I wish I was more experienced with all this... looking at all the options of these tools is so intimidating thank you everyone who's supporting and working on this project. I love this community <3

Going to bump this because I'm [censored].

Just a tip, you probably shouldn't put your Soul Gems on display. A common bug is that dropping a gem causes it to lose its contained soul (I guess it falls out on impact?) This would be a good mod though.

I guess I'm lucky i haven't encountered this before. The only thing like it that has happened is once when I put my smithing armor away in its drawer it lost its enchantments. Also a weapon lost its upgrades and enchantments when I put it in a weapon rack, but it was only visual. Once I changed zones the item was back to normal. I can't say the same for my smithing armor. So if its going to happen its going to happen, Not much I can do about it. At least if it happens to a soul gem I can just use the console to replace it.

The mod Isn't only about having pretty shinys to display. If a soul gem is out in the world I have no way of telling if it has a soul in it until I pick it up(other then the cost but I already have enough things to remember) this way I can decided if i want it or not before hand. Instead of looking at it then throwing it away if i don't. Especially if I'm stealing it and have to actually put effort into hiding.

Moving our discussion back here from another thread.


You are correct about the second set of nifs.

Changing the glowmaps from super neon bright to black has no visual effect in game. Some but not all of the glow is coming from the cubemaps. I have also discovered that the emissive and specular settings in nifscope have very little visual effect. Here is my current version, done almost all with the cubemaps:

http://i.imgur.com/wz1uM.png - here you can see that the glow isn't coming all the way out of the dimmer versions. Also both black gems are dull, because I haven't decided what to try and make glowing black gems look like.

http://i.imgur.com/pOg5t.jpg and neatly laid out for comparison. Those are black ones after the grands. There is some untouched clutter around for comparison.

http://i.imgur.com/e3Yi1.png - it is now becoming difficult to tell empty/full apart. I could give them separate base textures, but it would remove all compatibility with texture replacers. If I make the full gems much brighter than they are now, they appear as nearly solid white. You can also see Azura's star, which I have not touched at all yet except copying it's SLGM entry into my mod (it is basically a dirty reference for now).

Note the "JO" which is actually "Azura's star". Editing the SLGM entries makes their names into stuff like that. I hand-renamed the normal gems, but it means this mod will turn all gems English.

http://i.imgur.com/MTMRe.png - this is what they might look like on display. Not great. But if I dim them, they go back to being indistinguishable in a dungeon.

It could be my monitor color calibration, but I think the "normal lighting for buildings" image looks pretty good. I'd have to see it in game though to be sure. In bright lighting you would probably want the gems to be indistinguishable, if you're going for more of a soft glow than a light bulb.

*edit - I think what's wrong with the dimmer images is that the glowing gems don't actually emit any light. That could be fixed via script possibly by attaching a script to soul gems that spawned a light when they're dropped into the gameworld. The light could then have its own script that updated its position to match the soul gem's location, and delete itself if the gem is picked up. It's not something I'd really want to tackle until the CK is out though - based on my past experience with Fallout scripting it'd be really tough to come up with a way for the light's script to figure out which soul gem its supposed to be monitoring. Hopefully the new object oriented scripting language offers a bit more flexibility (like giving scripts access to object script variables, not just quest script variables.)

Since making them into lightbulbs turned out to be ugly when I did it, I think I will go with that soft glow idea. Now if I can just get them so a full petty gem is brighter than an empty grand one....

edit: to be clear I said that before the edit above. By "making them into lightbulbs" I mean a stronger glow. I have not attached lights to them in any way.

That doesn't completely solve the problem though. When finding soul gems out in the world you still wont be able to tell if its full before you pick it up, unless you have empty gems next to them to compare it to. Since there's no change visually other than a slightly softer color. It would probably be easier to memorize the values than trying to remember a color hue. I know I'm not contributing in any positive way and I apologize, I really wish I could but I currently don't have the time to correct my ignorance.

Adding an actual light would really help I think, since much of the time you'll be seeing soul gems in dimly lit dungeons and buildings. Not enough to illuminate a room, just enough to make a soft glow in about a foot or so radius of the gem. I'll see how feasible it is once the CK comes out.

I can't wait for that stupid thing... They should have worked on it earlier...

I'm back again >.>; With a bump :3

There is a fatal bug. I keep getting fake full soul gems now. They don't stack with the full or empty ones. They say they are full, but they have the mesh and value of an empty one and when I drop them, they become empty. This seems to happen to new gems filled since activating the mod, whereas my old full/empty ones are just fine.

I thought it was because I switched versions of the mod without cleaning my save. But then I went back and tried an older save, switching from just my first version to no mod at all, and it was still broken.

I kind of have no idea what to do about that. I can wait for the CK and hope that remaking the .esp part of this fixes it, I guess. Hopefully Imp's scripty version turns out to get around this issue.

Other people have reported a bug in vanilla Skyrim where soul gems empty on dropping and picking them up. I am wondering if it is the same bug. I never had it before, though.

I found out recently that there's a difference between soul gems you create and soul gems you find. The ones you find in the world are most likely the "filled" soul gems you see in the editor. But the ones you create are new items (similar to the way that enchanted weapons and armor are new items) that are probably based on the empty soul gems. There was a http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1328598-relz-acquisitive-soul-gems/page__hl__soul+gem__fromsearch__1 though with a script that would go through your inventory and replace any player created soul gems with editor created ones (so long as the soul matched the capacity.) Looks like it accomplishes it by editing the empty soul gems, but the end result is the same. I think that mod would mostly solve your problem, though not for soul gems filled with souls smaller than their capacity.

*Edit - Also, if the soul trap effect is a script effect, then it should be possible to edit the script to make it base player created soul gems on the filled soul gems rather than the empty ones, which would solve the problem a bit more directly.

That's good news. I will try that out and see if it helps any.

thanks for the update guys you are my heros <3

http://skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=5666 - only tested by me, on my computer, with my modlist. So hopefully it, y'know, works and stuff.

Soul gems themselves are bugged and it's really obvious when only non-bugged ones glow. So Acquisitive Soul Gems is recommended and Smart Souls may help as well (haven't tried it). Without Acquisitive Soul Gems, player-filled gems will not glow.

If you're going to make an actual glow map you need to make a file with a _g.dds in the title, like soulgem_g.dds
then you need to point the nif at the _g.dds and also change the emissive color of the mesh.

Correct, though that quote from me was taken slightly out of context - the question I was trying to answer was whether a script would be needed to get filled soul gems to look different from empty ones. I guess the answer ended up being "sort of."

Yea, LOL, I was just trying to find a post from that particular part of the thread to respond to touched on glow maps.
Looks like I picked the wrong one, there was one mentioning dds files more directly that I meant to respond too :/

The curve ball ended up being that all soul gems already glow slightly in the vanilla game, so the soul gem meshes already have glow maps attached. KSG had to edit the empty soul gem glow maps (and environment map cube maps) to make them less glowy. Once the CK is out I'm also going to see if there's a way to attach an actual light to the full ones, so that they illuminate their surroundings a bit.