Hey guys, I'm new to the TES series and I've been loving the game so far.
I've tried searching here and googling about the creation kit, but most of the info was pretty general.

My question is, how powerful is this Creation Kit that everyone's talking about?
Some extreme examples that show the extent of what this thing can do?

Thanks

It can create and destroy worlds.

and http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Main_Page

also isn't there already a few threads about it?

You want an example of what the CK can do? Play Skyrim. The game was developed using the CK. This is how all Edlerscrolls Games have been done since Morrowind. The Creation Kit is the same set of tools the developers use to make the game.

What Baratan said, but if you want some idea of what it's capable of in the hands of modders, just spend a day browsing the categories over at TES Nexus.

It's probably more correct to say though that the devs used an unrestricted version of the CS/CK. They don't give us one that's on a 100% equal footing with their own.

Do you have anything to back that up? I do not know of any "restrictions" or differences in the CS when used by modders.

What is done by the developers in Morrowind that can't be done by modders? How about Fallout 3? How about Fallout New Vegas? How about Oblivion?

The closest thing to truth in that statement would be in the period of time where modders didn't have the latest CS version available to use a few, specific scripting commands, but it was released a little later than the DLC that introduced them.

From what I've read on Nexus, Mr Hines has Tweeted something about PC users having to wait a little longer to make the characters naked, (even though we already have) so I guess that means we are not about to find out in any hurry. And that's a great pity as I want to make some faces in the CK, as the presets just don;t do it for me, and the Chargen is too simplified - added scars and warpaint (which don't much interest me) at the expense of being able to amend your character's nose shape in any detail (which does).

I'd bet they are wagering over at Bethesda about what mods will be made without the CK! How long it takes to make nvde body etc.

For example, the new version of CS for Oblivion, which incorporated functions needed for Shivering Isles, broke the LIP sync functionality. As you can experience LIP sync in Shivering Isles with the newly added NPCs/dialougue, I very much doubt that the public version of CS is exactly the same as the developers' version.

Also, 3rd party software integration had to be cut out, if there had been some (I would say yes).

If they don't implement an industry-standard scripting language like Python or LUA, I will be sorely disappointed and it won't be nearly as powerful as I would have liked.

And then we will probably need to wait many months for Skyrim Script Extender to allow us to do things that should be standard in any modern high-level language.

The only differences really are.....

No third party tool plugins (Modelling and texture tools as example). Most of these are licensed for only Bethesda to use and they can't distribute them. So they are removed.

No ability to affect hard coded stuff directly. All we can do is use scripts to override to a degree.

There may be more, but they're slight differences. The CK is essentially still the same tool they used,

That's not entirely accurate. It's the same tools that they used to make the world and all of the other content for the game, but the devs have also created the underlying engine and language that are accessed via TESCS. This is why we needed to create MWSE/OBSE/FOSE to give us the ability to do things which weren't included in the corresponding TESCS versions, but were, in many cases, simpler than things the devs had already done at a deeper level. My "Arrows of Channeling" mod (which dynamically changes the enchantment on your arrows to match your readied spell), for example, would have been completely impossible to create using only TES4CS as released, but gamesas could have easily created something similar using code at another level (or by adding the necessary commands to the CS).

That said, past TESCS releases have included enough functionality to extend existing systems pretty far and to create new systems which didn't diverge too much from gamesas's design - and when we wanted to do more than that, MWSE/OBSE/FOSE consistently delivered whatever was needed to make it possible.

Nothing handy, I don't collect screenshots of when the devs says stuff like this, or when they post screenshots of this stuff on their own somewhere. I've seen at least one of the Oblivion CS that had a window sitting over the render view where the guy was manipulating a NIF file directly within the CS itself. We clearly do not have that, and unlikely to unless it's forthcoming with the Skyrim CK.

There's also the already mentioned issue with the lip sync function being removed with the second Oblivion CS release. Some sort of licensing dispute. We also don't have the CS integration with Speedtree that the devs have. This may change with the CK since it's their own tree code this time.

We can't add magic effects, nor can we do anything with skills beyond the very basics, and I think it's safe to say the devs can do that too.

If you've looked at more than a few dungeons in Oblivion, it should be obvious as hell that there was also some form of procedural generation for those. Odds are, their CS has those routines. Ours does not. We're probably lucky we got the landscape region generation.

What's with people who do this anyway? NOBODY has any trust around here or what? If we have to always live up to some ridiculous standard of evidence then nothing would ever get accomplished. The whole "pics or it didn't happen" thing is somewhat offensive to some of us. I know I've personally got better things to do with my time than scour Google for these this stuff when it's pretty well known already.

DragoonWraith has posted that he has evidence it was not the exact same CS.

He wrote a lot for the wiki - I'd take his word on it.

As long as we get what we had in Oblivion I think most people will be pretty satisfied. Heightmap editor and Region editor are a must, or end of modding for some of the bigger projects such as my Mesogea, Merp and so forth as we have to be able to put large maps and region edit them (imagine placing every tree, rock and plant in Mesogea or Middle Earth, impossible). We shall soon see I suppose. Just keep everything crossed.

I will be disappointed if I find out that Bethesda hasn't made the leap to using Lua in place of their limited and convoluted proprietary language.

For me these are really the most important matters, without it say bye to large worlds and other provinces, but by the look of it we do not even have the CK to start with and hoping I'm wrong we won't it have so soon.

CK is unrestricted, however some plugins are not released as they are 3rd party products.
However the Bethesda designer has one benefit, they can modify the source code on the game.
Example hair in oblivion was only parented to head if you made long hair it would not hang down you back but stand out if you looked down. This issue was never solved by moders except by using a wig based on hood behavior.
It would have been trivial to modify oblivion.exe so hair behaved like hoods they might had to handle short and long hair different.

Well if we were to have the same tool as they have, they wouldn't need some weeks to package it. It would be in the DVD of the game already. It is obvious that we don't get the same exact tool.

That's an awful lot of assumption.

As long as we get a similar tool ... and soonish, please ...

It is what I call plain logic. If it is the same, they don't need time to prepare it for release.

Every CS since Morrowind has had differences. Bethesda has freely admitted this. These differences are only in places where licensing restrictions would make it illegal for them to distribute it unchanged. For Oblivion, that meant NIF-manipulation (within the CS!) and the SpeedTree tools (though apparently those are free now? They weren't in 2006). I don't know precisely what will be stripped from the Skyrim CS, but I'm sure things will be.

Oh good, I'm glad to know that Mr. Hines continues to freely and publicly insult the modding community. It's been too long since the hackers comment.


Actually, these are things that they hard-coded into Oblivion. They never used the CS for those things. The xxSE team can back this up if anyone feels the need to have it backed up, since they've looked into extending those things and found it hard-coded all over the place (and JRoush and kyoma can really back it up, since they actually took the time to hook all that hard-coding and allow those things to be extended).

Nothing that Arthmoor doesn't have — just the word of the developers and common sense. Seriously, guys, this is not some deep, dark secret; it's something Bethesda developers have freely admitted from Day 1.

Guys, there's already details on this in the SKSE thread: no, it's not LUA, yes, it's a far more powerful, albeit still proprietary, language. It's object-oriented (with inheritance; no word on polymorphism but seeing how frequently Bethesda uses that in their C++ code I wouldn't be surprised) and has native support for arrays and strings, and probably for loops... which covers most of the things that are "standard" in "any" modern high-level language. And SKSE is already moving forward rapidly.

I mean, you are sort of correct (the things not being released are third-party and there has never been any evidence that they have prevented modders from using any tool that they could legally distribute), but the term "plugin" is misleading. That implies a certain amount of modularity that probably doesn't exist: they probably built the tool into the CS, hence the time necessary to take it out again. It wouldn't really make sense for them to spend development time designing, coding, and testing a modular plugin scheme. Though it would be a really cool thing for modders to have; imagine if we could write plugins for the CS? That would be cool.

Too late, someone already did it.

Yes yes yes oh god yes thank you yes. I will spend the next 15 years modding this game now. This is all I ever wanted from the script extender and more.

I just hope the CK hurries up. Cant wait.