Skyrim Overhaul Dev Diary 01

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Category: Giskard's Blog

Last Updated on Sunday, 13 May 2012 13:50

Written by Giskard

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Every time I write Diary I keep seeing Dairy, so this a Dev Dairy for you Milk Drinkers lol.

Anyway welcome to the first Dev Diary for the Skyrim Overhaul, a mod that will revamp most of the game world without actually editing anything that the Navmesh bug can break. Which I admit is going to limit what I can do but there is plenty of other stuff I can focus on and there is no reason why I cannot bring my quest making/Script creating talents to bare on the humble overhaul idea just as I did for the Cyrodiil Upgrade Overhaul for Oblivion.

Currently I am cloning the Draugr really for build new custom leveled lists to avoid most conflicts, its a lot of extra work most overhaul makers do not bother with but I find a few days spent cloning stuff now saves me months of incompatibility issues after release. So this extra time spent now, saves time later.

Edit: Too 4 hours of work to do just the Draugr in the end. 4 hours work most overhaul makers do not bother putting in at all. Yet these where 4 of the most important hours spent on an overhaul.

This is the most boring part of overhaul creation btw, endless lists of forms that need copying and renaming. YAWN.. still it separates the men from the boys because this is a necessary stop for avoiding problems. Those who take compatibility seriously always clone the items they intend to edit. Only editing defaults when they have little or no choice.

Btw did you know Draugr means Animated Body of the Dead in old Nordic, or "one who walks after death" in Icelandic. See what you learn when you read this blog. Lots of useless information :)

Wight is an English Word meaning living sentient being, so aq Draugr Wight is "one who walks after death" "living sentient being". Lol... Guess Bethesda did not look up the meaning of both words :)

RPG games have changed the meaning of Wight to soul sucking bad guys, so I guess we can ignore this little error.

Still I could call Draugr Wight's, Sentient Death Walkers, it would be more accurate than Draugr Wight and say basically the same thing in 1 language instead of borrowing from English and Nordic and making mistakes.

The Draugr are the single biggest category of NPCs that need editing, there are literally hundreds of them, what annoys me is they all look the same so what are all these variations for. How many of you have noticed any real differences between Draugr of the same level except male and female differences ?

Yes, exactly my point.... lots and lots of extra work right there.

I am using the SKO_ Prefix for all my edits to make it easier to find them but when dealing with 100s of SKO_ files, finding a template to switch a cloned NPC over too is actually hard and error prone. So I renamed all the templates to AAA_ then added them to the SKO_ NPCs before changing AAA_ back to SKO_. Its proven to be a real time saver and more reliable too.

I should also add that I am only cloning the ENC NPCs and Creatures, those are the ones used in normal spawn points so none of this will effect quest creatures or NPCs. Only default spawns will be effected by these changes.

Another thing I found whilst doing this is the Face Presents used at the start of the game when creating a new character so I am going to see if I can expand those to include many more presents. The game currently has that everything looks the same feel about it, lots of people inter breeding with their mothers and fathers to create entire races that look related to each other. So I'll try and add some variety to the player presents early on, if it lets me.

Once the NPCs and Creatures are cloned and working, I'll create some leveled lists to hold them, I am thinking I may series of standard leveled lists and set them up so they support the player character at various stages of the player characters development. For example level 1 lists might support the player up to level 10. Level 2 lists might support the player from Level 10 to level 20 and so on.

Then when I add them to the official spawn lists, I'll use mostly level 1 for early levels, with the odd level 2 thrown in for a nasty surprise. Then at a slightly higher level, there will be more level 1 spawns and more level 2 spawns and the odd level 3 spawns. Then at a slightly higher level than that, there will be a lot of level 1 spawns, a good number of level 2 spawns, a normal amount of level 3 spawns and the odd level 4 spawn.

This way when a level 1 baddie spawns in the late game, there will be more of them than in the early game. So you still face low ranking baddies, but they gang up on you in the late game. And early on you have a chance of meeting a baddie thats slightly harder than you are as well as baddies of the same level that you would expect to meet.

Thats what I am thinking anyway.

So far I have made ZERO changes to any of the stats of the creatures of NPCs so they are default right now, its just the number and composition that will change at first. Later when I got back and tweak them, the cool stuff will be added.

I will need lots of volenteer beta testers for this first esp in the Skyrim Overhaul, its going to need to be tested properly in a real game over a period of weeks so you "I'll test it at the week end types" are not going to be much help to me. This will need installing and leaving installed during a full game.

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