Another Hearthfires Mod, with added Dremora Options

[Grits]

Awesome, thank you!

[ghastley]

So naturally I've found a bug already.

If you summon a melee housecarl at exactly level 27, they'll only have an iron dagger. There's a gap in the leveled list I made at that point, so they use the fall-back item in their inventory. It's there in case their primary weapon is disarmed, but it also made a good visual clue when they're summoned.

[ghastley]

Version 0.6

The female housecarls have some combat vocals now (detection, taunts, etc.) Don't worry, they're not going to start chatting to you, although they may announce your presence when you're trying to sneak.

I filled some gaps in leveled lists, so dwarven and elven maces and bows will be used.

I gave up trying to persuade the melee ones to use a shock spell at range. It appears that once they're tweaked far enough to use it, they then are mages, and won't use the mace. There must be a mechanism for choosing a ranged attack, as the regular housecarls will use a bow, but it may only be for a bow. Since they work well enough without, I'm admitting defeat for now. I have seen the left-hand healing spell being used, so they're not entirely un-magical.

My test characters have advanced to levels that confirm all the upgrades. Some were console-forced, but not all, which is how I caught the hole in the mace leveled list. Mignonette has built all my HF homes, so I know the set of mods is compatible.

[ghastley]

Version 0.7

I added a couple of hairstyles, so now the mage, melee and missile varieties of females have distinct hair, and it's even easier to see which you got.

I've tested the voices and this one's looking like it may become 1.0 soon.

[Grits]

Got it, thank you! I started 0.6 yesterday but haven’t gotten all the way to the tower site yet – any reason I should start 0.7 from scratch, or should I just update and keep going?

[ghastley]

Update and keep going. All I added were the new hairstyles, and those happen as soon as you re-summon or reload.

I re-saved all the FaceGen data, I hope. because there's a lot of use of one actor as a template for another, only the base face gets used, so I may even have too many included. The big bump in the size of the archive is the meshes and textures for the new hair, which is way higher poly than it needs to be. Since the whole mechanism for summoning restricts how many characters are wearing it, I don't think it's a performance issue.

If anyone complains, I'll tell them to drop off the 4k re-textures of the chickens to compensate.

I'll probably spend a lot of time this weekend tying to make screen-shots for the Nexus. A high proportion of my test characters are Dremora, to make it easier to test the hair etc. and most armor, and all clothes, don't show on them. So I have to do a race swap in RaceMenu to get a screenie I can use from the various saves.

And my latest couple of games have Illia or Aranea running around in just a circlet and boots. I've been testing out follower + housecarl to see what problems that causes. It turns out to be better than two followers, because any fight in the ranks that results from friendly fire can quickly be ended with a re-cast of the housecarl.


This post has been edited by ghastley: Mar 11 2016, 02:54 PM

[ghastley]

Now released.

Version 1.0 on the Nexus

That means I'll start finding a whole lot of new bugs again.

[Grits]

Ha ha, Junia is never going to leave the bedroom! Faendal, Lydia, you’re dismissed!! ghastley, that’s awesome and hilarious!

Congratulations on the release!

[ghastley]

Found the two problem Grits noticed.

The hairline for that hair was referring to the wrong folder for its textures. Of course, I have it there as part of KS Haidos, where the unmodified mesh resides, and the texture doesn't change.

The female body that caused the CTD's was linked to a non-standard skeleton, and has been replaced.

Version 1.1 is now on the Nexus with both changes.

[Grits]

Awesome, thank you ghastley!

[ghastley]

And of course, I made the right change in the wrong place.

Version 1.2

[Grits]

I checked out the ladies this morning, and they look great. Thank you for this!

Junia and her Housecarl Loyal (until we think up a better name or he tells us) are headed to High Hrothgar. Junia already can't wait to get back home.

[ghastley]

Yes, even now I've given the females voices, they don't say anything outside combat (which does include impending and resolved combat). They don't have the housecarl dialogue, and "can't carry your burdens" etc. so there's no opportunity for those conversations, even if their actions match the housecarl role of protecting and following. That will make it hard to get a name.

In part, of course, that's because the female dialogue has to correspond to the male, and only the combat and detection info's have the Dremora voice. Although hers is "female commander" or "female sultry" I needed to select things only for those tabs.

---

I started writing Kothet's story, and his housecarl's taciturn nature is causing me all sorts of problems. He's not sure if she's just not on speaking terms with him yet, but he's only just summoned her for the first time. I avoided him doing that in the bedroom, by having him go build as much as he could first. He'd not want to summon a woman into a half-finished building site! What would she think?

The tower still needs a crafting table, and some more chests, so they're looking for the rarer materials together. If you look out from the top of the Tower, you can probably see the smoke from the smelter at Soljund's Sinkhole, so it seemed reasonable for them to head there, to see what they mine.

Kothet won't be too concerned about a name, because he's not used to women having them. Prizna was an exception, and she got hers from the CoC as a reward for killing Kothet and closing the gate, which he considers a prodigious feat that fully deserved it. Mainly the killing him part, of course, which wouldn't have been easy. He doesn't expect anyone to measure up to his woman, not that Prizna's his any more, so others still wouldn't have names.

[ghastley]

As usual, working on one mod gives me ideas for others.

I was trying out various possible shrines to Malacath for the Orc Stronghold, and I got an idea for one for the Dremora Tower.

This wall plaque uses an existing mesh from Labyrinthian (Shalidor's maze) with a change to the glow hue, and making it activate as a shrine. It gives a mild Fortify Destruction boost, as well as the usual cure disease, etc. It should appear at the same time as the spell book. At present it has two separate scripts, one for the glow and one for the shrine effect. I need to merge those, so the glow turns off after it gives the blessing.

So I had to start a new character to go build the tower. Heavy Armour with a bound sword, so she counts as a mage and gets an archer as housecarl. Here they are in matching outfits. It looks a lot better on her.

[Acadian]

Great work, but she looks rather overdressed compared to most of your characters.

[ghastley]

It's an optical illusion caused by the longer hair.

[ghastley]

I tried porting this over to SE, and ran into a problem with the faces. The new CK automatically builds a new set of FaceGen files, and creates a plain white Tint file that only seems to affect the head!?

This seems to relate to the built-in female head mesh not having any tint mask, but I'm still delving into all the complexities. I had similar problems with Uzi, but she had a custom head, so it broke differently.

I'm not sure whether I'll do a separate Xbox version without the bedroom exception, to meet the no nudes rule.

[Kane]

Ah, yes. Can't be having boobs on Beth.net.

[ghastley]

I made a change to the spell script to test the platform it's running on, so only PC players get boobies. I'm not sure how to properly test that part. The bsa will include the nude "outfit" but an XBox player has no way to unlock it.

I need to rework the outfits for SE, as there are higher-res version of the robes to provide the textures, and I could use the opportunity to fix some sporadic clipping, and the odd neck seam.

My test character is currently an Imperial, and the courier with the letter was waiting to ambush him at the Whiterun stables. He never got to report to Balgruuf, as he decided to go build right away.

I want to do a run with a playable Dremora too, so this may all take a while.

Meanwhile, screen-shot!

This post has been edited by ghastley: Nov 13 2016, 12:11 AM

[ghastley]

Well it's been up on Bethesda.net for a while, and I have way more XBox1 users than it ever got on PC. But most of the comments have been "can you change it so I get the rewards without having to do the work?" just like on the other four. One of the most popular mods is a "cheat chest" for Hearthfires so you don't have to go collecting materials. I'm glad some of mine use non-standard materials that won't be in there.

I really must make the "Win Button" mod. You install the mod and as soon as the game starts it pops up a button labelled "Win". You push it, it tells you you won, and shuts the game down. That's all some of these kids need.