Oh and just to showcase the problem I am having now ...

time spent modding the last 3 days 0
time spent trying to find a solution for a showstopping bu ( LOD not loading anymore ) 3 days

Well from the conversations I've seen attempts to contact Bethesda with problems are a frustrating experience that is often met with no answer. I can on one hand see how stirring the pot to create more outcry toward Bethesda may be a good thing, but on the other hand it does seem like yet another thread by prometheus to incite unrestfulness.

Mod makers and tool makers have been known to expect no answer - work on elaborate work-arounds for problems then the next official patch it is cleared up. That seems like wasted time to me.

Well, for what it's worth, I've always gotten a reply from GStaff. It's not always been to my liking, of course, and Bethesda don't exactly volunteer information about breaking changes before they happen, but c'est la vie.

Which of these posts is that one?

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1345130-having-papyrus-trouble-here-are-some-things-to-try/
http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1347469-how-to-ask-for-scripting-help/
http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1361626-a-note-on-beta-update-1526/
http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1345049-creation-kit-update/
http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1343317-skyrim-mod-troubleshooting-best-practices/

I ask because none of them seem to list all the bugs described here and I did not see anything giving simple steps for reproducing the problem. But these were the articles I saw that could be guaranteed to be on page 1 of the CK forum that gave some hints in the title that they could be talking about bugs.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1352954-unofficial-creation-kit-modding-bug-list-3/ It has a few bugs on it that either are NOT properly verified or have actually been fixed. The biggest one that's been fixed being the grey-face NPC bug that's still listed as critical and unsolved.

Princess_Stomper put it best in post 27.


Those of us that mod, and continue to mod do it because we enjoy it, and are producing things that we personally want in our own game.

I remember the first bow successfully brought into Oblivion by Windy.

Seriously a hack job in NifSkope to fool it into thinking that two different models were the same model so it would produce the bow morph.

Brillant hack job.

Because it requires work, and inovation sometimes is part of the draw of modding IMHO.

If we had all the tools Bethesda uses then where's the challenge?

Create, export, put in game, done.......BLAH!

Hello all,

I see some familiar tags here - Prometheus, AV etc.

First point is in regard to the little issue with what Prometheus wrote a little ways back - you know the thing that looked a tad like an insult. As has been mentioned by others, I really do not think the remark was meant to injure. Prometheus can sometimes seem a little impatient I suppose, but we all can!

Now to the matter at hand;

I am a 'fledgling modder' and have been having some difficulties with the CK - some caused by my lack of experience - some due to the way the CK currently works (or fails to). A few problems because of the lack of CK documentation or guides (yes I know the CK and documentation etc is young!)

In particular, I remember trying to follow the CK tutorials and running face first into a brick wall when dialogue did not work as anticipated. After a while and some help on these forums, I not only got round the issue, I went on to devise a way for myself to (relatively) easily get voice acted dialogue into my test mod - this was done way outside the available (at that time) tutorials / guides.

I have recently been set on a path of making a mod for player ignite / extinguish of objects / targets and have learned a lot about how the CK works and my own limitations.

So, as a fledling modder, I can complain about certain aspects of the CK - but, in truth, the proverbial only way is up for me regards modding.

Is it worth my time and effort to continue modding or aspire to greater things (large scale mods of one type or other)? For me the answer is yes.

I can easily see though how, for some, the failings of the CK as it stands and related things is a real 'turn off' and that continuing without the requested support seems pointless. Wether this lack of support is actual or just down to the individuals perspective / opinion is a tough one to answer.

As said, I am a fledgling modder. At this time, I intend to continue with my modding as a hobbyist. I just hope that, as I grow in experience and such, I will not be put off by the catalogue of errors - percieved or actual - of the CK.

Not been solved from my experience. A duplication of an NPC still results in a grey-face. That's probably the most annoying one from my experience.

As far as the rest; make your own game if you don't like it.

You ask what people will want to play - they'll play what they get, they'll play what they enjoy. That's it. I never downloaded many add-ons to Oblivion because I enjoyed it after it was modded in itself. I didn't need new lands. *shrug* Never thought they were that appealing. Each person has their own likes and dislikes, and saying that it has to be done or else they'll get bored is a bit of a fallacy. DLC will be released, new content, all kinds of mods to make the story more interesting, to build into the game as it exists. New stuff's great, yeah, but it's not the only interesting thing.

In the end of it - if you disagree, you should just make your own game. You aren't getting an SDK for a game. They aren't providing an engine for you to use and edit to your liking. In the end, it's their call. Doesn't mean I always agree, either, but it's the way it is.

Not entirely correct, I did make a thread here on the forums when I encountered the Havok bug at -64 > X > 64 cell coordinates, which made most big worldspace mods unplayable. Bethesda refused to fix it, but luckily shadeMe found a great workaround!

Other than that we solved about all problems on our own or by contacting one or two other modders here on the forums to get some reinforcements. I agree with the sentiment that a lot of patience is necessary in the (TES) modding scene, especially when the game in question is still young. You also need to enjoy problem solving a bit, if you totally hate the process of finding workarounds, then modding is probably not a good idea. Also, don't expect to be able to release a new lands mod with all features of the game used in it within half a year after the CK's release. Things ARE going to be broken, and you may need to wait many months for a fix, either from Bethesda or the community.

Could you solve the issue of texture swapping on some lods?

That's pretty much the only substantial issue I'm having. I have Dwemer Tower mountains, invsible mountains, and mountain Walls (of the Whiterun variety). It's not a huge deal, it only slightly muggle's the appearance of my LOD, but definitely something that I'd like to find a solution for.

Then you're not following the procedure established for it. All of the NPCs I do are derived as duplicates of existing ones. I'm lazy that way. The ctrl-f4 method is now 100% working, which wasn't the case when the CK was originally released.

Ah. It requires the export of the facial data, then. That would be the difference. I'm duplicating them on a byte-by-byte basis outside of the CK. Seems odd that all of the facial data is stored elsewhere. Guess a work-around for that will have to be established for SkyProc. Thanks.

Yeah, I guess it's an export. All of Bethesda's own NPCs have their facegen data exported, so it's obviously the expected way to handle it now. Ideally you'd just make a face and that was it, but something changed somewhere. It's organized alot like voiced dialogue. Separated into a folder for each ESP, with the form IDs of each NPC as the filenames.

Sigh... so much modding that may never be possible due to these ridiculous bugs. Does anyone think maybe Bethesda should just try coding from scratch next game? I know that's a lot of work, but with all these new bugs I've got to think they must have screwed it up so much because of adding new attatchments to an existing engine and system, and thus it doesn't run cohesively. Maybe if they rewrote everything they could fit it together more sensibly and it would lead to less bugs in the end.

Coding from scratch would mean abandoning more than 10 years of Bethesda's work on the NetImmerse>Gamebryo>Creation engine. It's not economical to write a new engine when you already have one that works pretty well with the vanilla game content and DLC. Remember that console versions consist of a significant chunk of Bethesda's profits. A rewrite would not only increase development time ridiculously, it would also break the existing modding system completely. Sure, it would solve a lot of issues, but then modders would have to 'unlearn' what they expect from an elder scrolls game (.nif files, esp/esm mods, bsa archives). It's a lofty but unrealistic goal. A rewrite will also introduce lots of new bugs that need to be tested and debugged extensively. Bethesda doesn't have much economical incentive to fix the engine in ways only about 10% of its userbase will appreciate. It's sad, but there is a significant portion of PC Skyrim players who don't even use mods or only use 'cosmetic' stuff/retextures. Just look at the 'Hot files' section on the nexus.

For example, Bethesda patched some parts of Skyrim's engine after release that broke many modding tools, like the new load order system. Only BOSS and NMM has been updated and Bash still doen't have a release version that supports this new load order system. Try to imagine the chaos a completely new, rewritten engine would cause

Maybe you're right, it just at the moment feels like a house with countless unfinished DIY extensions, and it's starting to collapse under it's own weight. I mean the system has always had bugs but never before have their been so many the tools provided for modding were near or completely unusable for almost any significant purpose.

I wish I could unlearn .nif files. I've only worked directly with a small handful of Morrowind's .nif files, and it's a horrid mess. I can only imagine what surprises other .nif files will have. I feel really sorry for the niftools people considering they try to support every know version of .nif files (most not even from Bethesda's games), all of which add there own little bits and pieces. It would be really nice if Bethesda could switch to a format that was better documented so we could develop better tools for them.

I also see no problems at all with ditching BSAs in favor of standard ZIPs.

The ESM/ESP files don't have to change (no more than in between any other two games, at least). You can completely rewrite the engine and still use the same external data formats.

Biggest problem with that was that it was done when the game was already out. If the load order change had been done for the first version of Skyrim it wouldn't be nearly as big of an issue, but it instead happened when such tools had already started establishing themselves, causing everyone to scramble. It also just happened to catch Bash at a really bad time, soon after a release and when dev time is limited.

Aha, I forgot about that bug. That was pretty serious .

But yes, half the fun of modding, especially on the "forefront", is finding solutions to those problems and spreading the word. Not that I've done any of that myself, but still .

Things are the way they are, and complaining isn't likely to change things dramatically, so you may as well enjoy it .

I personally think the whole major issue is, Skyrim is moving 100% FASTER then any game before it. Many modders have modded for Oblivion and FO3/NV, we have the experience and the know how to do these things on games that have been finished for a while now. It gives us a huge head start into modding for Skyrim.

When Oblivion first came out do you know how long it took people to put out new bodies? New landmasses? Quests that involved scripting? MUCH longer then it has taken in Skyrim.

Skyrim modding is thriving faster and stronger then the past games, its leaps and bounds ahead of its modding time.... And with that comes modders expectations on things being "perfect". We are after all used to finished games and products.

I understand the problem and how frustrating it is to spend much longer working a nif into Blender then in Oblivion/Fallout it annoys the hell out of me, and this whole new scripting language is far beyond my understanding... But I also understand that I need to be patient, stop modding for Skyrim if you feel its to much of a strain go enjoy Oblivion again or even morrowind. Wait until the game breaking bugs are fixed before thinking about the CK being 100%.

I do not care for "satisfaction" by breaking the wall with bugs and find workaronds , for me are just a Huge "WASTE OF TIME" that stops the vision I have for the mod , I have very few free time , I am very productive in the few hours I spend a day for modding and I hate to Waste my few hours of relax in bugs , trying to find a solution and fixing things ...

My three big problems with Lods are the following :

1 The most annoying is that some nordic walls and some other minor stuff Get a Mountain texture or something like that or a Iceberg texture

2 The Lod distance view ingame is Way way way way way smaller than the one I have in CK , so in CK I can work and plan awesome scapes , but then ingame they look like a pile of crap spiked untextured "things" that are just .... "ugly" ...

3 Sometimes the Lods do not update and do not refresh , this happened to me also in the Skyrim game where for some reason I can't get the "awesome" picture scapes Bethesda posted all around ... and honestly I have yet to find a mod that can allow this ( is also true that I didn't look much for it if it does exhist )


I have yet to arrive to even touch the NPCs aspects , but The few ones I placed are used just for size references andI used the template races ,are those the ones you cloned?

No idea which ones I cloned anymore. I just pick them at random, and I never use template NPCs for that.

May be those are more suitable for eidting no?

Ok, so let's consider the critical bugs:

"http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1345681-navmesh-bug/ "

If this description is accurate, the obvious workaround would be to create a .esm to hold any nav meshes. In my opinion, .esm files should be used for new content (where load order does not matter), and .esp files should be used for override content (where load order matters). So either the final sentence here is misleading or the problem description is misleading.

And, ok, yes, "Creation Kit cannot create master files". But I think all that you need to do, to address that issue, is have somebody distribute a blank .esm file. Then to create a new esm file you make a copy of the blank one and give it an appropriate name.


"http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1347249-unofficial-creation-kit-bug-list-2/page__view__findpost__p__20325586 "

If this one is really fixed, why is it still on the list? The last update to that list was 01 March 2012. If this is the list of bugs that Bethesda is supposed to be addressing, basically, you are telling me that Bethesda is being more responsive than the modding community.

"http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1344939-things-disappearing-in-the-world/page__st__30"

This one does not make sense to me. Objects disappear in the distance so that the game can achieve good performance. So this is not a description of a bug, but a description of a design trade off. Probably what needs to happen here is that the modder needs to create LOD meshes so the game can render it properly in the distance. So this might be a description of a documentation problem (how do we make this object appear in the fashion that that object appears?). But calling this a "critical" bug is just silly. It's too ambiguous and self contradictory for me to even imagine how I could test if this bug were "fixed" -- is Bethesda supposed to buy everyone faster machines so that "Full LOD" without LOD meshes is not too slow [or whatever exactly is being described here -- I really cannot tell what is being described here. What does "too slow" even mean when different people have different machines that have different performance characteristics, and when -- hypothetically at least -- the modder can create objects with different mesh structures to be used at different distances? What distances? How much time? What model? How many triangles? HOW CAN I TELL IF I HAVE REPRODUCED THIS ISSUE?]?

"http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1345519-creating-new-worldspaceshow-to-get-around-the-broken-ck-features/

and
"http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1347249-unofficial-creation-kit-bug-list-2/page__view__findpost__p__20321917"

First, what's wrong with reusing the -64..64 range? (For example, stacking world spaces vertically in sky boxes in existing cells.)

Anyways, this pair of bugs looks like a real issue, one that might have a workaround.. But it's also a scope issue -- a request for feature. (The downside of "new engine" is that a new engine will tend to omit features which were in the old engine, even if they share file formats. And, Skyrim was advertised as using a new rendering engine...)

Anyways, if Bethesda fixes this one (and they might), the fix will probably come with the release of some DLC. To me, this kind of issue sounds like it would require some major redesign work. If so, and if they do fix it, ( a ) the fix will take a lot of time and testing before release, and ( b ) it might very well be risky enough of a change that they do not want to promise anything until they have confirmed that they can address all the underlying issues.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1352988-fixing-the-64x64-cell-havok-bug-for-when-you-just-want-a-bigger-world/page__st__60__p__20419923#entry20419923 suggests a possible fix, but quite likely the fix will introduce new problems (perhaps in path finding, perhaps in job scheduling, it's not clear why the code that caused the problem exists in the first place, but as a general rule people do not write code simply to cause problems for people -- as a general rule code gets written because it solves some kind of problem. So an issue here is: why is the code that "queues welding tasks" restricting the cell range numbers to -64..64?)


----

The problems and inaccuracies that I see here are seem more likely to hurt modders than they are to hurt Bethesda.

And, even if I have made some important mistakes on some of these issues (and I might have -- making mistakes is something I am good at), it still looks to me like there's a lot of improvement in what we are presenting to Bethesda, about what flaws exist in the game that we would like them to be working on.

Seriously, we need to do a better job of creating examples of problems that need to be fixed. But we also need to do a better job of understanding and describing the issues, to ourselves and to other modders.

The last suggestion I don't understand. Copying and renaming an ESM will not fill it with content, obviously. So, what did you mean?

As for the first part: Uh, why should we be forced to use ESMs for each and every simple house and dungeon mod? What's with mods that combine overrides and new stuff (as probably most of those affected by that bug will eventually)?

Umm... have you read the linked thread?
It's not about objects disappearing in the distance. It's objects disappearing (or not showing up in the first place) right in front of you. Like, stepping out of the door of a ship and having it disappear under your feet (described by PaladinRider).
The LOD thing fixes this for some unknown and random reason, but the issue has nothing to do with LOD per se.