Skyrim Overhaul Dev Diary 09

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Category: Giskard's Blog

Last Updated on Sunday, 20 May 2012 11:21

Written by Giskard

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Did you know that you can tell a programmer or scripter by how they write their numbers, for example most folk would have put Skyrim Overhaul Dev Diary 9, but a programmer adds a zero so when he gets to 10 he has a digit to store the new number, its force of habit for me. Keeps everything nice and neat too.

Skyrim is without doubt the least moddable Elder Scrolls/Fallout game ever made due to bugs and console limitations since Morrowind. There is no way to hide it, all it really supports is armour mods, weapon mods, texture mods, lighting mods (supports these badly) and various other limited eye candy mods.

Most of which need a PC to make.

Consoles cannot make armour mods without a 3d program for example, so any idea that consoles will be modding the game the way we do today is mute, they lack the power and support to do anything, if that changes I will be first to give them a try because I am not the worlds biggest PC fan either.

However I am expecting a very different future for Bethesdas modding kit, I'll show you at the end of this blog what I expect to happen.

Yesterday I discovered that Skyrims spawns only spawn 1 creature per spawn point regardless of what the spawns say should be spawning. This has proven to be a massive disappointment for me because the only way to add more is to place more spawns and then you lose the randomness of knowing 1 or 5 wolfs will spawn around the corner, its always going to be the same number as the number of spawns I place.

No variation EVER!

All previous games allowed me to set a series of random options for what to spawn, how often to spawn them and how many to spawn. All of those features are gone from Skyrim. Stripped out, probably for the sake of the Xbox that would struggle to support 8 wolfs on screen at once. So you get 1 regardless of what your fighting.

That hare must look pretty dam dangerous to a console user :)

This is why Skyrim seems too static and as of yesterday I see no good way of avoiding that due to the way its designed. I can see it as a performance saving issue, no doubt to allow consoles to run Skyrim but for a PC modding its deeply disappointing and frustrating given every other area of this game I have so far tried to mod has been broken and buggy. The one area that works is limited, locked down tight, nothing I can do to change it.

If I tried I would create massive compatibility conflict and even though its my right as a modder to make my mods any way I please regardless of the harm it causes others.

It would not stop my inbox being flooded with complaints every morning for years to come. Like or not, the players willingness to flame good modders over petty things is why some mods you would love to see, never get made. Or if they are made, they are never shared with you. I have several mods that fall in to this category for the last 4 Bethesda games.

I am absolutely against releasing any mod that makes it difficult to run other mods anyway, so do not consider it an option.

So I have come to decision.

I am going to do absolutely nothing, except add more deer, horses and Mammoths to make the plains feel more alive and not so deserted and then move on to add more depth to everything. I do not like the alternatives at all so I am not going to adopt any of them. I am going to step over the shit Beth left in my way and carry on without touching this feature too much.

Skyrim is a generic game, more so that oblivion, nothing we can do can fix that given the bugs and limitations of the game and its modding tools. No TES or Fallout game from Bethesda has had this many brick walls denying us modders access to things.

We are effectively walled in.

Since the game was released 6 months ago not a single vital fix to Beths modding system has been made. Beth talk the talk, but have NOT DELIVERED a single fix we needed yet. They may say "We love our modders" but somethings you have to look at what a company does or does not do, not what a company says to learn the truth.

Xbox Kinect anybody ?

I look for games I want to mod and buy them, they get my money as a priority and always have. I had been buying Bethesda games so far because they where moddable, despite all the bugs. Guess that has changed, so my purchases will change too as a result.

Bethesda games are clearly not as moddable as they once where and these days us modders are held hostage to Bethesda bugs and that is just annoying. Modders that mod without official tool kits never suffer with this problem, that is a fact, we make our own way, totally independent of the company and the tools they provide. Give whats happening to Bethesda games right now, their tools have become a liability.  

I will make a predication though, since no console can run the programs needed to mod any game like we did for Oblivion, eg 3d Max, Nifscope or Photoshop and those are tools of choice for most modders. The future of Beths mod tools will look more and lore like Spores own in game modding system and less and less like the sort of stuff I needed to make Kvatch Aftermath.

This is the future of TES modding... Enjoy....

Try using Beths tools past and present and see what conclusions you come too. IF you do not end up seeing this ending with a Sims 3/Spore style setup, I would be very surprised. 

Do not get me wrong, that is fun, but its not really modding is it.

Speaking of which, Sims 3 is a game about modding a game, good fun for modders with limited time on their hands. But not very satisfying if you like that "achievement factor" that comes with doing something good and releasing it.

Skyrim Overhaul Dev Diary 08

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Category: Giskard's Blog

Last Updated on Saturday, 19 May 2012 20:39

Written by Giskard

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It appears the spawns do not work the way they used too in ALL other Bethesda games, we appear to be locked in to a 1 creature per spawn scenario, probably because that is all the Xbox can handle. That means much of the work I did these past few days in balancing things was for nothing because. Your only ever going to see 1 creature or NPC for each spawn, not up to 8 as I had planned.

Which explains why yesterdays test was so boring.

The other thing this that it is no longer possible to revamp the spawns without directly editing the placed spawns directly in the world in some way because of the above limitation. I must now either add more spawns near them to increase the number of creatures you see in your travels or or remove all the existing spawns and replace them with new spawns I must now create.

The old spawns will lead to Wolfs and Sabrecats spawning together or Horses and Deer spawning together.  Not the effect i wanted when I set up the current lists to choose one of the other and then spawn X amount of them in one go.

The randomness I hoped to add to the game to get away from the generic "I know there is a wolf around this corner because its there in every game I have started" feeling is not possible either. To make a herd of deer for example I have to create a special deep spawn and add several of them. All I'll achieve by doing that is create a scenario where you know theres always a herd of deer around the next corning instead of that 1 wolf.

I have never been a fan of repainting the same wheel and claiming it to be a new feature when its the same boring feature I did not like in the first place. 

To fix this I have to edit the existing spawns directly in the world and that will create conflicts I have worked hard to avoid, in turn those conflicts will generate a massive amount of hate mail from players which I must suffer with if I continue developing this mod and release it.

So Skyrim and its broken and dumped down modding system has backed me in to a corner, either I content my self making minor mods, or I go a head with this mod idea and get flamed to hell by players when it starts conflicting, or I give up entirely modding Skyrim and walk away.

I'll let you know what I decide later, I need to think about this for a while.

TES Online Lore very implausible

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Last Updated on Saturday, 19 May 2012 11:02

Written by Giskard

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After reading a tweat about the new Elder Scrolls online I came across this on the Game Informer Website. It covers the Ebonheart Pack and how the Nords, Elves and Argonians became best friends to defend them selves against the surrounding threats.

Allowing for the fact the second era lore is the vagues lore of all, there are some things we know about the races involved that shed light on events at the time.

But lets look at Zenimax statement about this.

Zenimax Online’s Take:
“About 50 years prior to the game, an Akaviri invasion came in and basically tried to take over,” says creative director Paul Sage. “What happens now is that the Dunmer and the Nords have formed an alliance because the attack was so bad that they realized they were weak to the Imperial rise. So they form an alliance of convenience with the Argonians. They’re surrounded by all these tides of opposing forces. They feel really threatened, so the Ebonheart’s entire purpose is to band together and make sure they’re no longer in danger.”

Some points with this version of the lore.

The Nords are the strongest faction in Tamriel and have been in a state of almost constant war with their neighbors through out their history. Their Favourite enemy after the sacking of their first city was all Elves. Their most distrusted enemy after the sacking of their first city was.. yep you guessed it any Elf.

The Falmer are Falmer today because the Nords defeated them when they lived above ground and called them selves Elves. The Nords also battled the Dwemer and a host of other Elves too. In fact TES Lore makes the Elves the Nords favorite enemy.

Here is a little history of Nord folk and their wars with the Eastern Kingdoms from the first Era.

Here is the story of the Snow Elves and what happened to them at the start of the second era. 

This is why the Forsworn (Bretons) hate them as much as the Elves of Morrowind. The Bretons also share a border with the aggressive Nords.

During the Night of Tears the first nord city (the city of Saarthal) in Tamriel was destroyed by the Elves in the Merethic Era. Establishing an early hatred of the Elves that still exists today as you see when you visit Windhelm and listen to "any true nord".

From where I sit the Nords seem to be having no problems fighting their neighbors through out TES history, so it is very implausible for TES Onlines Lore to suddenly make the Nords best friends with them.

I would also ask where did the deal with Mogal Bal and an Undead Army come from in Cyrodiil History. No lore records anything of the kind from that period. This period of time saw the old Empire declining. Not raising undead armies, that was Cameron the Usurper of Valenwood that did that sort of thing. Not to be confused with the actual Cameron Dynasty which he tried to claim he was the heir too.

Morrowind spent much of the first ERA fighting the Reman Dynasty with mixed success, they remained strong enough to stay independent until tiber Septim turned up in the 3rd Era and they gave up without a fight and joined him.

Also Argonia, later called Blackmarsh has its own history which you can read about on the wikis. According to that history the Reman Empire conquered the Argonians in the first Era and it was only after the Akaviri Potentate collapsed (they where care takers of the Reman Empire after the last Reman emperor died) that Argonia was free again and then it degenerated in to banditry.

So according to the TES Online lore, the Argonians made a packed the Elves and the Nords during a time when the Akaviri already had conquered them.

The is room for error here but these seem to be pretty big glaring mistakes that which makes me think TES Online is a TES game in name only.

A better set of factions for the period would have been...

The Nords (Had an Empire of their own)

The Akaviri (The failing Imperial power)

The Cameron Dynasty or Aldmeri Dominion (if its late on)

Those where the movers and shakers of the time. Any serious attempt at a TES Online Lore game would have to focus on those 3, not bears, snakes and what ever.

I said to my own forum users that once the big money guys take over, everything you like about the game is up for sale and becomes subject to the bottom line. From what I have seen, TES Online is making no attempt what so ever to follow TES lore. Its not only wrong, its directly opposing existing lore, conflicting wildly with whats already known.

Skyrim Overhaul Dev Diary 07

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Category: Giskard's Blog

Last Updated on Friday, 18 May 2012 20:49

Written by Giskard

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The tests went well despite an early scare when the game crashed out before the main menu when the mod was loaded. Turns out I had some spawns looking for NPCs in a constant loop, Spawn A looked at Spawn B which contained Spawn A sort of thing.

So I learned something today, I learned a brand new way to crash out Skyrim before the main menu. Unfortunately those kind of crashes give no clues as to the cause where as in older games I would be able to look at near by spawn points for errors in the editor when approaching an area and suffering a crash.

The current balance of the mod seems a bit dull and will need tweaking so I have not recorded the excitement because there was'nt any.

Also I noticed the games level lock system seems to override the spawn settings this overhaul adds, allowing so many things to spawn but not the things that should be spawning at that level with this mod installed. So it looks like you need to start a new game to fully benefit from this mod. Otherwise the old spawns you have already encountered may in some cases not get updated.

Not a big deal really, the others should update normally.

The other thing that whilst my own randonly chosen stuff is being chosen in new spawn areas, I am not getting them in the kind of numbers I expected. Its like the game is automatically limiting what it will spawn despite what my mod tells it to do.

I need to look in to this, it may just be I need to add more options to the spawns so theres a greater chance of increased numbers of bad guys. Unfortunately Skyrim uses a lot of unique spawns for individuals an this mod is not designed to change those. So large areas of the game may keep that generic feel to it.

I am sure you have noticed how the same things seem to wait for you in the same locations game after game.

Anyway the randon nature of this mod has made difference to that samey feeling Skyrim gives off in every game but it clearly needs a lot more work.