Well, nearly... real developers also have to waste time swapping hardware in their test rigs, stealing (sorry, "borrowing") equipment from their colleagues, writing specifications and producing estimates for managers, providing helpdesk support, fixing other people's code...

Hell, in comparison, modding's a walk in the park. With occasional thunderstorms !

May be but at least they are provided with :

Proper importer exporters ,
Proper working tools ,
If bugs are found and showstoppers some programmers of the engine will to fix them fast ...

And modders arent getting paid but are being provided tools that are supposed to do what it says on the tin, mod. The CK is like going into a restaurant that offers free pasta with any meal. You pay for the meal and its ok, not the best, but its ok. Then the pasta comes and its Alphabeti Spaghetti with a bit of blue mould and some gristly bits that cant entirely be explained.

By the way has someone lost the key to the Bethesda offices? or are they taking a year off. Wakey wakey Bethesda, crowd are getting fractious. Does anyone have any idea just what they are all doing nowadays?

Apparently, they're spnding all their time adding kinect support to Skyrim.

Besides the glory of voice commands for the game they've been posting lots of blog stuff about Dishonored. I'd say at least from a PR standpoint they're busy with release prep on that one. So we don't really know what the Skyrim team is up to right now.

I imagine most of them are working hard on the first DLC right now, while a smaller group is still patching?

Disonhored is worked on by arkane studios , bethesda softwoeks is the publisher , bethesda studios I guess is working on skyrim but they probably will delay any DLC after that game release to not subtract eventual interest from its crucial launch date... As for a patch I guess can still come...

As publishers they are getting the piece of the pie already.

The only person who can decide whether it is "worth it" is you. For some, dealing with the issues of a new kit (bugs, unknowns, workarounds, etc.) is worth the effort to release an idea early. For others, it's not worth the effort, and they prefer to wait until things are easier or go to a different game. The problems with modding Skyrim this early are hardly new - each game has suffered from something - and yet fantastic mods have been produced. If modders gave up when things were hard, we'd not have any mods.

They have to pay for those. If you paid up, I'm sure third-parties would license them to you, too. The difference is they are doing a job, they are paid for it, and the programmers are paid to fix the issues for the designers. The only motive they have to fix them for us is PR and out of the goodness of their hearts. That's not to say they shouldn't - but the developers don't necessarily control the input and output to the fine level of detail needed.

Just sayin' - don't judge the situation unless you know the specifics, and can say with a certainty where and why it's all not being provided.

I'm pretty frustrated with how some of it works, too.. But, it's one of those things we have to live with. When something stops you - the best bet is generally to fix it yourself. I've had to circumvent so much of Bethesda's code already in my mods.

For me it's more like:

Time actually modding: 90%

External tools: 8% (Usually editing audio from my voice actors, so this time is still 'modding'.

Bugs and whatnot: <2%

Maybe I'm just lucky?

Did you try to do lods ? Armors ? Animations? Furnitures? Static animations ? Texture color map generation? Navmesh? If yes ... Then I guess you are...

- if I had a dollar for every time I had to write code without anything approaching a proper tool set I could retire by now. But your basic premise is correct. It's not whether you will have to struggle but how much. IMHO the degree to which you have to struggle to mod many aspects of Skyrim is greater than my free time or patience allows for at this point. I managed to get very efficient with Blender 2.6.2 and static objects, but my attempts at dealing with armor and setting up world spaces just required more effort than I was willing to put in.

Or Alexander has committed a great deal of time to getting proficient and can now do these things with relative ease. But that's the problem - it takes a great deal of time to get proficient. The mechanics are buggy as heck and not intuitive. One can learn to deal with the limitations, but it takes time.

Not really .....

there are aspects of this game hardcoded that not even the most willing and smart of the hacker coders can go throut and an input from Developers is mandatory .... like for some aspects of the undecoded parts of the nif format , some aspects for importer exporters etc etc...

Not having access to the nif format in no way impedes one from making cool stuff. It is by no means required that a mod include new meshes or even new textures. Input from the devs isn't necessary either, but it would certainly help.

The CK is a powerful tool unto itself. It has some issues. All software does. I think the huge list of bugs may well have a lot of bogus entries on it since plenty of them seem to have been added from one-time reports with zero attempts to verify the details of them. So it may appear to be buggier than it really is.

The issues of the CK are not standard basic usual issues as all softwares do have ... if you take a look at the Cryengine SDK mod kit it has some bugs but nothing is a showstopper that woudl prevent you from making a working level , in CK instead you can't do a working level because the Navmesh is bugged , and if you look more ahead to whole new worldspaces , Bethesda seems not even having it put in consideration because of the overbugged system and the lack of tutorials involving more than simple dungeon making ..
I do not agree , almoust 90% of the mods online are based on retexturing , remodeling , rehacking , other meshes mixing and stuff like that wich implies more or less new content ...
using just the Canonic Stuff .... with the overmentioned bugs woudl lead to almoust nothing valuable , because from a side you wouln't have anything new , from the other you wouln't have anything workable ... yes may be you would be able to make the 100th Dovakhin relaxing cottage in the woods but nothing else ...

The CryEngine SDK is an SDK, not a mod kit. SDKs are designed so that you can build new products off the basis of whatever the SDK is for. Mod kits are for changing little things within an existing product.

Apples and oranges.

I do think that the complaints are being made without any sense of proportion. The vast majority of people don't mod. The vast majority of modders don't make the sorts of mods where they'd come across the bugs found. Aside from the navmesh and LOD bugs, I think it's fairly accurate to say that the people coming across these bugs are pushing the envelope out. They're at the frontier, as it were. Of course they are going to experience issues. Sure, the issues are annoying to them, but they are doing things not commonly done, I'd be more surprised if I didn't come across issues.

There's also little point in bringing up the navmesh bug over and over, Beth have finally said they're going to fix it. At this stage, mentioning it is a bit like beating a dead horse. As for the other bugs, are people reporting them to GStaff, or just posting complaints about them here? Just complaining about them is unlikely to get them fixed, you've got to gather up some evidence, a reproduction method, and then contact GStaff with your report, with evidence and a reproduction method so Beth can't really justify relegating it to the "we'll fix this one day" pile.

Wrong !
Cryengine has two SDK wich means software development Kit , there are two version the Mod SDK and the Developers SDK , with the first you can make mods , with the second you can make your own game ...

And according to your statement then we should just stop making big mods and rely on making some more animemangabigboobs stuff or the 1000th different sword?

Actually most of what's on that unofficial bugs topic are fairly trivial things. Yes, they stack up over time, but no single mod short of a TC is going to need every last feature that post talks about. Plus, as I said, some of those aren't even properly verified, while others still listed as broken have been fixed and those fixes community verified.

Yes, the navmesh bug is a major pain in the ass. That one alone is going to cripple anything of significant size involving the creation of new locations in existing worldspaces. NEW worldspaces aren't as much of an issue since best practices would dictate those be in ESM files which are immune to the bug.

LOD is a pain, but is by no means strictly required. So that can also be handled down the road should some new method be found to work with it, or should it actually get fixed properly.

As for the rest, really, with the 4 mods I have out now, everything is working as expected other than navmesh issues. I've touched on a large enough cross-section of features to know the CK can be used to do great things.

Just because 90% of current mods involve new meshes and textures does not mean that is required to make mods. That just means Skyrim is progressing in the same way the 4 previous games did. People are making armor and texture mods. That will change over time. Big content mods take more time to finish. This time next year the landscape of modding will be entirely different.

I think what he's trying to get across is that being at the forefront of modding, so to speak, you're bound to come across problems. At MERP we've had a number of problems ourselves, but nothing so pressing I'd want to start a thread to complain about it. The main thing, from my understanding, is huge mountain meshes with different textures, and their LOD. But like Arthmoor says, it can be handled down the road. I imagine by the time we actually get to our first release they'll be work arounds available.

Not that I was there at the beginning of Oblivion modding, but it's my understanding there were huge issues then too. Expecting Bethesda to cater to your every whim is unreasonable. Just give it time.

Ehhhh, kind of.

The CryEngine SDK is a Source Dev Kit, whereas the CK is just a DevKit. It's not a 'Mod kit for changing little things within an existing product'. It's the kit they used to make the game themselves, you just don't have access to the sourcecode like in an SDK. Yes, an SDK can be used for making a whole new game, whereas a normal DevKit can be used to recreate or expand upon the game within engine limitations, that's all.

http://mycryengine.com/ says differently. You can't use the free version for commercial projects, but it's still a fully-fledged SDK, not some modder's plaything.

With regards to the second, what AliTheLord said about, plus the fact that you're speaking to the wrong people, preaching to the choir as it were. You need to confront Bethesda directly about this, instead of just posting in their forums to a bunch of people who are broadly in exactly the same boat as you.

Picture this: you're on Columbus' famous voyage to the New World, as a member of the crew or something. One of your crewmates spends the entire journey there moaning about how difficult it is, and how if they had a better boat it would be so much easier (he probably had a pretty good boat, but suspend disbelief here).

You are starting to sound like that crewmate. Yes, it's difficult, we all get that. You're breaking ground though, difficulties should be expected and overcome with skill, and without a whole load of complaining, so that the rest of us can see you triumph and take our hats off, saying "what a guy/gal!". Or something like that.

EDIT: And just to be clear, I'm not personally attacking you or anything, this is just my opinion on some people's response to the issues. You just happen to be the OP.

Lod is not strictly required?

Surely not if you can live with the distant view of few meters , are not annoyed by custom pop up of huge buildings and stuff in front of you and you can eventually stand very very bad Looking landscapes from distance just because of nonexhistant or bad looking lods ..

Well I have 9 mods out there and I coudl manage to make them work , but yet I define them as "minor mods" even if they regard new content , totally made from scratch armors ( not retextured or remheshacked Stuff ) wich required a LOT of work , Really a LOT of .... "Work" not much in the 3d tools , the PS stuff but in the NIFScope Alchemy brainstorming , trying 100 different hacks and stuff to "make" it work in game ...
and we are not talking of weird stuff that is not appearing in game , but just normal armors stuff ...

Modding Skyrim requires a Lot of External work of CK that the CK is just right now a handfull tool as many others that allows you to create levels , but still lacks a lot of "working" features that coudl allow to realize the properly called "mods" ....

May be I may sound harsh or look "unpolite" in my answering , but is not my intention .... For me ture mods are the ones that add new Content that is "fitting" with the game , I do not even consider stuff like Pink Dragons or boobed dolls ... What will make the Game be more interesting and appealing for people in future are "content mods " the ones that will add quests , things to do and new landscapes to see ...

The new little stuff may be cool for some minutes to play with .... having the 100th different hammer with the shiny surface or the 1000th different skimpy armor how long will keep the players play with Skyrim ?

I think this is what the developers should relally consider when "helping" the community to make the mods ....

the real modding starts where the true new content is added , not the random stuff added in the forms of Just "items" .... I include myself among those modders as well ...

Not think of my mod for example for conan outfit ... so far I did from scratch the conan outfit , took over a month of work of wich 60 % trying to make it work ingame and 40 or may be even less in external tools ...
Then I just placed the stuff on a table in a cabin ... no quest no things to do , etc .. This is what usually is done for the 99% of the new content ... you either pick up somewhere or you craft ...

well after having tried the new toy ... and having done nothing to get it .... what will keep the player still playing the game?

you are nitpicking on small things , The MOD SDK is used to make Mods for crysis and is allowed only to make mods for skyrim so is a modding kit ... call it SDK mod kit or the like but is a modding kit where you have access to the same tools used by the developers to make their game ... wich is the exact same thing Bethesda gived us , a development kit with thepossibility to program and script inside ... you by no means have access to source code in Cryengine ... .you can program for the engine as you can do for the Creation engine ... the cryengine kit , just works better ...