Modding questions.

[Vagrant0]

As I plan on starting on a fairly large mod this summer involving alot of new models and areas, I was wondering if anyone could think of any difficulties I might run into before I start the painstaking job of creating a tileset from scratch only to find out I can't do anything with it. Mainly my questions pertain to things which cannot be done with dialogues due to bugs (such as the topic bug which I'm still not clear on), CS bugs involved with 1.2 and SI.

 

Essentially I want to create a new realm with a large city as the starting point with additional areas being accessed through that city. The city is invisioned to be one of peace and prosperity, within the realm of one of the divines. If the planes of oblivion are meant to be a vision of hell under the influence of that Daedric prince, the planes of the divine would be a vision of heaven under the influence of the divines. I don't know how lore compatable it is, but the idea alone seemed to be worth merit. As such, I would like to create a space for people to wander largly for the enjoyment of the scenery.

 

Phase 1 is devoted solely to planning and building the models for the city from scratch, and should take several months to do.

 

Phase 2 involves populating the city, where these questions become an issue. Havng a ghost town just wouldn't work, and having general dialogues on every NPC would cut down on the enjoyment of the area as well as limit its expansion. While I know I probably won't be able to have spoken dialogues, even having just text would be sufficient.

 

At this point, no real work has been started, and I'm not forming a group or anything until I have atleast a good portion of the models done. I am more concerned about being able to achieve phase 2 in a meaningful manner. Additional phases will be branching off of phase 2, and be open to a wider range of community involvement.

 

Once again, the purpose of this topic is not to discuss the project, but rather get an idea of where problems may pop up so that they can be handled or worked around before work has even began. I'm most concerned about dialogue issues as I would like to eventually have quests and other features involved with this project that rely on gaining information from NPCs and having actual conversation. Once I start on this, it may be years before even phase 2 gets completed, it will likely be the last Oblivion mod I work on, so I would like to be able to do something spectacular, the scope of this project is huge, and before I get involved I would like to hear if it's even possible. So I ask if you can help me put my doubts about working on it to rest.

[SickleYield]

I still don't understand the dialogue bug myself. -shrug- It didn't cause any problems for my House of Philemon mod and I didn't even know about it when that one was released. (The reason I'm always harping on the need to combine cosmetic mods is because a lot of people quite using House of Philemon because one set of eyes made it incompatible with many other mods.) I've been modding with SI/CS 1.2 all right, but I haven't tried generating lip movement files yet (I hear that might be broken). If you just want plain dialogue without sound, that won't be a problem for you, though.

 

If you use the latest version of the CS (not the first 1.2 CS, the latest with bug fixes) you should be able to see things and work with things just fine. I have been for a couple of weeks now. My impression is that it loads a bit faster than the old one, but that may just be wishful thinking.

 

You might glance around for recently-released quest mods that were made with the 1.2 CS and specifically contact one or two of their creators for bug tips.

[Sypron]

Just a little idea about compatibility (but it may sound very stupid); re-install the game using no patch and the original CS (if you can find it), make the mod with that original game then once its done change back to your good oblivion.

 

About the realm: It is my understanding that the divines don't have realms and do not have physical manifestations (excluding akatosh, when he came though). And not all of the Daedra realms are "evil" and "hellish." Mehrunes Dagon's is because hes the god of destruction, Peryites probably isn't, but was made like Dagon's because they probably didn't want to make a "new" one. Also, Sheogoraths realm is much like hell, its turnips. So you could make your realm based of maybe Azura's realm.

 

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tamriel:Azura

 

Her realm, Moonshadow, is "blindingly beautiful and colorful, with flowers, waterfalls, trees, and a city of silver"

[Povuholo]

The dialogue bug is when two mods add new greetings, and use the 'add topic' box to add a topic there. If two mods do this and run at the same time, one of the topics won't show up when the greeting is said. This is also why some people have problems with KOTN, since it uses the add topic box at greetings.

 

Basically you just have to use the result script box and type 'Addtopic TopicName' (The topic has to be created already for that to work of course) to avoid it. It doesn't matter if another mod did use the add topic box, as long as you didn't your mod won't be affected. You can still use the choices box for the greetings, and you can use the add topic box everywhere else.

 

Fixing the AddTopic Bug

 

And remember that once you've edited your plugin in the 1.2 CS, you can't edit it in the original CS anymore. There is an utility which allows this... TES4Gecko. I don't use it myself.

[Lingwei]

One easy way I find to get around it is to create a quest, in the quest stages tab create a journal entry but don't give it any text and then in the results script add in all the topics there. Set it to start enabled and that way as soon as the mod is loaded up all the topics you want are immediately added to the NPCs.

[Vagrant0]

Just a little idea about compatibility (but it may sound very stupid); re-install the game using no patch and the original CS (if you can find it), make the mod with that original game then once its done change back to your good oblivion.

 

About the realm: It is my understanding that the divines don't have realms and do not have physical manifestations (excluding akatosh, when he came though). And not all of the Daedra realms are "evil" and "hellish." Mehrunes Dagon's is because hes the god of destruction, Peryites probably isn't, but was made like Dagon's because they probably didn't want to make a "new" one. Also, Sheogoraths realm is much like hell, its turnips. So you could make your realm based of maybe Azura's realm.

 

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tamriel:Azura

 

Her realm, Moonshadow, is "blindingly beautiful and colorful, with flowers, waterfalls, trees, and a city of silver"

Good points... As far as compatability goes, I might just have to do a good portion of it in 1.1 as I still can't seem to get exterior cells to load properly without manually selecting them from the list (used to just be able to use the arrowkeys to move around). Which means that the task of laying out new areas which are larger than a single cell get more time consuming. Or, I would just arrange the statics in an interior cell (which seems to have more room to work with at once) then piece things together into a worldspace. Making it usable without 1.2 or SI though is more or less a secondary concern to just being able to do it.

 

I'm really not up on the lore, but now that you question it, I should probably try to find someone who is to run the idea past them to see what fits. The problem being that I already have a vision of the specific look and feel of the areas, and don't want to shift away from it too much. I would however prefer to handle this discussion through PMs.

[Hsandman_1]

Good points... As far as compatability goes, I might just have to do a good portion of it in 1.1 as I still can't seem to get exterior cells to load properly without manually selecting them from the list (used to just be able to use the arrowkeys to move around). Which means that the task of laying out new areas which are larger than a single cell get more time consuming. Or, I would just arrange the statics in an interior cell (which seems to have more room to work with at once) then piece things together into a worldspace. Making it usable without 1.2 or SI though is more or less a secondary concern to just being able to do it.

 

I'm really not up on the lore, but now that you question it, I should probably try to find someone who is to run the idea past them to see what fits. The problem being that I already have a vision of the specific look and feel of the areas, and don't want to shift away from it too much. I would however prefer to handle this discussion through PMs.

 

Enable view distance to max etc. in the CS editor file-preferences-lod, that way you will be able to see large chunks of the land (i can see whole city in my editor about 16 cells i think at the same time.), if you do set up lots of stuff in interior space and then copy that, you might get crashes, i had to move a city from one place to another and i had a crash, lucky it worked 2nd time around.. had me sweating :P

 

ps. arrowkeys work for moving around in my CS. v 1.0.303

[Vagrant0]

ps. arrowkeys work for moving around in my CS. v 1.0.303

Yeah, and I'm using 1.2.404. Arrow keys still work to some extent, but when I move to the edge of a cell, new cells aren't loaded. Meaning that I have to constantly reload exteriors often when even doing simple landscaping. Having a few hundred Wilderness tiles to choose from doesn't help, neither does renaming those wilderness tiles... as each tile has to be named differently. While my current plan focuses more on structures than terrain, it still could prove to be a problem.

 

The total area I plan to use for the city is within a 25600 radius, which means that from end to end the worldspace would be 13 cells by 13 cells (really only using the center area 8x8 or so for the actual city) with some extra space around should anyone feel inclined to venture out that far. As that is 169 cells total, moving from one part of the city to another in the CS would still prove to be an annoyance doing it like that. I wouldn't expect it to be too much more strain on a person's computer than open skingrad, but this is also a concern. Naturally I'll be trying to optimize models to cut down on the problems, dealing with more than 15-20 NPCs in an area (more than 100 throughout the city) though is also of concern. I know I can get around it with careful planning of packages and using interiors, but want to have the city seem more alive.

[SickleYield]

I had no idea tes4gecko could do that, Povuholo - since I want voiced dialogue in my mod and am currently using CS 1.2, I'd better investigate the Gecko's features more carefully. :)

 

Sounds like a neat project, Vagrant. I think people will be willing to accept the system demands if the mod is good enough - i.e., if your numerous NPCs are well-pathed and AI'd not "overcrowding" each other.

 

Sounds like you're making good progress in Max if you're ready to make all the models yourself. Way to go. :) I still can't get export to work right on the .nifs (won't export skin partitions). Are you using the Civ IV rather than the NIF script exporter?

[Vagrant0]

I had no idea tes4gecko could do that, Povuholo - since I want voiced dialogue in my mod and am currently using CS 1.2, I'd better investigate the Gecko's features more carefully. :)

 

Sounds like a neat project, Vagrant. I think people will be willing to accept the system demands if the mod is good enough - i.e., if your numerous NPCs are well-pathed and AI'd not "overcrowding" each other.

 

Sounds like you're making good progress in Max if you're ready to make all the models yourself. Way to go. :) I still can't get export to work right on the .nifs (won't export skin partitions). Are you using the Civ IV rather than the NIF script exporter?

No, using the 2.9 version of the nif exporter. Havok seems to export properly as well as skin and bones. Don't even need to screw around in nifscope much.

 

That aside, my initial tests on just how much I could stick in a worldspace bwfore having less than 1 frame a second didn't go as well as planned. The mockup structures (basically rectangular solids with 3x16x20 or more segments high, long, wide or more) seemed to create significant slow down within the area. The 20 NPCs wandering around probably didn't help much. It did however help me get an idea of scales and an idea of how the CS handles very large objects. I'll probably continue doing mockup works for the remainder of the week. Once I know how many polygons I can have per building and such I can plan further from there. In the meantime, feel free to bring up things I might have to deal with later.