Return to Helgen: Say hello to Mr Smith

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Category: Giskard's Blog

Last Updated on Sunday, 07 April 2013 20:25

Written by Giskard

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Let me introduce you to Mr Smith, he works for the Penitus Oculatus and has just arrived in Helgen to set up an outpost. He has the Emperors ear and follows his orders regardless of the consequences, the law or one sided treaties.

He is the Empires last line of defense against the Thalmor.  

Trouble is, somebody wants to kill the Emperor and Mr Smith and the Penitus Oculatus do not know who. Whilst other agents of the Penitus Oculatus protect the emperor from that threat. Mr Smith has orders to prevent the Thalmor from undermining the Empire.

Recently he heard about the appearance of a Dragonborn and seeks to recruit him in to the Penitus Oculatus. Fortunately for him the Dragonborn joined the legion so he can just have him transfered to the Penitus Oculatus if he wishes. But he decides to ask nicely and earn the Dragonborns trust. 

He knows that trust may be useful one day. 

Mr Smith is very much aware that the Dragon Emperors were also Dragonborn and the consequences of finding another one in Skyrim has not been lost on him. But he servers the Emperor and expects the Dragonborn to do so too.

His loyalty is clear. 

With the Dragonborn on his team, the Penitus Oculatus outpost in Helgen starts conducting missions to Riverwood and Falkreath. Getting an idea of what the Thalmor are doing locally and through out Skyrim before sending agents out to deal with them.

The Dragonborns recent encounter with Thalmor agents in Helgen has made it easier to get the Dragonborns cooperation now the Dragonborn has seen the face of the enemy first hand and knows the game they must play whilst preparing for the next war according to the Emperors own plan. 

One day word reaches him that the Dark Brotherhood has assassinated the Emperor, the plan is a bust, a weak Emperor is dead. Mr smith cannot decide if this is a gift or a curse. The Emperor was weak and his strategy of waiting for the Thalmor to strike was not working. 

Yet under his command is the heir to the Storm Crown, so say the Greybeards. 

If he was man of faith he may believe this was an act of divine intervention. The appearance of a possible new Dragon Emperor, Tiber Septims heir no less and at the time the Thalmor are busy denying Talos his god hood and trying to destroy the Empire Tiber Septim built. 

Should the peasantry start believing Tiber Septim has returned, it could unite a weakened empire, it may be even get Hammerfel back on side and greatly undermine the efforts of the Thalmor right across the Empire.

Mr Smith leans forward in to the candle light, deep in thought just an agent runs in and hands him a message. 

Message reads "The bards of solitude have started singing of the return of Tiber Septim".

He dismisses the Agent, leans back in his chair so his face and upper body are hidden in the shadows of the outpost and mutters the words "funny how that worked out".  

Return to Helgen News

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Category: Giskard's Blog

Last Updated on Friday, 05 April 2013 15:46

Written by Giskard

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My next release will be the Return to Helgen mod, I will be putting House Redoran on the back burner for a while to allow the excellent Dragonborn DLC (it is the best DLC for Skyrim so far) to become more popular.

My first job in the Return to Helgen mod is to remove the quests that slowly build up the town after it was destroyed and rewrite the Mining quest. The reason I am dumping down those features is because they use unreliable (ok out right buggy) papyrus commands built in to Skyrim.

Right now they do not work as intended and if beth ever fix them, it may actually break the mod. So I am getting rid of the buggy skyrim stuff once and for all and drawing a line under it.  

The mining quest will be shorted and rewritten, it will be easier to get the mine working.

After I have removed that buggy skyrim features, I will be focusing on the Storm Crown plot line I spoke about before Christmas. The plot that allows the player to become Emperor.

I may build in that plot line in to the next Return to Helgen Release, or maybe the one after that. Since it is a complicated quest line that requires the player finishes various default quests such as the Dark Brotherhood quest line, I need to create a new Imperial Legion/Assassin Character to help me develope the mod.

I will say that the Elder Council guy who sets you on the path to assassination the emperor will in reality be one of your own guys in this mod and will be part of your plot to become emperor. In other words, YOUR the guy who put him up to it. 

Thats my way in thats explainable under the lore. That and the Storm Crown backstory that I'll talk about in more detail later. 

Just 1 warning, I cannot possibly make every single person in Skyrim call you emperor, not only would the mods file size run in to 100s of megs for the download due to the voice files, but it would make the mod incredibly incompatible with other mods.

But what I can do is make you feel like an emperor within the confines of this mod and maybe the legion too. 

So... who wants to be Emperor ?

Skyrim is a buggy game to mod

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Category: Giskard's Blog

Last Updated on Wednesday, 03 April 2013 12:59

Written by Giskard

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Did you know that for every minute I spend making feature you see in my mods, I spend 8 minutes working around bugs in Skyrim. It is true, I spent over 2 months testing features in House Redoran but only a week actually making things that made it in to the mod. 

The amount of work needed to get that weeks worth of reliable code was horrendous. I had rewrite the entire mods quests 3 times, the last time to give up on the repeatable quests and convert them to one shot quests because of problems with the moveto and resurrection commands. 

Not minor issues either, these made NPCs float around like angels, very strange.

Then we have the resurrection spell that if used on an NPC the combat quests used would cause the isdead command not to recognize the NPC as dead when killed and there for break the quest entirely.

So it is important you do not have companions that use that spell on those combat quests nor use it your self. It is a problem I cannot work around so we must all live with it.  

When I was making Telvanni hall I had similar problems with other commands, mostly dialog control, eg it was not under control using the default system. So I used the quest vars to show or hide dialog instead of the official system and got it working 100% of the time.

That beats the official dialog system that barely functions most of the time and broke randomly. My workaround never beats, it always works. But requires more effort to set up. 

Experimenting can be fun, but it quickly gets old when you spend months working on the same feature trying to get a command to work when it either does not work at all, or causes massive problems with it does work.

Skyrim and everything in it uses a scripting language called papyrus to work, everything you see has a papyrus script attached to it, and papyrus is only half functional at best, most commands in it either do not work or are buggy. For a game that runs from a script, that is fatal. 

Which is why Skyrim has so many problems.

Skyrim may be a bigger world but compared to older TES games there is less of everything in it, including resources modders can use.

For example there is only 2 complete dungeon tile sets. The Dwemer one and the Drauge one. The rest are 1 piece sets that have ZERO variety in them.

Recently I had a user on steam moaning my Wizards of Winterhold mod was not lore friendly because I used the Dwemer tile set, the guy did not know there was only 2 full time sets modders can use in Skyrim and none of these DLCs have added anything new that can be considered a complete set yet.

So we are not going to see any more full dungeon tile sets for Skyrim from Bethesda. All mods are doing to have to make do with those 2 full sets because all others are limited in scope. 

Since Skyrims release I have been fighting Skyrim game bugs, Skyrim editor bugs, Bugs introduced in patches that break mods, the Navmesh bug and a whole host of other things.

Mean while some very bad advice concerning using BOSS and unofficial patches has been affecting players who now believe all mods cause their games serious problems so they do not try any new ones.

The people that tend to be the idiots that think forcing incompatible mods to work is never going to come back and bite them on the ass seem to be mostly Nexus users who consider them selves experts on mod usage. Even as they are posting their problems on a forum, they fail to accept they did it to them selves and tell others to do the same stupid thing too.

So what chance does a modder have of making a good mod that works when everything from Bethesda to the players them selves seem intent on destroying their games and breaking all mods for it. 

All the effort to get that 1 minute of functional mod out of 8 minutes of buggy crap is wasted.