TyrisBel Posted February 28, 2012 Share Posted February 28, 2012 I want to clarify right off the bat that this is not a flame or a rant about how crap CK is. It's just a record of my impression of the past month, and the reasons behind it. I also want to make it clear that I'm grateful to Bethesda. Ever since Morrowind where someone told you me could download "keyring" addon I've been a mod addict. Some of my fondest and best gaming memories come from Elder Scrolls and Fallout, and specifically, modded versions of those games. It can't be easy spending months on a complex and detailed world, then releasing it to the public and allowing them to change it, and what does the public do? slap on a big pair of [censored] and give it the sword from Final Fantasy VII. Suffice to say I have been a passive participant in this community for a long time. Enjoying the mods people made, and allowing them to enrich my experiences. From the very first moment Skyrim was announced, and I saw those screenshots, I knew I wanted to be more than a passive observer this time. I wanted to add to that world, I wanted to tell stories and generate content, to give other players the enjoyment I'd have over the years from the modding community. Who remembers Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul? Or Martigen's wonderful creature mods, Textures, Weapons and Armor Oh my! Release day came and I bought Skyrim within minutes online. Before the end of December I had 380 hours of play under my belt. I loved this game more than I thought I would. That had never happened before, I was taken aback, should I ask it to go steady? maybe just buy it some RAM? But that only made me hungrier for CK and I began to plan the mods and quests I wanted to make... The day came, I snapped up the creation kit and began to do the tutorials. When the video tuts were released I did them too. and the gods of level design looked down and declared that lo it was good. Anyone who ever played with lego as a kid will agree that learning the kits and snapping them together is a very satisfying process. Suffice to say that in a month, I'm quite savvy with the level design aspect. Using mostly hot keys and shortcuts and putting things together in minutes that initially took me hours. I dabbled as a graphic designer and animator in my youth, so I figured I was well prepared with a background in Photoshop and 3ds Max for re-texturing and and new meshes. (to be honest I have not tried that yet) But then I got to the meat of the game. The Quests, Oh the stories I had to tell! I was excited at the prospect of introducing a new noble family to Skyrim. To give them a dark history full of misfortune and intrigue. and to weave the Dragonborn into that web with promises of treasure and moral choices. But from the get go, I could not make anything work. The moment I came up against the slightest piece of logic, or minor script I screeched to a halt and opened the wiki to find it vague and sparse and suddenly I could not find the path to tell my stories. If I wanted to do anything more complex than a fetch quest or dungeon bash, if I wanted to tell a proper story I was going to have to ask for help. Now if you recognize my user name, it's probably because I've been bleating for help almost non stop this month. And to this forum's wonderful credit, I have not been flamed, banned abused or mocked, People have patiently helped, when they were unsure they offered their best guess. Were it not for this forum I would have quit long long ago and for that you have my profound and eternal thanks. But this is the part I want to talk about. The thing I want to get across (mostly to Bethesda) CK does not feel like a finished program, it feels like a jury rigged dev tool (which is what it is I know, but hang on the point is coming) I'll give you an example in level design. Its useful to be be able to hide things to they don't get in the way while you work on other aspects. But The selection process is dodgy, and seriously, we NEED the ability to invert a selection, so I don't have to select 300 objects to hide so I can work on 30 others. and do I really have to work with textures on all the time? And the gizmo's oh as a max user how I rejoiced when I saw the gizmos. but they're unintuitive and buggy as hell. fine degree of control is not actually their strong point, particularly rotation. If you incorporate a feature, it should be release ready. That's all I'm saying. What I've mentioned so far is not really the problem. I turned the air blue with profanity, but I got them to work, bent them to my will and created my levels. My problem lies with Papyrus and the Quest design system. Not so much their functionality, well some of it, but mostly it's a case of documentation. The wiki is vague at best and downright lacking at worst. The word wiki does not mean you don't have to adequately document all your functions, packages and terms but rather wait for some long suffering user to do it. It means you create a database that people will learn from and as a result add to. (I have the most horrible feeling one of you is going to post the actual meaning of wiki, but you know what I meant) For every roadblock I hit, My procedure was this, Head to creation kit wiki, search term, no luck, head to nexus, search term, no luck. head to bethforums, search term, no luck. *sigh* head to YouTube, search term, wade through hundreds of vids that have no bearing on my question. then finally going to post in the aforementioned forums. So now I need to wait for some kind soul to help. I move on to the next bit, and hit another issue aaannnd repeat. In a month, where spent all my free time with this, I have learned very very little. The concepts and logic behind quests still often eludes me and scripts that work in one esp that fail to work in another confound me. I've managed not to ragequit yet but only just. The thing is, I'm a fairly persistent bastard. and I'm sure there are other people like me with great content and stories to tell, but gave up because the technicalities involved are not adequately documented or explained. I found myself asking "Is this really the tool you guys used to design the game? Seriously? it cant be identical because things like the navmesh bug exist. so I'm curious about the difference between your CK and ours. If it is the same tool, that goes a long way to explaining some of the bugs in Skyrim's initial release. So Bethesda in conclusion I'm not asking you to simplify the program or make it less versatile. I'm just asking that you explain it better. more tutorials, more examples more vids and finally, some polish on the features you've incorporated, I read a statement somewhere that one of your marketing guys said you were gearing up to support Skyrim and CK for the next couple of years. If this is true it's great news but only if you continue to improve and refine not just the program, but the learning curve for it. I'll say it again, this was not an angry post, just my thoughts and feelings towards a game, it's developer and it's community that I want to be a bigger part of. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sunnie Posted February 28, 2012 Share Posted February 28, 2012 This might be better posted somewhere on the Beth forum... But a suggestion.. cut all the personal reflection and get to the point. You lost me in the middle of the first paragraph, I think you would lose the people you really want to see this in the first paragraph also. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Brasher Posted February 28, 2012 Share Posted February 28, 2012 The CK does stink pretty bad. Papyrus is terrible. The NavMesh design flaw could be devastating to Skyrim modding. The documentation is indeed woefully inadequate. Just as Bethesda releases Skyrim updates, I feel they need to release CK updates. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WorldShaperDragon Posted February 28, 2012 Share Posted February 28, 2012 I heard they were working on a patch for the navmesh issue. Also, navmeshes will work, so long as the mod is made an .esm, as opposed to an .esp (which seems to fix a lot of the issues, such as the NPC texture issues, and maybe the adding animation ones) As to documentation, yeah, in its current state, there is a lot to be desired. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Krentz Posted February 28, 2012 Share Posted February 28, 2012 Verging on tl;dr a little bit here, but mostly agree with your general point (I think). Maybe part of it is due to the fact that the CK and Papyrus are pretty new, but it is really difficult to find example code or to even get answers to questions about any scripting beyond the most simple first-steps material. Any time I find somebody on a forum asking a question similar to what I want to know, there are no responses to it. I currently have a thread open about disarm scripting and of course... no replies. Hopefully the community as a whole will grow a larger base of active skilled script coders soon. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TyrisBel Posted February 28, 2012 Author Share Posted February 28, 2012 Worth mentioning that I posted on Bethforums, and the replies are constructive http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1354218-an-open-letter-to-bethesda-regarding-ck/page__pid__20410072#entry20410072 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sunnie Posted February 28, 2012 Share Posted February 28, 2012 I heard they were working on a patch for the navmesh issue. Also, navmeshes will work, so long as the mod is made an .esm, as opposed to an .esp (which seems to fix a lot of the issues, such as the NPC texture issues, and maybe the adding animation ones) These issues are actually long standing issues with toolsets all the way back to FO3 GECK. Part of the problem stems from the removal of integrated 3rd party tools that they can not redistribute. Honestly, I'll take a toolset thats 75% working over no toolset at all (or homebrew tools that only do 20%). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nightech25 Posted February 28, 2012 Share Posted February 28, 2012 I heard they were working on a patch for the navmesh issue. Also, navmeshes will work, so long as the mod is made an .esm, as opposed to an .esp (which seems to fix a lot of the issues, such as the NPC texture issues, and maybe the adding animation ones) These issues are actually long standing issues with toolsets all the way back to FO3 GECK. Part of the problem stems from the removal of integrated 3rd party tools that they can not redistribute. Honestly, I'll take a toolset thats 75% working over no toolset at all (or homebrew tools that only do 20%). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nightech25 Posted February 28, 2012 Share Posted February 28, 2012 But if that's the case, shouldn't the devs at least give us the 3rd parties tools they using, i mean in writting) i know we as little kids that we are will find a way to fill the gaps in CK trust me WHERE THERES A WAY THERES A SOLUTION Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jagji Posted February 29, 2012 Share Posted February 29, 2012 The CK is fine for a beggener like me.... but I do have to agree with the OP. I think the gizmos need fine tuning a bit. I also think there needs to be an indepth tutorial on scriping, as I have no clue what to do with it. I was expecting a LOT more from the offical tutorials aswell. Its all well and good to show us how to make a dungon, but what if we want to set up an NPC and quest chain as part of it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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