» Thu May 17, 2012 11:51 pm by Quarn and Kivan
I spent over two years working on the Unofficial Oblivion Patch (UOP), Unofficial Shivering Isles Patch (USIP) and Unofficial Official Mods Patch (UOMP), to the detriment of much else. They were a contributing factor to the loss of my spouse*, career, house, vehicle and possibly some sanity...
... and I can't wait to get back on it.
*It's all good; she came back, and I'm much happier with just her without the rest of it... including the sanity... hah.
I've confirmed Quarn's onboard, so let this be the official notice of the unofficial: that we'll be producing Unofficial Patches for Skyrim and its expansion(s) and/or DLC... just like old times! (Happy Birthday UOP whose five-year anniversary was this July 5th.) I know it's months off and all, but just gotta get the word out there, given how much I'm looking forward to this. (Also it's great to be back here!) I'll try to commit at least two years to the project, and won't do any other mods during it so won't get (too) distracted. I think it will go much more smoothly, given the experience we've had with Oblivion.
As with Oblivion, as we don't want to take the place of or conflict with the official patches, we'll probably release the first USP after the first official patch comes out. Before that, we'll certainly be collecting bugs as they are found. Of course, we'll offer all of the installation options: self-installer, manual installer and whatever variant of mod manager archive (ie OBMM, BAIN) are ported over for Skyrim mods. I'd also like to start up a proper online bug-tracker to manage submissions and solutions, which is something I'll be looking at in the coming months.
(Unfortunately, we can still only fix the PC version, of course. Perhaps if and when third-party mods come to console platforms this will change.)
The other reason for starting this thread: even though Skyrim is months away and hasn't even gone alpha yet, we do know, from Bethesda announcements, some of what we'll find in it. As the technologies, file formats and other game mechanics and features become known, we can keep a running list of things to watch out for when the big Six Ones arrives. (I'm very fortunate to live in Canada where November 11th is already the Remembrance Day statutory holiday, so I already have a paid Skyrim day off then, if I can get it in time!)
So, here are a few things that are confirmed will be in Skyrim, and the possible bugs that we'll be looking for based on them:
Havok - Havok Physics once more will be used, which was the case in Oblivion. Havok Behavior will also be used, which was not. (Havok Behavior is a character physics and animation system.) I'll be checking for:
- Items that fall through the floor/ground when dropped (especially pointy objects)
- Fallthrough floors and jumpthrough walls
- Small items missing their Havok mesh or using the incorrect type so don't behave normally (paintbrushes, anyone?)
- Collision repulsion causing objects to float off the surface they should be sitting flush with, or to move or even fly off in the case of small objects when the player approaches
- Overcomplex meshes causing FPS drop when near (Havok is a CPU-only technology)
NIF - NIF meshes are also confirmed to have returned. While not a perfect format, their presence is actually amazingly good news because we have a complete set of community-developed apps. and utilities to work with them that took years to get to their current level of sophistication. So we can expect to see Bethesda-quality creature, armor and clothing mods (and bugfixes!
) shortly after Skyrim's release. Given that I can imply the same or similar NIF exporters will be used by the developers, I will be looking for and am expecting to see:- Seethrough gaps and flickery duplicate-in-place facets in meshes esp. architecture
- UV mapping errors on curved objects
- Possibly, overlapping alpha issues ie disappearance, depending on how the engine was rewritten to cope with this (this was already noticed in one of the promo screenshots although I don't doubt that it's still being worked on)
- Weighting errors on clothing and armor (although fewer due to the confirmed merging of cuirass and greaves)
- Armor or clothes with swapped or missing ground/world mesh (disappears when dropped or hovers and can't be picked up)
- Meshes benefitting from optimization (unwelded vertices, strips vs. shapes, excessive alpha.)
Real-Time Dialog - Unlike Oblivion where conversation was "modal" in that nothing else happened in the gameworld while the player was talking to an NPC, in Skyrim the gameworld will continue on, and even the NPC in conversation will continue to do other things. If there aren't proper safeguards taken, this could cause a lot of problems, such as broken quests. What happens when a random beastie decides to munch on the all-important questgiver just before the handover of the all-important quest item? Sure he might be "essential" and all, but if his dialog is interrupted, this might cause variables to be set wrong, items to not be handed over or taken, quest logs to not update... chaos.
Minimal Attributes - Only three attributes will remain for Skyrim: Health, Stamina and Magic. With only three numbers to watch, anything that fails to update them correctly is going to get spotted pronto.
Books! - Three hundred of them at least. This means that most, if not all, of the Oblivion books will get carried over, and many of those were already carried over from Morrowind, with their typos and other errors intact. I expect them to be carried over similarly again.
Mountainous terrain - If tree placement (dropping in place) in the Creation Kit is anything like with Oblivion's Construction Set, I'll expect to see plenty of floaty trees with their trunks out of the ground (drop is stopped when the horizontal branch touches the hillside) or branches "waving" through solid rock, on steep hillsides. Another complete cell audit may be in order, certainly when the higher-priority stuff has been dealt with. The gameworld will be handcrafted, though, so I doubt there will be as many errors.
Radiant Story - This is an update and expansion of "Radiant AI" as it was called in Oblivion. I don't worry about it half as much as one might expect. Why? Because I'm sure it will get severely scaled down by release time, as Radiant AI was.When Oblivion was first demo'ed, Radiant AI had a similar degree of control over the gameworld. By the time it hit the shelves, Radiant was practically gone. Why? It broke quests and caused chaos in the gameworld. Elder Scrolls RPG's are story-driven, not randomly generated, and overshadowing all else, the Main Quest must absolutely work. Given the number of leftover bugs it's difficult enough to get all of the quests working smoothly together, without some random AI element additionally breaking them.
Of course, these are things over and above the usual quest, item, dialog and other errors that would be present regardless of any of the technologies used in Skyrim that we'll also be looking for.
Curse my na?ve optimism, but I really do think that Skyrim will give us much less work to do than Oblivion did. Bethesda Softworks has a far larger team working on it--more eyes catch more mistakes--and has the benefit of experience from Oblivion. So let's hope for the best.
Discuss!
!
USP will undoubtedly be a staple of any modded load order. Thanks for your work on UOP, and good to hear Quarn is back! 
