depressing, as that is the only type of modding I wanted to do. The work-a-rounds were known, some tutorials were out there but it seemed like I would have to jump through too many hoops to do the simplest things. I felt that I had invested a lot of time learning to do things in Oblivion and I didn't want to re-learn everything. I didn't want to go through the beginner's frustrations all over again.

 

About 6 months ago I decided to bite the bullet and try it again. I had a weekend free and I was prepared to spend a couple of days trying to figure it out. Well surprise surprise, it took about 15 minutes to put an armor mesh in game. I could kick myself, I wasted 3 years where I could have been doing the type of modding I enjoy. I had been waiting for nif scripts that were never going to happen, not realizing they were never necessary. Once you do the nifskope thing for importing and exporting a couple of times then it becomes second nature.

 

What I really don't like still is the _0 and _1 meshes, it doubles the work.

 

Papyrus I don't have a problem with, but then I stick to very basic scripting. My scripting is embarrassingly simple, no one would ever be impressed by them, but they work, so maybe simple is good some times.

[scrivener07]

My scripting is embarrassingly simple

That should be a point of pride. If you KISS your doing it right!

[Di0nysys]

Aside from modeling for the game, and certain scripting, i tend to find the rest of the engine incredibly easy and fast to work with. My only gripe with it is the highly specific nature of skyrim nifs, and the complete inability to create new behaviour graphs for animations apart from idles.