Construction set advice, pls?

[mcchuggernaut]

I was wondering if anyone could point me to where in the construction set I should look to find vampire aging settings?

 

I recently downloaded Circuitous and throttlekitty's excellent "Vampire Aesthetics" mod, which left the things I like (such as the default vampire eyes, and a little bit of face changing) but stopped the ridiculous aging. I don't actually play as a vampire myself, but I would rather some of the important vampire NPCs don't look like they fell out of the ugly tree and smacked into every branch coming down. His mod actually makes vampires get YOUNGER by about 40 years, which looks better than the ancient, wrinkled version, but is just too much for some characters. Now Vicente Valtieri looks to be about 12, and it's VERY weird, especially with that over-40 adult male voice. I think 10 years younger would be just right.

 

So, usually being a do-it-yourselfer, I tried to modify the .bsa in the construction set, but couldn't find anything that controlled it in the vampire race settings. Where is this attribute hiding? I have hit a dead end.

[Striker879]

You'll need to find each vampire you want to change in their respective race. For example Vicente is a Breton vampire so he's listed along with all the other Bretons in the game. In the Object window expand the NPC item in the left pane and you'll see Breton listed along with all the other races. Expand Breton and you'll find Vicenete listed. Double click on him once you have all the Bretons listed in the right hand pane and you'll open the Edit window for him. On the first of the Face tabs at the top you'll find an Age slider.

 

After your changes to the vanilla characters save to your own ESP. If the NPCs are added by a mod you'll either need to edit that ESP or use Construction Set Extender to get around the problem of ESPs not being able to be masters using the vanilla CS.

[mcchuggernaut]

You'll need to find each vampire you want to change in their respective race. For example Vicente is a Breton vampire so he's listed along with all the other Bretons in the game. In the Object window expand the NPC item in the left pane and you'll see Breton listed along with all the other races. Expand Breton and you'll find Vicenete listed. Double click on him once you have all the Bretons listed in the right hand pane and you'll open the Edit window for him. On the first of the Face tabs at the top you'll find an Age slider.

 

After your changes to the vanilla characters save to your own ESP. If the NPCs are added by a mod you'll either need to edit that ESP or use Construction Set Extender to get around the problem of ESPs not being able to be masters using the vanilla CS.

 

I found Vicente and his age slider. It's set at 65, which I believe is the maximum age possible, but the mod still makes him look 25, as it makes vampirism take off 40 years. This still leaves him looking too young. I need to modify how vampirism aging itself works, not just one NPC. The mod's authors managed to do that, and what I really need is to know how. Thanks a lot for trying to help, but I need to find where the vampire age setting is. I tried looking in "Spells" and "Diseases" for vampirisim, but I only found powers and porphyric hemophilia, and nothing about aging...

 

edit: I suppose it might be whatever script kicks in when you become a vampire?

Edited October 29, 2015 by mcchuggernaut

[wetblanket]

TES4Edit is the quickest way to see exactly what a mod changes/adds.

[DrakeTheDragon]

The biggest problem here is likely that there is no scripts or anything much that can be modded in regards to the Vanilla game's vampirism aspect. It is all pretty much hard-coded. That's why everybody has the same eyes when turning into a vampire, regardless of the race it was before. No Argonian vampire eyes, or pretty much anything "Argonian" vampire at all, really, just the same as all "humanoid" vampires have as well all the way.

 

Look at the face changes of vampirism more like a "blend" between the actor's original face and a single "full vampire" shape that is the same for everybody inside the game. Your level of vampirism (if I got that part right) determines "how much" of the vampire shape is blended over the original shape and thus controls the resulting "mixture" shape.

 

On the technical side of things vampirism is a "morph", just like the age morphs from during CharGen or the animation morphs that make you smile or frown or blink an eye. And the level of vampirism determines how much % of the morph is applied to the head mesh. I learned this the hard way when I tried to mod the Argonian vampire appearance especially in the teeth department, the vampirism morph inside the teeth's morph files made all attempts futile (I cannot mod face morphs or create them from scratch, at least not yet, it's too complex).

 

Morphs are like part of the head meshes, precisely they're the "EGM" and "TRI" files going along with them every time, while the EGM is for the shape morphs (CharGen sliders) and the TRI file contains the facial animation morphs. Vampirism should be within the EGM, but don't quote me on it.

 

According to the readme what this mod did now was:

 

EXACT CHANGES:

- The standard FaceGen settings for Vampirism are disgustingly bad. I reset the face shape and texture to standard, changed the tone more towards paleness/blueness, and lightened up the eyebrow and "beard" portions.

- Vampirism normally mods your age forward by 100, adding wrinkles and other unpleasantries, especially for those of us using Django's Unique Features. The sudden addition of tattoos upon gaining undead status always bothered me somewhat. With this ESP, Vampirism now *reduces* your age by about 40. This makes older characters suddenly look more youthful, as undeath has proven to do in more modern takes.

- Rather than using a stock Bethesda head mesh for Vampirism, I've instead used throttlekitty's "Hotter Heads" mesh - the masculine version - for its better definition in the sunken cheeks department. In merging the two, Oblivion now churns out a remarkably Vampiric countenance.

So it says it changed the vampirism morph inside Throttlekitty's "Hotter heads" mesh's EGM/TRI files so it no longer makes them dry up and wrinkle. Even at 100% morph applied you shouldn't see much difference, if at all, anymore when I got that right.

 

Then there must be a setting somewhere that controls the effect of vampirism on the actors' age, so they turned progression about 100 years into regression about 40 here. That one should be easily moddable, but I don't know for myself where exactly it is found right now.

 

There's still some unknown mysteries left in regards of some of the hard-coded parts of the system. I think I found out it isn't only morphs for each individual race's head mesh and face parts but also some kind of weird "merge" between a so-called vampire "race" and whatever race the vampirism is currently working on (one for all? even beasts?) but I couldn't yet make neither heads nor tails out of anything of what I found back then, and to make things worse, it's been several, and several more, years since then already and my memory was never a good one to begin with.

[mcchuggernaut]

TES4Edit is the quickest way to see exactly what a mod changes/adds.

Thanks, I'll check that out.

 

Edit: This turned out to be a great help! I found something had been modified in "Game Settings", setting number 01000800 (NEVER would have found this on my own), called "iVampirismAgeOffset". It would seem that it was changed from 100 to -100. I'm going to try fiddling with that by setting this offset to zero, and observing what it does in-game.

 

 

Edit edit: It works! The mystery is solved! Anyone who wants to change how much aging is applied to a character with vampirism need only modify this single value: Game Settings -> iVampirismAgeOffset. This is extremely easy to do with TES4Edit. Positive numbers are an age increase, negative numbers are an age decrease. You can now tweak vampirism aging to your exact liking. Face morphing still applies though, so you are still going to get the changes to face shape and color, but with a value of zero you won't get any more wrinkles than your character already had, and at negative values you will appear to get younger. Cheers! :laugh:

Edited October 29, 2015 by mcchuggernaut

[mcchuggernaut]

(Lots of good information)

 

 

Well, thanks very much for giving me such a thorough explanation! I understand what is going on now, and that I need to find the base morph that vampirism uses. As wetblanket said above, I should be able to use TES4Edit to find what exactly the mod changed, and use that to find this base that is used for vampirism. I at least know how to proceed now. Really appreciate the time you took to reply!