Cool, thanks Guess I'll have to wait 'til after installation to dissect the patient and see what it's made of. Also, it's a relief to hear the scripting hasn't changed too drastically.

Don't tease me bro! Don't tease me!

It's hard enough to wait the god dang remaining 2 months to dive into modding Skyrim, without Developers like you talking about how incredible it is! :drool: :foodndrink: :tes:

Um...? The vanilla scripting language in Oblivion was ways more powerful than in Morrowind. Both do poorly compared to games like NWN. But compared to Morrowind (without MWSE) Oblivion (without OBSE) is miles ahead. You don't "require" OBSE any more than you required MWSE, quite on the contrary..

Strange. That's the opposite of what every experienced modder was saying at the time. And I can tell you that I never came across a mod that said "requires MWSE" for Morrowind, but there were many that said "requires OBSE" for Oblivion. And most of the discussions I read concerning scripting were always about how much more difficult it was compared to Morrowind. That was one reason I decided not to get into Oblivion scripting, especially considering I was so late getting into it. But that also meant that by that point I could take the word of those that had been modding for the year or so that it had been.

And we saw some rather entertainingly-titled Youtube videos as a result. For the record, McReary was asking for it.

Also, if you want to blow my socks off, tell me we can add new skills. I can tell you right away some of the first mods to be made will be ones that try to bring back hand to hand, mysticism, and acrobatics and soon after ones that try and expand upon the necromancy spells we get. If it's as easy as adding a new value and specifying a marker to denote actions that raise the skill then people will bow down and worship you in thanks.

It's quite the opposite. Mods that need MWSE to do something *might* require OBSE when ported to Oblivion. Mods that need OBSE will most certainly require MWSE / MWE.

My Oblivion Stealth Overhaul was one of the first mods that required OBSE, because vanilla Oblivion has no way of getting weapon length and armor type. The Morrowind port I made later was quite less elaborate despite requiring MWE's scripting functionaliy.



Again, that's very strange. Oblivion is much more tolerant when it comes to syntax, even allowing c-like constructs like:

set flag to Player.Getitemcount "myitem" > 0 || (Player.Getitemcount "somethingelse" > 0 && Player.Getav Intelligence >= 50)if flag	dosomethingendif

whereas Morrowind would require you to write

set flag to 0if ( ( Player->Getitemcount "myitem" ) > 0 )	set flag to 1elseif ( ( Player->Getitemcount "somethingelse" ) > 0 )	if ( ( Player->GetIntelligence ) >= 50 )		set flag to 1	endifendifif ( flag == 1 )	dosomethingendif

(And don't you dare remove the spaces around the brackets)

Of course you *could* still use the old Morrowind constructs in OB, even use -> for pointers; of course you could heed the old Morrowind syntax conventions, but why would you want to?

Believe me, I'm a declared and very dedicated Oblivion-hater. But when Oblivion did one thing better than Morrowind, then it was the scripting.

The main reason that there are more OBSE mods than MWE mods, and more complicated scripts in OB than in MW might be that Morrowind simply didn't need as much modding at stuff that required dedicated scripting to manipulate or emulate engine mechanics, because it did most things right in the first place.

Very good to hear some news on the new Construction Set, seeing as I have plans to jump right into that after doing a playthrough.
It might be the only thing that has me as excited as the actual retail release.

As far as OBSE vs MWSE, OBSE is far, far more prevalent than Morrowind's ever was. A lot of that has to do with the complexity of Oblivion mods though. Most Morrowind mods I've looked for are simple retextures or an addition here or there. Maybe a new house in Balmora; Have you ever looked up FCOM for Oblivion? Or some of the quest mods? A few of them are on parr with Bethesda's own work. And that requires quite a bit of access to the game in the form of scripting that wasn't originally implemented.

You know what would really blow our socks off right now? Information.

Will there be a Creation-Kit Wiki? Any chance we get access before the game is released?

Heck, even a (current) map of Skyrim would be great for planning our mods. (e.g. is there a town next to the coast / mountains / forest ? etc.)

What im curious about is water, oddly.

If i remember right, its been a while, in Oblivion CS , for lakes etc, you had to set the water height for each cell you want it in, then shape your land to get what you want.
Wondering how these flowing rivers are handled. Still the same way, or is there a new/better way for doing rivers and streams etc.

To be fair i cant remember properly how oblivion water was handled for stream etcs,so i might have it all wrong.

Listen to this man, he KNOWS what he's talking about. JOG's mod is pretty much a must have in OB (and the other games he mods actually). Couldnt imagine playing without specially as a stealth character.

A wiki before release sounds great. Give modders a chance to plan out their mods more extensively ready for a day one relz. Im actually more eager about info on the CS than the game itself. Pretty much given up on Beth giving me the gaming experience i want straight out of the box (figurative) since my first (and last) 5 hours or so into vanilla OB.

Morrowind has as much quest mods as Oblivion, if not more. Voice out playing not a small role here.

Quest mods usually don't require the kind of scripting that needs a script extender. My Thievery in the IC is quite script extensive as are Havish and Booty Island for Morrowind. None of the mods required script extenders (up to the point that I made my own trigonometry functions for the cannons in Booty island) but in general my Oblivion scripts are much slimmer, and better readable even after years.

An arcsin function for calculating movement angles can be emulated by simple math functions, for such things you don't need a script extender in a quest mod. (Unless that Script Extender is installed by all users anyway). Other than Morrowind, though, Oblivion allows a script extender to access certain object values, like weight or weapon damage. Most users have OBSE installed because some game-mechanics mods that are deemed essential require them, thus the quest-mod makers don't hesitate as much to use OBSE functions that could be emulated by more complicated scripts.

Also, MWSE was released very late, OBSE almost at day one, so the willingness for using mods that required a script extender was much higher for Oblivion than it was for Morrowind.

you know what blew my socks off? seeing JOG!

Oblivion simply had still water AFAIR no flow direction at all. But according to the footage we've seen so far, Skyrim water seems to work more like it does in NWN2 (where you can set flow direction and speed). I'm curious about the waterfalls, will they be ingame objects? Will they merge seemlessly with the water-plane, or will we need to cover the seam with rocks and greenery?

Hello,


Releasing the 3dsmax model exporter would be very kind.

I'll buy some extra socks while I'm out purchasing the game.

Best regards,
RX31

One thing we really really really need is being able to have voice-less dialogue without it skipping to the next line in <2 seconds. Because generating silent voice files just to make sure people can read the dialogue was damn annoying, until that Universal Silent Voice OBSE mod was released and solved that.


Waterfalls and such were animated statics. Also when you had normal water somewhere, and then a waterfall followed by normal water at a lower level, the border between that high water and the lower water was exactly where a cell ended. A nice workaround since there can only be 1 water height per cell.

I am pretty curious about those rivers too though. Maybe it's still like the Oblivion system, but there's an option for changing the water current per cell? I wonder if those white water rapids are also some kind of water or just animated statics that don't do anything if you walk through them... Could be normal water underneath.

Not much of a modder, yet, what without a PC.
Though one thing I've always wanted, is for the ability to create new weapon types with animations.

You don't have that worry any more with the new system. And, in general, less wonkyness in terms of the syntax. It's much more consistent and when you get something wrong the compiler will complain loud and long.



I'd love to give some more info - at least in terms of the scripting system - but until more info has been disclosed by someone not me there is very little I can say.

I can say, however, that I've put a lot of time into the internal wiki's scripting-related pages for our designers, so if that gets made public like what was done for Fallout and Obllivion (after a clean-up pass) then you'll get to benefit from it.

If not, then I guess I'll have to track down whatever wiki you guys set up and get to writing

All of this makes me want to get back into modding :swear:

Maybe I'll finally get back into the programming (and modelling!) groove. No idea why I'm studying this Computing Science degree right now

*looks for the mod ideas thread*

I'll bet Skyrim has inherited http://geck.gamesas.com/index.php/PlaceableWater records from the Fallouts. That is pretty tricky though, how they pulled it off in Oblivion with the cell border work-around.

*also hoping for FLST, NAVM, IMAD, "Constant" flags for GLOBs, and ONAM lists for ESM headers*

99.999% certain this isn't going to happen . Bethesda's exporters will be pretty tightly integrated with Havok Physics, Havok Behaviour, and probably a few other pieces of proprietary middleware (like that needed for lip-syncing the head bones to voice files) which Bethesda won't have the rights to hand out. And even if they were to go to the trouble of stripping all of that out, rendering the exporters nearly useless, the NIF file format itself is proprietary - so it'd probably be illegal for them to release even a stripped down exporter :shrug:.

I'm jealous of people like you. In Morrowind I reached a fairly high level of proficiency with everything that could be done *inside* the editor, but not the other *outside* stuff, like creating new meshes and from-scratch textures. You guys made the game so much better on so many levels. I wish I had that kind of talent (and of course the necessary software).

EDIT: And our of curiosity, why is it called the construction "kit" now instead of construction "set"? For some reason I like TESCS more than TESCK. That and I thought people were making really bizarre Calvin Klein references until I figured out what they meant.

@SmkViper: As a modder who has spent the past two and a half years crafting Alton, IL, for Fallout 3 (a big mass of land), I'm very interested in the LOD functions in the GECK. Can you confirm or deny whether or not the handling of generating LOD has been improved? I've literally spent probably a month trying to figure it out, and I've only within the past few weeks gotten it fully working. For us large-world modders, LOD is essential.

I'm not sure if you'd know much about that, but there's got to be something about it on the internal wiki.

I hope nifskope will be updated to work with the new nif version, if so importing models should be an easy task. Hopefully there will be a 3ds max netimmerse exporter update too!! Make things even easier!! So many things I want in my skyrim game, so little time...

Yeah I cant wait to play with the new graphical updates too xD

Faster saving !!! My mod takes atleast 4 minutes to save, thats just annoying when you have to save because of the crashes

You think 4 is bad? Mine takes roughly 7 to 8 minutes to save.