[X] My Assistant

[mALX]

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The CK was not in existence the last time I played Skyrim, so this is my very first attempt at doing anything in the CK. It is a little clunky for me - not used to the havoc being so...active. Having trouble finding my way around the lists - new items on there I have NO idea what they are!

So anyway, here is my first attempt at modding in Skyrim, why not post yours here too? (or any of the construction sets).

Even the mistakes can be fun, I remember in Oblivion having my ONE (essential) Todd Howard multiply to 12, and they were wreaking havoc and couldn't be stopped.

Another was making the Unicorn follow the Player if they were carrying apples - and the Unicorn began following Maxical into houses, buildings - castles. The castle guards in Skingrad did not take kindly to a Daedric beast popping in on them (and Maxical was trying to sneak in for the TG quest).

Then there was the Weynon Village fiasco, when (also essential) Scrappy the Banty Rooster went nuts and started killing all the other barnyard animals - and then killed ME!


Anyway, here is my first Skyrim attempt. So far the havoc is killing me in this mod:


This is a tavern - my favorite thing to make:



http://i434.photobucket.com/albums/qq67/Ma...zpsf3de2fe4.jpg



http://i434.photobucket.com/albums/qq67/Ma...zps20214084.jpg


http://i434.photobucket.com/albums/qq67/Ma...zps1f13fcd2.jpg


http://i434.photobucket.com/albums/qq67/Ma...zps68c81a4a.jpg



http://i434.photobucket.com/albums/qq67/Ma...zpse8c69a56.jpg



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The Basement:


http://i434.photobucket.com/albums/qq67/Ma...zps7351fd76.jpg


The Alchemy Garden:


http://i434.photobucket.com/albums/qq67/Ma...zps2685f022.jpg




Here is the grounds and stable area - the garden was added after these were taken, it sits on top of the stables:


The Grounds:


http://i434.photobucket.com/albums/qq67/Ma...zps1e7ae4dd.jpg


http://i434.photobucket.com/albums/qq67/Ma...zps3e76da77.jpg


http://i434.photobucket.com/albums/qq67/Ma...zps539bb3fa.jpg



A full Smithy, Wood-Chopping, and mining on the grounds:


http://s434.photobucket.com/user/Maxical1/...a3b033.jpg.html





At night:

http://i434.photobucket.com/albums/qq67/Ma...zps0c5c460a.jpg




The Stables – water in the trough, and I didn’t have to make it! Lol.


http://i434.photobucket.com/albums/qq67/Ma...zps90f4e8db.jpg


Everything in this mod is vanilla, I used only basic meshes through the whole mod, actually. I just had to really dig to find stuff to make the place the way I like it.


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This post has been edited by mALX: Oct 12 2014, 12:33 AM

[SubRosa]

Better late than never I suppose. But I echo ghastley's comment. That is just an effect of Skyrim's lighting system. You get that and some other odd effects sometimes because of the lights around you. Like he said, the Sub Surface Texture Mapping (*_sk.dds file) is designed to take the light that hits your character, scatter it under the skin, and the send it out somewhere else. It mimics how light effects real skin. Unfortunately, the game's lighting doesn't always play well with it.

[mALX]

Better late than never I suppose. But I echo ghastley's comment. That is just an effect of Skyrim's lighting system. You get that and some other odd effects sometimes because of the lights around you. Like he said, the Sub Surface Texture Mapping (*_sk.dds file) is designed to take the light that hits your character, scatter it under the skin, and the send it out somewhere else. It mimics how light effects real skin. Unfortunately, the game's lighting doesn't always play well with it.

Oh SubRosa, I am so sorry I didn't say it - I thought I had. I'm a total gauche idiot sometimes, really don't mean to be so scattered. I got so wrapped up in her privates issue that I guess I didn't think of much beyond it - self involved, and I don't like that, most especially in myself.

I humbly apologize for that, I am (and have been) deeply grateful from the moment I set eyes on her originally when I didn't even have the load order right - she looked beautiful, and there is no way I could have achieved that without your help.

Through the years and different games, you have always been an expert (in my mind) on what makes women beautiful, I wanted your advice more than anyone's. You gave it in detail, even gave links and load orders - not many would have given that much time and effort.

I can't thank you enough, every time I look at her I think how grateful I am; really stupid and gauche of me not to say it.

[Grits]

Here’s Jerric demonstrating the Cure Disease spell I made. Mostly for RP purposes since Abiene felt humiliated drinking a potion to cure herself, but it does come in handy in vampire lairs. I guess in three days we’ll find out if it really works.

I’ve hit a few bumps lately (can’t get a conjuration staff to work, need to learn more about scripts to get another spell to work, exterior NavMeshing makes my eyes cross, Ulfe is still pink)(I’m calling that last one a ‘feature’), so it was nice to complete something for once!

[SubRosa]

Here here on the cure disease spell! That was one of the glaring omissions in Skyrim.

[Acadian]

I agree on the cure disease spell. What was BethSoft thinking? I just gave up completely on the whole school of SkyRestoration as too limited to be worthwhile. Buffy's SkySchools are conjuration, illusion and alteration. And alteration only after we changed detect life to 'detect anything that can move' and got her an 'unlock' spell.

[SubRosa]

I found that Restoration became much more viable after I created some Absorb Health spells, and substantially reduced the magicka cost of wards. Aela was an almost pure Restorationist, mostly based upon those two spells, and it made her quite awesome. Persephone too, though she favors the sword.

Sadly vanilla restoration is much less useful, except of course for self-healing after a fight.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Oct 30 2014, 10:00 PM

[ghastley]

I found that Restoration became much more viable after I created some Absorb Health spells, ...

I've cloned those for Drelka, but she's using them with the regular mage armour spells, instead of wards. I also let her use lightning spells, as they fit the Daggerfall precedent, when she needs more range.

I must get back to playing her game, I distracted myself trying a Hulking Archer who also only uses mage armour, not physical. So she's doing mainly bow, but switches to two-handed when she runs out of arrows, or they get too close. She hulks out against bosses like Dragon Priests. It seems like a viable build so far.

I'm not sure about a Cure Disease spell - doesn't that leave mudcrabs as a useless annoyance again?

This post has been edited by ghastley: Oct 30 2014, 10:23 PM

[Grits]

Mudcrabs are delicious! They’re still on the menu. Another happy consequence of Fast Respawn is a crab feast every time someone returns to Lakeview.

Today I’m taking another crack at adjusting exterior NavMesh. Oh my goodness, what an enormous pain.

[mALX]

SubRosa, have you seen this mod for the pale skin?


http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/f...-flan-and-max/#



They have some amazing skin!

[SubRosa]

That looks interesting, and I already have Robert's Body. I am downloading it now. Though I think I'll pass on the Fixed Boners!

[mALX]

That looks interesting, and I already have Robert's Body. I am downloading it now. Though I think I'll pass on the Fixed Boners!

What? I didn't see anything like that - I just ran across the pictures of the skin! I'll have to go back and look closer, lol. Oh, I loved the look of that skin, it looked so absolutely natural!

[ghastley]

Can't call this fun, as it's driving me nuts!!

Clarisse has been very demanding recently, and she wants a ship of her own. Something about the size of the Katariah, but without all those dragony bits. So I've been reworking the model to remove them, and replace the figurehead's hair. It's almost done, but the latest version of the model crashes the CK when I try to use it. Some of the dragony bits are in the same mesh as the railings and rigging, and editing it in Blender is proving complicated.

I couldn't find a reasonable parking spot, so I created a new worldspace for her to put it in, and tried to connect it to the mainland via a rowboat, copying the technique for the one from Icewater Jetty to Castle Volkihar. It looked simple enough, but the trigger box around the mainland rowboat doesn't activate the teleport door when it should, and the one on the ship won't even let me activate it - even though it's the same as the one that does. So I have to COC to the ship for testing, but that's going well enough, but...

I copied over the interior of the Katariah, as it's easier to re-arrange clutter than start from scratch, but some of the roombounds and portals stopped working, and part of the interior disappear when you look through doors. I know how to fix those, but it's tedious stuff.

Then I discover that the main cabin of the Katariah is a separate worldspace, too, as it needs a view out of the windows. I managed to clone that using TESVEdit, but I still have to remove all the landscape. Her ship, the Red Witch, is out of sight of land, so I only want a few icebergs in sight. It may turn out to be a simple delete in TESVEdit, so I'm hopeful there.

After all this work, it's going to need some quests to make use of it, probably as part of the Thieves Guild Extension.

[mALX]

Can't call this fun, as it's driving me nuts!!

Clarisse has been very demanding recently, and she wants a ship of her own. Something about the size of the Katariah, but without all those dragony bits. So I've been reworking the model to remove them, and replace the figurehead's hair. It's almost done, but the latest version of the model crashes the CK when I try to use it. Some of the dragony bits are in the same mesh as the railings and rigging, and editing it in Blender is proving complicated.

I couldn't find a reasonable parking spot, so I created a new worldspace for her to put it in, and tried to connect it to the mainland via a rowboat, copying the technique for the one from Icewater Jetty to Castle Volkihar. It looked simple enough, but the trigger box around the mainland rowboat doesn't activate the teleport door when it should, and the one on the ship won't even let me activate it - even though it's the same as the one that does. So I have to COC to the ship for testing, but that's going well enough, but...

I copied over the interior of the Katariah, as it's easier to re-arrange clutter than start from scratch, but some of the roombounds and portals stopped working, and part of the interior disappear when you look through doors. I know how to fix those, but it's tedious stuff.

Then I discover that the main cabin of the Katariah is a separate worldspace, too, as it needs a view out of the windows. I managed to clone that using TESVEdit, but I still have to remove all the landscape. Her ship, the Red Witch, is out of sight of land, so I only want a few icebergs in sight. It may turn out to be a simple delete in TESVEdit, so I'm hopeful there.

After all this work, it's going to need some quests to make use of it, probably as part of the Thieves Guild Extension.

From what I've learned in these modding Skyrim lessons (if I have this right) = the vanilla stuff can't be deleted without making Skyrim unstable. You can disable them, but better to sink them below map instead for the most stable outcome.

[ghastley]

The "don't delete" mantra is because you never know what's using the item. In my case, I'm making copies of whole cells, or even worldspaces, and what I'm deleting is the new copy, not the original, so those considerations don't apply.

I keep running across things that the developers apparently did to work around limitations of their first attempts at something. The final results are often more complex than needed, but they do something subtle like change a piece of text in a displayed message, like just removing the word "activate", by adding extra activators and messages, and chaining stuff together. In many case, cloning an item and renaming it would have done the same. But sometimes, the side-effects are what make it work, and not just cosmetics, and it's hard to distinguish those cases, except by trial and error, which is how they must have worked in the first place.

[Grits]

If it’s any encouragement, ghastley, ship homes are loads of fun!

I saw a picture of Clarisse in another thread that I can’t find now, and she looks great! I agree with her, a ship is the perfect accessory for her outfit.

[mALX]

The "don't delete" mantra is because you never know what's using the item. In my case, I'm making copies of whole cells, or even worldspaces, and what I'm deleting is the new copy, not the original, so those considerations don't apply.

I keep running across things that the developers apparently did to work around limitations of their first attempts at something. The final results are often more complex than needed, but they do something subtle like change a piece of text in a displayed message, like just removing the word "activate", by adding extra activators and messages, and chaining stuff together. In many case, cloning an item and renaming it would have done the same. But sometimes, the side-effects are what make it work, and not just cosmetics, and it's hard to distinguish those cases, except by trial and error, which is how they must have worked in the first place.

I believe that, this game feels like a huge trial and error project as soon as you open the box. Open the CK and learn you were right thinking that, lol.

[Grits]

OK, so in the general store mod I made for grown-up Alesan (during a TESA class) I put a beehive in the front garden like the ones at Goldenglow Estate. Well, Sofe just went by there in her game and while she was pillaging her brother’s garden Braith set the beehive on fire!! I was laughing too hard to realize I didn’t have Fraps running, so all of the pictures I took are sadly useless. I guess Braith must have whipped out a torch since it was getting dark and she was standing too close to the hive. Oops.

Now I have to decide if I’m going to switch the beehive for a Hearthfire apiary or leave the burned hive in Sofie’s game as a reminder of unexpected consequences.

[ghastley]

I don't yet know if this is my problem with the boats as doors, but it's an example of what you have to work around in Skyrim's CK. From the CK wiki -

"•Player Activation: This only works for Triggers and allows the player to get a prompt when his cursor is over the Trigger, which can then be activated by the player and sends an OnActivate event.
• The prompt will be the name on the trigger/activator base object
• There appears to be a bug where the trigger is impossible to activate if its Z rotation is at 0 degrees."

I hope this is all that's wrong, but somehow I doubt it's going to be that simple.

Edit: of course it wasn't. My rowboat doors still don't work.

This post has been edited by ghastley: Nov 19 2014, 02:53 AM

[ghastley]

I finally fixed my rowboat doors, but I still don't really understand how. I'm sure they were configured the same before and didn't work.

Now I'm back to working on the ship - The Red Witch. I repaired the broken room bounds and portals mainly by re-connecting rooms that got separated by the cell duplication. Now I'm tracking down all the books that got a random orientation, and come flying off the shelves because of havok collisions with each other. I suspect they were all placed and then havok-sim'ed into place, and the cell duplication did only the first part.

And Clarisse has told me she wants a full crew "with a boatswain to look after the boat, and a cockswain to look after me." So I've made a crew "uniform" out of the top half of the farmclothes03, both male and female, and paired that with trousers from Ashara Prince of the Woods, and appropriate boots. With a tricorn hat like her own (minus the feathers) and the extra bits available from the farmclothes03 - horns and pouches - I can make each crewmember a bit different, but enough alike to look like a crew. They're all Breton, as the ship comes from Farrun in High Rock, but I'm considering a token Argonian for underwater jobs.

I'll post portraits of them all when I get finished. So far I have First Mate Helene, a ship's cook (with a cook's hat), a barman for the mess, a ship's carpenter/smith, and a few ordinary sailors. Since I cloned the Katariah interiors as a basis, there are beds for at least twenty crew, (not counting the three cells in the brig), so there's room for a lot more.

The interior doesn't account for the forecastle and sterncastle of the exterior, so I may also add two more doors off the deck, and a couple more cells. I kept the anchor chain entry as a way to get back aboard if the player goes over the side, but other than that, there are only two doors from the exterior to the interior.

The Captain's cabin has doors to the interior and the stern balcony, from which you can only fall in the water, or go back the way you came out. I've removed the imperial banners in there, and put in plain tapestries reworked from the Companions one with the axe motif removed.

The whole ship needs more chests for pirated loot - most of them empty, and waiting to be filled. And finally I'll need to write a few quests!

[mALX]

I don't blame Clarisse for wanting a cockswain, and I don't even know what it is!