If you listened to the tutorial videos, you hear it is the second.

Thank you, sadly I have not had the time to watch them in full.

Dang it, Red, you got me all misty eyed remembering my early days coding in Fortran and Pascal. (sniff) ... okay maybe not. lol

You're right in the props and vars though, they seem to go out of scope (are discarded) when the scripts end, even though the object is still valid.
Bah ... if it was too easy anyone could do it, no? rofl

That really is the hammer of justice and truth to end any and all doubt.

Would you listen to that thunderous boom? Yes, yes, what a sound to hear, indeed.

I hesitate to put my two cents in, but I've struggled with the CK and navmesh... why that losing fight was just this afternoon, wasn't it? Yet, to be honest, I've been having a lot of fun making buildings inside and out with clutter and lighting. So, on balance, thanks Bethesda for releasing the CK. It is The Grand Gesture of love for your fans. And yes, it replaces multi-player, no matter what.

The fact that gives me hope for being able to work with the CK is that the devs have worked with it (or some feature sub-set) for seven years and I've been learning and using simultaneously for less than seven weeks. None of my other programming tools and languages came readily to hand in seven weeks. As someone who started programming with Fortran II and IBM-mainframe plugboards, I have to agree with Kreij when he said "...if it was too easy anyone could do it, no?" Erm... not trying to one-up you, buddy.

Wait... are you SURE the devs use the same navmesh tools in CK? That means...seven years of Hell? Oh, Oh. My sympathies!

RShel aka Old Grizz

As frustrating as the CK can sometimes be, I'd rather have it than not. So thank you Bethesda.

I actually enjoy the CK more than the game now...how funny is that?

It is without a doubt the most bad ass lego set ever created...in my opinion.

Glad to hear you're still working on the CK and I hope you take most of the complaints and criticisms, such as the well written OP's, in a constructive light. One thing I've been trying to communicate to Bethesda ever since MW was that they are really selling themselves short by not putting in more development time into their editors. I think there is a vast potential of efficiency improvements possible by a well designed UI and stable app with attention to details. I figure within Bethesda you've had at least 160,000 hours using the CK for Skyrim (20 people, 4 years). Even a measly 10% improvement gives you another 16,000 hours for *free* and I would say in a type of app like the CK where almost everything is the UI that 10% improvement is a low-ball estimate. This is small potatoes, however, to the amount of hours the entire modding community as a whole could gain by a better editor, especially since most of the hours gained would probably be mostly in the initial learning curve of the CK which is very high at the moment.

Seeing the amount of critical crash/data loss related bugs as well as the larger amount of "annoyance" bugs makes me guess that whoever used it internally merely learned to work around the difficulties over time. Part of the issue of working so closely with an app is that over time you become completely unaware of the usability issues: doing X causes a crash, learn to don't do X; doing Y is hard but do it 100 times and its not so hard anymore These critical bugs are actually very frustrating for most users as it actually represents a net loss of time and a lot of the time the ultimate cause of the crash is not obvious so you can't learn how to avoid it. I'm willing to bet that if you add up all the internal time lost on such bugs and put that time into initial CK development time you'd end up with a net positive gain (by far I'd also bet).

Some examples of relatively minor issues that have a large impact in the long run: The relatively hap-hazard placement and alignment of controls on all the editor windows increase the initial learning curve and contribute to "interface fatigue" (there's a better term for it I believe). Similarily, the placement of the Ok and Cancel buttons are almost in the same place but not all the time. This requires the user to actually have to think and "look" them as opposed to having them in the exact same place which leads to muscle memory and no thought/looking needed very quickly. Small things but the fewer small things the user has to worry or think about the more big things they can concentrate on.

I'll quit rambling while I might still be a little bit ahead but could suggest a large number of UI improvements for the CK if needed (most of which I try to implement in SkyEdit actually).

Heh. You and I are in the same boat. I'm slowly passing up my play time in the editor.

(Boggle) - Um...yah...I kind of have been spending all my time in the CK these days...heh.

Only time I'm in game anymore is when debugging my work. After this next home I may try to sit down and play some of the awesome mods that have come out.

Last time I tried playing though, I ended up seeing a spot on a hill, and thinking...yeah, there needs to be a home right there.

Add me to the list of people who spend more time in CK than in-game! *lol* Just got to playing around with it last week and REALLY glad Steam doesn't track how much time I spend in "Tools" like it does for Games. I would be horrified!

The nav mesh tool is very easy to use.. Save for the current bug in it, I cant imagine using anything else.

Actually...it does...under your community profile.

I've used the CK for more hours than I have played the game...wayyy more. And people say building player homes is easy to do. They have no idea how much work goes into a detailed layout and design. I'd argue that is just as time consuming as any other aspect of modding for Skyrim.

Creation Kit
267.9 hrs

However, I think over half of the time the CK was just running and I was not on the computer.

Wow

I just wanted to add to this point, At the moment, we are all being trained by tutorials and CK to not read error messages and just click "yes to all" when an error message pops up. This is bad as I'm sure it leads to design bugs. The error messages exist for a reason, even if they are triggering superfluously, the habit we all develop is a bad one in terms of design and debugging

Whatever this version control provision they have is, it seems to be a massive chunk of what our issues are linked to. There's no way you could build the same game with the CK we have without tearing your hair out just from dealing with issues in the editor itself. In fact before you even got to that point you'd be stopped by crippling bugs.

Having mod tools like this is really nice, but at this point it only seems barely adequate for most projects. For a lot of others it's just not good enough right now. I just hope we see some patches in the near future.

@ Joel - thank you so much for chipping in here!


Thanks - that completely sums up my own feelings.


Oh, absolutely. I bet in a couple of years we'll wonder what we were complaining about. I certainly think the CK is exponentially easier to use than any other kit I've come across. I took one look at the Dragon Age editor and gave up immediately.


Hahah ... I'm pretty sure it's the dev equivalent of filing (aka Death By A Thousand Paper Cuts).


What, like how, in Morrowind, the 34th variable didn't work for absolutely no reason and nobody knew why?

About animations, what tools was used to create new ones?
This is something moders are unable to do now, we can manipulate even totally change existing animations but not create new.

We cant even create statics yet without copious workarounds. Any chance of releasing the dev tool you used for that?

Same here. I took a break and enjoyed the game for a few days. Atleast it drives you to play more instead of losing interest and playing less.

Well, Joel, it seems the obvious, and most prudent, thing to do is release the CK source code and Bethesda's loving community will have all the bugs out of it in a month.

(I know, not likely to happen ... but one can dream, can't one?)

I've been hooked on the ES series since Daggerfall, and if you keep making them, I'll keep buying them.
My favorite is still Morrowind due to its surreal, other-worldly feel. I may be the only person who loved the Cliff Racers. lol

The wiki documentation was set up mostly to be a reference that people could look at when they didn’t remember how a function was called, what parameters it took, or what it did, and is modeled off of one of the online references I use all the time in my development. I still think it’s a great place to go to look up specific information or to poke around to see what’s possible, even if some of the examples on the reference pages are terse. The Wiki is a community tool for you guys to use and we encourage you to come up with better examples


I think there might be some misunderstanding here. Your properties and variables will always save their values for as long as the instance of the script exists and isn’t reset. For a repeatable quest, you’ll keep everything until the quest is started up. If it’s on a reference, you’ll keep everything until your cell resets (if the reference is flagged to reset). If it’s on an active magic effect, you’ll keep everything while the effect is applied to its target (after that the script instance is deleted as soon as you stop doing things with it). For more information on resetting, you should take a look at http://www.creationkit.com/OnReset_-_ObjectReference#Notes.

Any variables you define inside a function will be discarded as soon as you leave the function, similarly to most other scripting and programming languages.

I think the consensus is that we LOVE the wiki, we just want it to be meatier, and examples that aren't terse, verbose even I am all for contributing to the wiki, but so far I can't get my code to work, so I have no examples to give, it's kind of a chicken and egg problem I need the wiki to improve so I can improve the wiki, if you see what I mean.

I have to agree with this. Some of those errors might be from my mod, but if I click 'yes to all' I might not even realize it until I have already uploaded it. I am fairly careful with my edits, but we all make mistakes and oversights.

On another note I really would 'pay for' dlc content that adds additional ease with some aspects of the CK(meaning I love it and I want more lol). I know that, as a business, huge improvements and or addon programs (i.e. keyframe editors rooted in the CK or Mesh editors rooted in the CK) is likely not going to happen without a prospect of a cost return. So yes, I would pay for all sorts of big neat impliments and or addon programs rooted in the CK.

There is such a wide variety of different kinds of modders out here(director types, story tellers, crafter/designers, architec, simulation programmers) its just amazing. This CK brings us all together and that is something 'awesome'.

Thanks for some official answers ... Then for the broken features of world building we must suppose you used some other tool for generating lods and landscape ? Because the world building features are not working right now ... As for the controls in outside landscaping I hope you could produce a tutorial on how to do because there are many bugs like items appearing and disappearing ... Camera view not resetting after selecting an object and deselecting or camera crazy movements and pan around several cells... So if is the same tool used in manual landscaping then i hope you could show us how to overcome those bugs...

@SmkViper : If you come to WI and give me a couple of hours of CK tips and tricks, I'll make you a Prime Rib dinner and supply all the beer you want.


Kind of like our own little zombie mob in Racoon City !!

Thanks again, BGS folks for all your help.