CK Nub Pleads For Answers

[marthgun]

why hello,

 

If there is a certain place where the cowards live (the internets) where I can find all the answers to my questions, then please direct me.

 

 

I just started out on CK and I would like to make a 10 hour quest mod, with a new town, some dungeons and a few squirrels,

 

1. Should I start with Interiors first and then work my up? Or should I create the Macro aspects first?

 

2. Have I read the tutorial at creationkit.com? Yes, thank you for your condescension.

 

3. Besides level design, is there something I should start first?

 

 

Thanks

 

love mafguhn

[bben46]

Start small, you cannot learn every facet of modding needed for a mod of this magnitude overnight. For an experienced modder, you can expect at least ten hours of work - or more - for every one hour of game time - so for your 10 hour quest mod, you should expect to put in a minimum of 100 hours of work AFTER you learn how to use the CK.

 

Start with a simple mod. an object such as a new weapon. Do both a new mesh and a new texture to learn the basics. Get it working and upload it to get some experience and feedback.

 

Do a single house. Both exterior and interior. Get it working. The inside should be a new world space and will teach you how to do that.

 

Then add more houses and other stuff to make your village.

 

As a part of making the village you will learn all about how to change the landscape to fit what you want

 

Now add an NPC to the village - just one to start with. Now you start learning path gridding so they don't walk into walls.

 

After you have your NPC able to go wherever you want them to. Start on scripting so they will be able to talk and do things in game.

 

Add more NPCs to fill out your village.

 

Put your quest in, lots more scripting, and ... lots of troubleshooting what doesn't work the way you expected it to. At first it will seem like for every bug you squash, 3 more show up for it's funeral.

 

The squirrel, which probably looked like the easiest may actually be the hardest. Depending on how realistic you want it to be. It will need a mesh and texture which you have already learned by this time, then unless you want it just sit there, you will need an animation. And new animations are probably the most difficult part of modding.

 

By the time you get this far, you will either have quit in disgust or be hooked on making mods and forget about playing the game except to test your creations. :thumbsup:

[marthgun]

yoho thanks for the reply,

 

I've actually used the ck in oblivion a little bit when i was writing dialogue and stuffs for various quests, but I have never tried to do it all before.

 

I am somewhat familiar with blender and even less familiar with maya, although i have tinkered with them. Making meshes and textures and then exporting them to skyrim is on the very bottom of the list,

 

when i say I am familiar with blender, I've spent about 25 hours in it and basically got nowhere. so I have a lot of respect for people who do that and do it well. I'm not really that ambitious.

 

I've already made my first interior and ref'd it to a place in tamriel. But I was really stumped on what I should start first, to learn the basics of the program with. I think starting with the interiors would be best because I don't want to hate my exteriors after all that work.

 

I'm going to go big and most likely fail big, I just couldn't find any good starting tips on here or youtube or the wiki's, so i had to ask. Any more helpful starting tips would be great :dance:

[Dahveed]

I feel your pain buddy.

 

I also would like to get more into modding but it seems the "tutorial" resources aren't truly aimed at us nubs. It seems the developers who make the tutorials don't truly realize the true, spirit-crushing extent of our sheer nubosity. When I checked out Bethesda's Navmesh tutorial I felt like crying about 3 minutes in. (And this is coming from someone who has experience in computer programming, was a straight A student and has a Master's Degree in linguistics.) In other words, a lot of them are incredible modders but capital "T" Terrible Teachers.

 

Good luck :)

[elseagoat]

10 hours aint no joke either.

 

I started modding 3 days ago and I am almost done with my first spell, I plan on overhauling conjuration.

 

That's right, not even done with one spell yet. And I would say I am a very fast learner too, considering the spell runs 4 completely fresh scripts in all each over 100 lines long, and I have never scripted anything before in my life, and they all work perfectly (though I am sure they are insanely inefficient).

 

Can't wait to figure out how to give reanimated undead a passive disease aura that infects enemies and spreads from NPC to NPC, raising them from the dead if they die as well, through a perk. That is gunna be a total b***.

 

Keep working at it. The more time you spend on it, the cooler it will turn out.

 

 

 

I have some suggestions though.

 

THE FIRST 5 HOURS ARE THE HARDEST. This is the point when you literally have no clue what any of the buttons do, and because of that, you have no idea what you are capable of doing with the software.

 

What you need to do to overcome these first 5 hours is form an idea in your head. I picked a spell. Spells are cool and give you immediate gratification. Quests and other things can be tedious to test, say you write a long quest, and you want to test some trap at the end of the dungeon, having to get to that point in the quest can be annoying.

 

Pick something. Something small. Form the idea in your head in its entirety. But this is important: Test your idea in your head.

 

I had this idea for this spell I am making, it would be placed at your feet when you cast it, last X seconds, and enemies that enter the area would be chased by a ghost and afflicted with soul trap.

 

I tested this idea in my head by asking what ifs. What if an enemy runs away? Will the ghost chase him indefinitely? How can I rectify this while keeping the ghosts invulnerable? What if the enemy dies, how to I make the ghost go away? What if one ghost hits another by accident? How to I make the spell spawn one ghost for each nearby enemy?

 

Ask questions about your idea and form answers. Once your idea is fully formed in this manner, set out to accomplish it.

 

Take the first step, which is to dig through all the stuff in the CK and look for anything similar, and try to understand how it interacts with other things in the CK. See a magic effect with a certain projectile? filter out for that projectile and look at it. see what options it has. click on the scripts attached to things and read them, and read the properties too. read everything.

 

Once you have a general idea of how something that is already similar to your idea works, copy that thing and start there. this is much less daulting that starting from scratch. Once you have copied that first form, modify it, tweak the properties, and copy and modify any forms that are linked to it.

 

By doing this, you will learn much more than you will by reading on the wiki. But don't throw out the wiki alltogether, use it as a reference if you need to know what a certain parameter, option, tool, button, or script function does. But don't use it as a guide. You need to be the guide, or learning will take forever.

 

 

 

Once you get your feet wet, you will find that every hour that goes by, you make much more progress than the previous hour, yet you still learn just as much.

 

Good luck to you my friend. (and don't ask me for specifics! I started modding 3 days ago lol!)

Edited March 21, 2012 by elseagoat

[DangerManzo]

I am going to agree with what elseagoat said about looking at what is already in the game. (Well, everything he said is good advice) If you are interested in questing, look at the quests already in the game, like the MQ line. Assuming you have done the main quest you will know how they worked in game. And I noticed that the developers were pretty good at putting comments in their code that explains what they are supposed to do.