I get irked about this too, but somewhere along the way I realized that many of the modders who were prone to just adding a chest to a main city to get their goods into the game have absolutely no interest in Construction Set/Kit work. You see, they are visual artists who have spent a crazy amount of hours modeling and texturing, often from near-scratch, because that is what they love and are passionate about doing, and we are quite frankly very lucky when they choose our games as their avenue of release and give us plugins at all.

So if you don't like where they put their chests and barrels, in under an hour you can learn enough modding how-to to move those containers to the inside of a dungeon or into a player house or a hard-to-find spot in the wilderness. It's also quite easy to have an existing vendor sell them. You can also learn how to drop tough baddies around the container to make them "earned". Or you can dress a bad guy up in the items. I recall for Oblivion someone made "Not For Free" versions of many clothing/armor mods with replacement plugins that would set the items up to be acquired in ways such as these. Or, if you've done Construction Set work before, you can offer these artists your time and willingness to design a mini-quest to acquire the items. I am sure many of them would be grateful for the help, so they can get back to doing what they love and do best, which is not making plugins.

So you see, you have a lot of options besides complaining and criticizing. Get to work!

LOL theres even a Preacher like in Megaton... But instead of a A-Bomb its a statue

I plan on using Solitude for my base of operations. That place is awesome. Plus I always have a world space for testing things that I don't want in the main game world. My test worlds are always fun. =)

That's not unusual unless you're talking about the 4 other major cities not having complete sets of shops or something. Smaller towns and villages aren't expected to have full services.

Seyda Neen was just as bad, if not worse, especially for the crate/chest of weapons/armor/jewelery/god items/etc.

Really, Balmora Syndrome was more that everybody put their new shop/house/whatever building in the one or two available spots you could find in and around Balmora. This made conflicts a big time problem, because the changes of each mod were all interacting with one another (landscape conflicts were the worst) and making a huge mess. Conflict lists for mods making changes in and around Balmora were always long.

That's one reason for Spencer Homes I made most of my houses further away from most cities, and sometimes out in the wilds. But you can't win. I got complaints that the houses were too far away from the cities. Oh well. /sigh

Solitude is where its at for me. Whiterun was nice for a little while but I think that if I end up adding houses or anything of that nature, Solitude will be where I go. Or Markarth now that I think of it. But I agree, I think that Whiterun will sadly suffer from the Balmora Syndrome, lets just hope that ppl are more creative this time around :/

Then I download an item mod I usually want to test it at once and remove mod if i didn't like it. If the item is a quest reward or placed in a hard dungeon then the dungeon/ quest is the main purpose.
Personally I prefer adding the item to traders, this way it don't conflict with other using the container, can give the item an realistic price and be sure you can get more of the item so you can safely enchant it.

Adding the item via script it's where it's at, man

You don't even need to make them go to a certain place to get it. Just bam, item added. Easier that way and no conflicts. idea for the "gief me armor!" people. Of course your risk overencumbrance.

This is actually how I learned to use the CS. A modder named EntWentMoot created a Witch King Sword for Morrowind and leaned it against the wall in Arrille's Tradehouse. I said I loved the sword but I thought a Daedric Ruin might be a better place to put it. But, as Khettienna said, EntWentMoot was an artist. He really had no interest in where the sword went.

Someone in that thread told me how to move it. It was my first time modding a game and I was ecstatic when it worked. I spent the next few weeks totally destroying my game over and over again by fiddling with everything in the CS I could get my hands on. But nine years later I'm still here, still learning. And it's all the fault of that sword.

I plan on making a housing mod - a cave outside of Riverwood. I planned on having it out of the way anyway, mostly because I like the idea of my character being a hermit. Figure, once I get a decent grip on how to mod more than the basic "create new cell" stuff, I'll make it so you can get upgrades for it (Alchemy Station, Forge, Enchanter, etc.), so that it can be configured exactly how you want it.

... Wow, that was a tangent. Anyway, I'm gonna try to avoid Balmora/Imperial City/Whiterun Syndrome.

This is what I thought after the first several hours of quests without yet visiting another major city. However.

I like Balmora Syndrome. Especially for literal Balmora. Getting around was painful in that game. What fast travel we had turned out to more likely than not contribute to save game corruption and crashing. I certainly have a more stable game when I walk everywhere. Having people dump their stuff in one or two places where I'm actually likely to be any time soon was helpful.

It doesn't actually take more effort to put your vendor in the tower in Tel Branora than in Ariel's, so I don't get how it's lazy. The only difference is, I'll forget about your mod before I ever go to Tel Branora. If you're adding some single item/set/functionality, is it really worth me walking literally half the length of the world to get to? But you can count on me to be in Balmora at some point. Even if I'm done with chargen, Seyda Neen is at least within two minutes of Ebonheart and Vivec.

Fast travel will help with that a lot in Skyrim. (In an established game, when I can easily get to all the cities.) But if I add several mods at once (especially before a new game, which I prefer), I can either take notes --actual physical notes to refer to while trying to play a game -- or play all the ones in Whiterun and get around to the rest when I find them.

And do I really need a whole extra shop, complete with potential land conflicts/clipping with other mods, just to get a set of pretty armor? Or a potion of forgetting spells, or an infinite time torch? Would the fact that it took longer to mod somehow add value, when I see it during the extra minute it now takes to get to the thing I actually installed the mod for?


Basically, released mods are made for players and not for art critics.

I almost never download new weapon/armor/apparel/ mods, unless they're part of an overhaul which usually integrates them into the leveled lists properly anyway. Free armor everywhere is not exactly balanced, and it doesn't make a lot of sense either.

If you really feel the need to stick your modded stuff in a crate in Whiterun, at least try and take a similar approach to the http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=22414 from Oblivion -- there was an inventory item (automatically added to the Cobl options menu for bonus good design) that would let you remove the crate from the gameworld once you had what you needed.

Admittedly, this probably won't be an option until Skyrim Script Extender, but I'm sure something similar can be worked out.

needs no Script Extender... simple menu pop up when you leave menu mode after activating the chest and then open a menu asking if the chest should be disabled (actual command)... all basic script commands

If there is a modeller who develops shiny new weapons and armor, but don't want to design a quest to hand it out, they could provide it as a resource for another modder to better integrate the items into the game. If nothing else, many of these could be gathered up into a nice community shop mod.

no way lol... sorry

reasons:

personal experience
a ) stolen assets put into mods without permission or even credits and me getting hatemail after complaining about it
b ) my quality being in one mod with stuff that is totally different quality wise wether better or worse breaking up the entity of the mod, a vanilla looking sword doesnt fit next to one using phototextures, high detail textures or low quality textures
c ) my assets which i gave permission to use were then wildly distributed which ended up in me hunting down my stuff and having it removed from dozens of pages of which i didnt approve of for a multitude of reasons like being a commercial superfish like fileplanet which makes money off my work and i dont see even a thanks

no thanks i rather create a nice background story which i usually do anyway in my head yet whilst i spend a bunch of hours designing and creating an item and then use what i can do in the CS and co to put it in game, and with my current abilities it takes about 20mins to put whatever i add into levelled lists, test it, pack it and release it, maybe another 5mins to create an optional mod that simpy adds the item to the player... i take longer to make the screenshots XD

@forgetting about a mod
thats the whole point, i dont want my mods to feel like mods, thy shall be part of the game, giving the user a fuzzy feeling about having explored somin new, extending the experience without bashing you on the head with it (well ok that housemod i made for FONV kinda could have a guy falling on your head from outer space so... yeah that could hurt lol)

But will it turn in the Inventory?

I suggested someone could willingly offer something up as a resource. I didn't advocate stealing resources without permission. Please don't put words in my mouth.

I think he said that he authorized them for one mod and then found them in others which weren't authorized.

There are some good suggestions mentioned in this thread about alternative methods concerning items in particular.

But...and just look at all of that relatively flat prime real estate on the plains just west of Whiterun...that is destined to become a popular place to build...is my guess.
But it seems there could be [potential] problems that would have to be overcome; is it my imagination or do the Giants move their fires around in that area? Just thinking out loud and wondering.....

what do you mean?

if the item turns up in the players inventory?
yes thats the idea of the optional "for impatient lazy" people mod...

i simply add the line:

player.additem mynewshinythingy 1

to the quest script that already distributes the item on levelled lists througout the game and am done...

did that throughout fallout new vegas and it worked quite well, much less questions on how to get the items (ya i usually tell how to get em in my readme, not that anyone would care reading em anyway, im guilty of that myself tbh lol)

if you meant if the items will be turnable/spinnable in your inventory like the items in skyrim, i dont see why they shoulndt but i cant say anything specific until i see the model and cs setup, i doubt that it needs an extra model tho, looks like the normal low poly ingame stuff to me... that new inventory feature should be sweet for screenshots tho, especially as it shows the ingame shaders and not some fancy stuff i magicly render in 3dmax

lol... dude...sorry if that felt offensive for whatever reason but please get used to conversation... i did not put anything in your mouth i just told you what my experience with shared assets was and why i wont do it

let me clarify again:

1. quality
the quality of all the different assets used in a merged mod usually varies heavily, from totally ugly first timer modes and textures up to high end pro stuff, this inconsitency imo takes its toll on all assets used in such a mod and doesnt allow it to shine as bright as it could

2. control
your assets might end up in unwanted places like in my case fileplanet which used it commercially, but they might also turn up in mods you simply dont like like that one dude who wanted to retexture some of my models with nazi insignias... had i released as open source there would be models with swastikas floating around the net that i made... horrible thought...

3. credit
merged mods dont give credit enough, often only to some of the asset contributors and if they do the list is simply too long for anyone to look through it, youll praise the person who uploads it but not those people who put actual work into the mod (one might argue if thats just to polish the modders ego but some need the attention also to get for example a job)

hence i rather get requests for permission, can take a look at what they intend to do, and then decide on a case to case base, often depending on my mood too lol

........damn now I have to come up with a new strategy to release new armor lol...

That was not the majority of mods. Most didn't add the stuff at all, you had to do it yourself. And many others added it to vendors, although unfortunately a large number of these added them to the same vendor so now there was only one vendor worth visiting. I enjoyed most the ones that spread stuff out over various different vendors.

But there were also quite a few "place it yourself" equipment packs, many of which were considered and/or designed to be modder's resource packs. Which brings me to the next quote:


That's not a modder's resource though. Lots of people *do* release their stuff to be used in anyone's mod as long as proper credit is given. What you are describing is making your own mods, not giving resources for someone else to make a mod.

However, if stealing your stuff is a real issue, then it's best not to release it at all. Unfortunately, it's going to happen with anything you release, *especially* new meshes. Whether you give permission or not, there's a good chance it'll show up in other mods. However, if it's just a case of someone hosting your mod in a location you'd rather not have it hosted, 9.9 times out of 10 contacting the site and saying you wish to have your file removed will get it removed. Most of the community is pretty good about respecting the wishes of the author, or responding to situations where an author's work has been taken and reused/redistributed without permission.


Yes, but that's not what the person he was responding to was talking about hehe. Enderandrew was talking about someone wanting to release new items but didn't want to be bothered with making a mod for them. I assume he is referring to one of the main topics of the thread, which is people that just kept dumping stuff in the same location because they couldn't be bothered to make an immersive mod for their stuff (or didn't feel like or didn't want to learn how).

I did this in Morrowind for Gogetto when he released his new stalhrim weapons. He just threw them into the game, and I asked if it would be okay for me to mod them into the quest. He okayed it, I made it, gave him credit for the meshes, and myself credit for the other modifications. Seemed rather equitable. Gogetto got his stuff in the game, and players got to pick them as new quest rewards with my mod instead of just picking them from a chest somewhere.

I was guessing this was a reference to being capable of rotation (turning) in the 3D preview pane.


Offense was probably an overreaction, but in his defense, you did quote his post when you went on to talk about theft of your work. He was talking ONLY about modders who wanted to release new meshes but not be bothered with mods. You then responded with how you won't be releasing anything because of theft. I don't think you were necessarily putting words in his mouth, but he was only making a suggestion for players that like to model and *want* to contribute to some sort of a community shop mod, not for people that *do not want* to do it.

the thing is if i give a general permission i loose all control, that might not matter to some but to some it does, including me, and as a modder myself i state that this aint an option for me, but then again i dont really need that option either

however i didnt just rant about theft, that was one point of those i named, the quality aspect is imo much more important as it affects modder aswell as user