Skyrim Modding: Just Spent 10 Hours Modding, Time to Play

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Skyrim Modding: Just Spent 10 Hours Modding, Time to Play

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

Gonna plug a few of my (IMO) better mods here for inclusion in the OP:

Acquisitive Soul Gems <- Trapped souls only go into gems of the same size.

Breezehome Basement 3x2 <- A basement addition for Breezehome. Pretty basic e.g. doesn't include full-out blacksmithing workstation or smelter - being underground, no hot tub, underground greenhouse, sex dungeon, etc. Also no quest you just buy it from the steward like everything else. I made this because I couldn't find a single Breezehome addition that didn't suck. Includes enchanting station, two chests, two mannequins, two bookshelves, one weapon rack, a chair, a rug. That's it.

Flora Respawn Fix <- Ever notice that plants and other harvestables effectively don't respawn? That's an engine bug. This mod works around that engine bug. Compatibility patches for Convenient Horses and Harvest Overhaul are available.

Perk Books <- Buy books to teach you perks in much the same way that books teach you spells. Don't use this if you're using any mods that heavily modify perk trees (e.g. definitely incompatible with SPERG).

Soulfire <- Merges your magicka with the charge on your enchanted weapon. Using the weapon will draw power from your magicka until you run out, at which point it will draw from the weapon. Higher-level enchanting skill makes you more efficient at recharging. Toggle-able. You can also recharge your weapons with this, of course.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2013 05:52

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 11:36

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

Alasyre posted:

Looks like NMM is going to be doing something similar to Mod Organizer by installing mods in NMMs directory rather than the Skyrim folder. If I'm understanding this right, it will be as if millions of Skyrim installations suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

This should be interesting.

Where did you read this?

NMM's been a poo poo-show since around v43.x anyway. For me, at least. They keep introducing bugs and rather than fixing them they just plow ahead with new features. Anything later than that throws exceptions about half the time I activate anything. This is over multiple installs and even since a fresh OS install a few months back. Fortunately, there isn't any reason to upgrade.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2013 15:33

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

From the sound of it I think their approach might be a bit different from MO. If they just use symlinks like they say, it should be transparent to pretty much everything else, and you won't need to use NMM to start Skyrim or any such foolishness. It's a good idea, although I'm sure it will take them several tries to get it right. At least they'll have to rewrite all the logic for loading mods into the tool, because all that poo poo is broken now anyway afaik.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2013 16:48

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

scamtank posted:

So I got to Avanchnzel and the last two ghost encounters aren't firing properly.

The scene where Roots is supposed to die horribly just has all three ghosts file up against the closed door, then the human mercenary shouts "Wait!" and they all disappear. The final scene near the Lexicon pedestal never kicks off and the ghosts just stand there forever.

I do have the USKP and the patch apparently fixed this stuff years ago. Is there a script I can kick in the reset button to make things work?

There's two things with this quest:

* The reward which was broken, and fixed by the USKP, then broken even harder when Bethesda tried to fix it in the latest patch, then fixed again by the USKP (no, seriously, the last official patch from Bethesda broke the reward even worse than it was before, and they would have been better off leaving it completely alone). If you have the latest USKP, this works.

* Some "missing scenes" that were almost certainly cut on purpose by Bethesda, but since they were left (unused) in the game files, in the grand USKP tradition of content restoration masquerading as a bug fix even if you have to create the content from whole cloth in order to restore it, this content has been restored. The problem? The restored content interferes with other scenes playing out which advance the quest, which is probably why Bethesda left them out. I mean, one of the scenes even happens *in the same loving spot as another one it overrides*, cutting out a key plot element and leaving the player wondering why the gently caress one of the explorers is laying there dead. And of course, what is happening to you now which is totally expected. If you have the latest USKP, this will happen to you. It's broken.

Arthmoor and Co. are aware of it and intend to take out all the changes to the quest itself in the next patch release, whenever that is. You'd think this would warrant a hotfix as they've done it for less before, but whatever. If you really got blueballs for completing that quest, it's only a few records to delete actually, but I think you'd probably need to use an earlier save to start the quest again.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2013 15:59

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

Inverness posted:

So I'm looking at the readme for the Flora Respawn fix...

How the hell am I supposed to remember all of the hundreds of things I harvested already? It implies it will break if I don't.

Am I just misunderstanding this or what?

Hi, I made this mod.

You don't need to remember anything, if you don't want. All that means is that, if you already harvested something before you install the mod, it's still going to be broken after you install the mod until you harvest it again, after it respawns. Once you harvest it, it will work fine from that point forward. Since it's still broken until you harvest it, if you enter an area and then save/reload before harvesting something, and at that point it's still affected by the bug, the game will despawn the object. Then, since it despawned already, you can't attempt to fix it again until it respawns.

Nothing breaks. Anything you haven't ever harvested yet, you don't need to worry about because it's taken care of. Anything you have harvested already, you need to harvest right away (i.e. before any save/reload) when you enter an area if you want to fix that object. If you don't care about fixing existing objects, you can leave them alone and save/reload all you want, and they'll just stay broken.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2013 13:35

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

Psion posted:

Smells like you should just console yourself the good stuff. I mean that section seems to imply "if you don't harvest everything, it won't reset right" but it means per area, possibly per-cell? But I have no idea how you'd handle stuff in the worldmap of Skyrim that way.

And just to be clear, on games started with this mod installed, on stuff you haven't harvested yet, and on poo poo that you already fixed, you don't need to do anything different at all.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2013 13:44

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

Average Bear posted:

Yeah I'm just not gonna touch anything that has to do with SkyProc. It breaks every other time I run the patchers.

I used a few mods that incorporate SkyProc and I've never had any problems. I don't use Mod Organizer though. I know everyone likes to evangelize MO around here, but even based on this thread alone it seems to cause more problems than it solves.

SkyProc is great, is what I'm saying, and it allows for mods that would otherwise be really tedious to install and even more a pita for the author to maintain. If MO is having problems with it, that's a problem with MO.

# ¿ Sep 21, 2013 02:12

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

Vasudus posted:

Once you take the effort to learn MO, you'll never want to use anything else again ever.

Nope. I know how it works, that's why I don't use it.

Kilroy fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Sep 21, 2013

# ¿ Sep 21, 2013 02:27

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

Inverness posted:

I've used it for months as soon as I discovered it. I've only ever had two problems with it. The first being getting the uncapper to use the SPERG ini file, and secondly the 1.0.0 update with Python crashing on me.

It's made management of my mods and saves loads easier than it ever was before with NMM or back in my Oblivion days, so I'm surprised that anyone could not like it if they know how to use it.

Well prepare to be shocked: it's possible for a person to know how to use Mod Organizer and still prefer to use something else.

# ¿ Sep 21, 2013 04:30

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

btw Inverness did you see my note about Flora Respawn Fix

# ¿ Sep 21, 2013 04:32

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

futile posted:

Come on now. You can't make sweeping judgements about how well the program is doing for people in general based on the posts you see here. It's a drat troubleshooting thread. Of course we're going to see problems. How many of us use mod organizer without issue and love it? Who knows.

If people use it and it works for them, then wonderful. But when you look at how the thing works and if you know how other tools work, it turns out MO breaks a lot of assumptions that those tools make to do what they do, and as a result using MO makes it a lot more difficult to use those other tools unless MO explicitly supports them. I really don't feel like waiting around for one author to support another's work. MO might be great but I'm not going to give up ease of use of other tools just to isolate mods, especially when I don't change up my mods very often anyway and more especially when NMM does a pretty good job of keeping track of what files belong to which already. (I.e. functionally there is no difference on that between MO and NMM.)

Anyway, why the gently caress go to the trouble of replacing a DLL? Although I'm sure it will take them 10 releases to do it right, NMM's plan from 0.50 is superior to the way MO isolates mods. So why didn't MO just do that in the first place? The Windows functionality they are making use of has been around for 7-8 years now (since Windows Vista).

# ¿ Sep 21, 2013 17:25

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

Cerevisiae posted:

Does NMM keep a spare copy of overwritten files in case I want to change the order they were installed? The main reason I switched over to MO was because of how it handles loose file conflicts. I was having conflicting file issues when installing later mods that resulted in the game crashing because a mod was expecting it's version of a file to be there or things looking messed up because the wrong texture being overwritten. I also like being able to use MO to disable loose files from mods.

When you install a mod that overwrites a loose file from another mod, it will ask you to confirm the replacement, or to keep the existing files. Either way, it keeps the replaced (or ignored) files around in case you uninstall the mod that 'won' the file conflict, and then puts the other files back in.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2013 03:49

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

Raygereio posted:

If you simply don't like MO, then you do don't like it. [...] You just have to know how to do it.

This part is really annoying - being told that if I don't like to use MO it must be because I don't know how to use it, rather than I just prefer to use something else. I guess other people's opinions cause some kind of cognitive dissonance in the heads of most people posting in this thread, so I'll leave it alone.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2013 04:06

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

nessin posted:

Your whole spiel about how tools have to be configured to use Mod Organizer is completely false and shows a clear lack of understanding about how Mod Organizer actually works. Which is understandable because there isn't a lot of reason people should know about the underlying mechanics, but those who don't understand it usually don't go around trying to sound like they do. So, for your situation based around your post, it is exactly a situation of if you don't like it then don't use it.

Oh neat, I didn't realize I could create an app that did work on the Data directory, and it would just magically work the way I expect even if I'm an MO user. Thanks for the tip.

e: it's not working what's the deal

Inverness posted:

What tools don't work with MO exactly? Your statement makes me believe you don't realize that tools like TES5Edit, SkyProc ASIS, BOSS, etc. all work fine if you simply launch them from Mod Organizer in which case they will detect the final file structure that MO is presenting to Skyrim.

No, I get it. There isn't any false information and you didn't have to jump in, but thanks. Basically it's down to "if you simply launch them from Mod Organizer [and they are configured for you or you have configured them yourself]" which I prefer not to do and for some reason this is causing people's heads to explode. I don't know what the big deal is - sorry I don't use MO guys.

This is dumb and I'm not talking about it anymore.

Kilroy fucked around with this message at 09:02 on Sep 22, 2013

# ¿ Sep 22, 2013 08:56

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

Scyantific posted:

Aethernautics - A Space Travel Mod: Trainwiz is a pretty cool guy who makes pretty cool mods. This one is no exception (unless you count him being out of his mind while on painkillers while making it as one). It looks good, plays great, and is worth a look. Steam Workshop Link

All I see when I look at that beetle thing (on the title pic for the mod) is a pair of breasts.

Beautiful golden breasts.

# ¿ Sep 29, 2013 16:56

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

Gyshall posted:

loving finally, Morrowind style rechant over time:

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/42356//

I made something like this 18 months ago and nobody gave a poo poo :-(

# ¿ Oct 2, 2013 01:14

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

I never made it, I made Soulfire instead which is in the OP. But, the recharging script used in Soulfire can, with a few modifications, be used to do this. After I had finished the script I tried to start a discussion on the official forums (I may have mentioned it here too - not sure) about whether to do something like Soulfire or go with Morrowind style recharging. Needless to say said discussion never took place, the thread fell into the abyss, and I made Soulfire which mechanics I prefer anyway.

Then this dude goes and makes it and it becomes a featured mod wth :bang:

# ¿ Oct 2, 2013 01:37

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

Woolie Wool's post make me wish Skyrim was RL so I could find his character and beat him up a bit.

# ¿ Oct 9, 2013 13:40

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

Cardiovorax posted:

I don't think there's a way to make the engine support "half-filled" soul gems. There is the Soul Forge mod, though, which gives you a spell-accessible area where you can empty out soul gems and stuff the soul points into bigger gems at your leisure. It's neat, if ridiculously overpowered.

I think it would be doable one of a couple ways, and it's definitely not the first time I've heard the request. The important point for me would be finding a way to make sure the partially-filled gems don't empty out when the player drops them or places them in a container.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2013 13:17

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

Skyrim needs body replacers because there aren't any dickgirls, and that's heteronormative.

# ¿ Oct 22, 2013 08:45

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

I don't think micropenises are adequately represented in Skyrim, nor macroclitoratii.

# ¿ Oct 22, 2013 08:57

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

I wasn't too keen on any of the body replacers for Oblivion either. I don't think every NPC needs to have flawless abs and well-defined buttocks. Photorealistic genitals aren't a priority for me either, personally.

Oblivion faces were even worse than Morrowind unplugged though, making NPCs Revamped a must-have.

# ¿ Oct 22, 2013 09:10

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

If you're up for being a guinea pig Flora Respawn Fix 2.0 is up. Brings back the animations on TREE objects that previous versions removed, and doesn't need world or cell edits to do its work - which means it has a much smaller footprint and is compatible with most new lands mods. Just be aware it was created using a hacked version of TES5Edit, and we're not sure how Skyrim.exe is going to like having VMAD fields in TREE objects. Preliminary testing looks good though.

Nothing special is required to upgrade existing saves, although already-harvested stuff needs to be re-harvested before the animations come back. Just don't plan on reverting from 2.0 back to 1.x.

# ¿ Oct 23, 2013 16:33

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

What version of the unofficial patches?

# ¿ Oct 26, 2013 03:02

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

I thought maybe you had installed the beta patches but not gotten the load order right.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2013 03:12

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

Der Luftwaffle posted:

Are there any good house mods for a Dwemer tower? Kind of like the Reachwind Eyrie one. For the life of me I can't find anything decent on Nexus.

There was a mod that put one right outside Helgen... but you said 'good'. Unless realistic making GBS threads physics is important to you Levelers Tower is not 'good'.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2013 03:35

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

I think the last time I checked it out he had just released it, and it was terrible. I just checked it out again, and I gotta say the guy has certainly put a lot of effort into it. Shame he has such poor taste

# ¿ Oct 26, 2013 05:40

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

ARTHMOOOOOOOOOOOOOOR :argh:

# ¿ Oct 29, 2013 11:47

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

jkk posted:

Hmmm. I have Live Another Life, have started the main quest (have just visited the Greybeards), but I've never been to Helgen. I started in Windhelm as a Stormcloak (apparently) and eventually Ulfric sent me to Whiterun for Civil War stuff. I don't remember how exactly the main quest started from there, but it seemed clunky - I think I had the option of telling the Jarl or someone that I'd been "at Helgen".

The main quest and the civil war are tangled up enough that he basically said 'gently caress it' and skipped a few earlier portions of the main quest.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2013 12:51

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

SirDan3k posted:

Does the new unoffical patch fix any huge bugs because it seems like they have been chasing down just minor stuff for a while now.

Define "huge bug". There aren't a lot of them left.

You should get the most recent if for no other reason than to cut down on crashes.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2013 01:50

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

Berke Negri posted:

Yes, thank you, Winterhold needed a ton of ghosts walking around for reasons. It is "un lore ish" to have more people just loitering around what is a really unbelievable ruined city, but add a poo poo ton of ghosts? Why Not?

haha

It always starts with small stuff though - you could tell this was going to happen to that mod eventually. The next step is probably to start adding some quests and changing existing NPCs.

Are the older versions at least still available for download?

# ¿ Nov 3, 2013 09:31

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

SurreptitiousMuffin posted:

Speaking of feature creep, anybody know which mod adds this little guy? He keeps appearing and just hanging in the air, completely still. I'm running on a lovely computer, so almost all the mods I have installed are of the simple, 'remove shrubs to boost framerate' type. I have no idea why this drat parrot keeps showing up.

That's near Riverwood, right? And it looks like one of your mods removed the tree that should be there. That guy shows up in that tree, in the unplugged game. Something to do with the flock of birds that sometimes fly out of that tree. So, the answer to your question is that nothing added it. Something took away the tree that was hiding it before.

Are you getting much performance improvement out of removing trees from the game? I don't think you would.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2013 09:36

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

Mayheim posted:

I think something messed up my firstperson camera and now I feel like a dwarf in first person.

I've already tried this mod but it did not help:
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/32155/

Bonus pic, me sitting at Alvor's table:

Edit: I figured it out

Make sure you keep the solution to yourself. If there is a mod we should avoid or an easy fix should anyone run into the same issue, I for one would rather not know :colbert:

# ¿ Nov 6, 2013 01:46

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

LtSmash posted:

Most of this is actually bethesda chopping the game down to run on consoles.

Something they continued to do with each successive patch. Many of the bugs that showed up in the latest patch are thought to be there because of efforts to get it to work on PS3.

It'd be nice if they'd release a PC-only patch with all that poo poo cut out. Apparently 1.9 isn't compatible with Open Cities at all.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2013 02:26

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

Leelee posted:

Does anyone know of a blacksmithing mod that will either take out the "do you really want to make this?" part or let you select how many of an item you want to craft? It gets tedious when making arrows, housing materials, or just leveling blacksmithing.

Get Better MessageBox Controls.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2013 01:50

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

Blarfo posted:

So I know this is a common question but I can't find a singularly useful answer: mouse lag fixes. I've tried the antilag file to limit FPS/render ahead limit and it fixes the mouse lag but introduces a bunch of bizarre bugs where my animations freeze up and casting doesn't work right all the time (sparks fires nothing, then when I let go it shoots all the sparks out at once etc)

Is there an actual fix or is it just "deal with it"?

I keep forgetting this is why I never beat the game every time I go back to reinstall it.

For me it's always been enough to change bMouseAcceleration to 0 in SkyrimPrefs.ini

# ¿ Nov 10, 2013 05:00

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

graynull posted:

Does anyone know what causes loot/inventory lag in a new game? I seem to have gotten it twice in this new game in which I'm basically using the same mods as previous games. I don't have a ton of stuff in my inventory or anything, and the solution just seems to be to go back and load an earlier save. A quick script latency test (thanks convenient horses) doesn't seem to be too worrying, about 50-70 ms average.

SkyUI will wait a certain amount of time for a quest (SKI_SettingsManager) to send it any custom configuration overrides, each time you open a menu. If the VM is busy for some reason (i.e. other scripts), it will keep waiting until it times out. I think the timeout is one second but they may have bumped it up a bit to fix a different issue. If, once the menu opens, you notice none of your custom settings seem to have been applied (like, for example, the text is large even though you set it to small), then this is the issue.

As others have mentioned, it could also be that whatever container you're trying to open, including yourself, has a lot of items in it that you can't see.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2013 12:19

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

LtSmash posted:

While tracking down a particular thing automatically would be a ton of work reasonable error handling that was kind enough to report at least something before burning down would be nice. The script VM is already pretty much isolated from the actual engine, making it dump papyrus stacks on a crash couldn't be that hard. Wrapping the whole engine in an error reporter that gave some vague notion of what was going on would probably let the community come up with the list of what fuckups lead to each one. The fact skyrim doesn't even give you a message before choking when your load order had missing master files is just dumb.

The fact that that crashes the game in the first place, is dumb.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2013 12:20

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

They might be able to ditch Gamebryo and keep most of the code for parsing ESM/ESPs. I suppose it's probably all the tangled mess though.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2013 12:16

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 11:36

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

The "Creation Engine" is definitely derived from Gamebryo. Skyrim shares many bugs with Oblivion and Fallout like the NavMesh issue which was finally fixed in one of the Skyrim patches. It might be heavily modified, even enough to justify calling it something new, but that's where it comes from.

Anyway, I suspect the Skyrim codebase might even be a bit more manageable than Oblivion or Fallout's. They must have done some serious refactoring at some point to be able to add all the new poo poo. I doubt they ditch it for the next one - although maybe they'll reuse the stuff from TES:O instead

# ¿ Nov 14, 2013 13:12

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