Incredibly unlikely, but statistically possible. Never dismiss something outright.

I'm not active on the Nexus forums, but: I would hesitate to jump in with such a mod, as well.
First, it sounds like a lot of work with uncertain results. If you want to try it, go ahead. But I wouldn't be exactly surprised if it never got past beta. Which is why I'm not that thrilled about these "I want to make a whole province!" mods, either. If they succeed - great. Nehrim worked. Tamriel Rebuilt, OTOH, started working before Morrowind even came out, and they're still not even near completion. I'm all with Meek about what I want to see in mods: quests, locations, quests, people, quests. But I'm somewhat sceptical about large projects.
And second, and more important: This vision of a kind of RTS in Skyrim differs quite heavily from why I play Skyrim. The game has some (rather poorly executed) concepts like this already with the Civil War quest line - I'd rather see this expanded and made worthwile within an RPG context, instead of changing the character of the game altogether.

Yeah I can accept your points, but like other game changing mods they are hugely popular when released. I am looking to learn how Papyrus works to see if I can do this mod myself but will start off on something easier like getting Danica in Whiterun healing the player as she is supposed to be a healer (in conjunction with no health regen to make the change worthwhile). We'll see how it goes.

The question here is whether it is worth it to keep modding big scale projects. Please get back on topic?

Adding RTS functionality to an RPG is a pretty big project, the margin for error and bugs is huge and the amount of code in Papyrus would take many hours. We are talking about making the engine decide if AI characters should to war with other AI characters, not just the player, and this will be done in real time. All the while keeping the RPG element unbroken so the player can carry on doing the quests. It's a shame that with all patches being made by Bethesda that any such mod would be broken on a monthly basis and this would test the patience of any modder. This is why I believe Bethesda need to cool down on the frequency of their patches being released as we are seeing this problem occur already and we haven't really had the big projects yet, things like custom houses are already putting off the most talented modders and as for Wars in Skyrim? Well that modder completely gave up and I don't blame the guy, imagine seeing your hard work being undone so often. You get it right, then Blam... it's broken. You fix it and Blam! Broken again. Bethesda need to move on to a more sensible release schedule now the game no longer has any game breaking bugs, those have been fixed and so the little things can wait to be released as one giant bug patch once every two or three months because the Severity 1's are out of the way... all other fixes are nothing more than Severity 3 and I would even argue for the majority of them being Severity 4 and 5.

Such a scenario gives the modders confidence their big project plans can go out and be stable for a while, and when the next patch comes out they have time to fix it properly and another rest period until the next one. I also think the way Bethesda handle their Beta patches annoys the modders as well, they get to see the Beta and so decide to patch the mod accordingly.... and then Bethesda move the Beta patch into the 'Live' Status, however the 'Live' version is not the same as the Beta?!?!?!!?!? That means the Beta was not actually a Beta at all, it was an 'RC' (Release Candidate). All of the work patching their large mods was a waste, Beta's should always be the UA version (User Acceptance) and this is a practically one of those unbreakable rules in the professional industry. The final UA (Beta) version before 'Live' (also known as 'Production') should never have any differences in the coding. I doubt the final UA version to be tested by the Bethesda devs themselves is different to the Live version that is released, they should provide the same UA versions to the general public as and when they are available because the only reason we get to see them anyway is to notify them of any bugs they didn't pick up in their own offices. This must surely make some modders wonder if there is any point in making the big mods.

If it means releasing several new Beta's before the Live one, then so be it. This would potentially make more work for modder but because the previous Live version is left untouched for a Quarter, the pressure is off. He/she can tell people to stay away from the latest Beta's and thus get less complaints from mod users and it gives the modder confidence that come the day the Beta goes Live, his/her work might just be working great. Everybody is happy then and the modder can rest for a couple of months, he/she only need to tackle the Beta's on the third month of the Bethesda release cycle. It makes the whole experience of modding more pleasurable and virtually guarantee's these patches break as little as possible even in the Vanilla game as well. Literally, everybody is happy.

Glad to see we've all reached a conclusion then. It seems to be, not everyone agrees. One thing that's been overlooked is that we have learned a lot from Skyrim and Skyrim is on probation still. Just because you try a new car and find it to be flawed and a bit rubbish. Pull out the best bits and put them in the last good car you owned. In our case that's Oblivion. Not litereally, as in take stuff from Skyrim etc, but use the ideas from Skyrim such as the concept of meshes for mountains and so forth.

I am going to keep pushing on with Mesogea, and the saving grace is that all of the meshes and ideas, the distant land cliffs and so on can very easily be remade and ported into Oblivion as can the heightmap and tonnes of other stuff. Skyrim is worth the effort at the moment as third party workarounds are being made and improved.

One thing that's an absolute certainty is that this is a buyers market and if the buyers dont like it, the buyers stop buying it. Like the old adage of "if you like something you tell a couple of people, if you hate it you tell dozens" the same applies to a game. Whenever we are on the subject of Skyrim at work or elsewhere I give the same stock answer. "Its flawed, its ok for a bit of a play and it was worth the money for a punt, to see if I could mod it. I will tell you next year if I will buy another offering."

If we all took the same attitude it wouldnt be long before a lot more effort was made to fix what are quite pathetic issues. I mean LOD for one thing. One guy working alone could within a couple of months make Oscape that's infinitely better than the CK's lamentable and quite pathetic excuse for an LOD generator. Res ipsa loquitur.

Its about time we saw something more from Bethesda than we are. Once again we are in the same position of wondering what, if anything, they are doing. Its like deja vu waiting for the CK again.

In short, I think (notice the "I" and that does not mean "everyone should think" or "can I have feedback") that the game is great but the CK is not fit for purpose in its current state and that if Bethesda want to keep the good will and credibility they have rightfully cultivated over the years then they need to put in place some basic fixes. Texturing is good, new lands are good, its all good but what I dont understand is why texturers think texturing is fine on its own or world modders think all that matters is world modding etc. What matters is diversity and the ability to mod a variety of stuff.

Its this "I'm allright jack" attitude that whiffs at the moment. If you can do what you want in the CK then good, well done, I am happy for you. Now spare a seconds empathy for those who cant. If you're not interested, dont comment. If you want an argument, do what I did, get married and have kids.

If its in the CK it should work. If it doesnt it should be fixed. If it isnt going to be fixed it should be made very clear as early as possible so people dont waste time trying. Common human decency and respect to the buyer can be provided with no cost or effort. When it doesnt happen, that's the insult, not the flaws in the kit.

Personally (note this is my opinion again, so try not to get excited) I aim to carry on modding Skyrim and making fixes as well as seeking them. A lot will be done over the next months or years, with or without Bethesda so for the time being its worth trying.

Anyway rant over.

Next up are the Bethesda cheerleader gang who will say my opinion is rubbish because they have a differnent one. Its just my opinion, not an invitation to get excited.
pom poms please.

I would just like to see some More official and "constant" dialogue with some Bethesda employee that could speack as their voice for the modding community ...
They talk with every crap blog reviewer but don't spend much answering modders .... I understand that most of us may be just picky and annoying at times ... but hey some answers and a roadmap for what will or will never be fixed would help a lot , and actually let us know if we are doing a good job or we are wasting our time ... personally if I knew that I can't push foward my mod because of bugs that will Never be fixed , I woudl just stop and go modding cryengine ...

+1!

Anyway, I don't mind that much that we need to fix things ourselves occasionally and find workarounds. It appeals to the problem solver in me. I just wish that on the issues the community really can't solve themselves somehow, Bethesda would consistently jump in. Not even necessarily with a direct fix, but perhaps some explanation that might help making a fix ourselves. We have one helluva modding community, but not even the best programmers can reverse engineer everything.


That's all I wish for. Give the community a nudge when we're completely stuck. Sure, some will whine that Bethesda expects the modding community to fix the game for them, but whiners will always be there. I prefer they support us fixing things than that stuff is never fixed at all, like in many previous games.

First, you've got it backwards. Release candidates are farther along in development than betas (they are, believe it or not, candidates for full release!).

Second, with Skyrim so far, Bethesda have not once released to all users a patch that was different from the most recent preceding beta.

I must admit I'm not a modder but have been a very heavy mod user from Morrowind onwards and I am not expecting to see any major quest mods to appear until the autumn at the earliest. A good quest mod takes a serious amount of time to create, test and polish and as the game is what 6 months old, the ck even less so way to early in the games life cycle to expect that type of mod at the moment. At this stage in Oblivion life cycle the same thing was happening - graphic and tweaks dominating the mod releases - at least this time the levelling isn't too badly broken to stop me getting seriously annoyed with the game.

Patience is a virtue when it comes to good mods.

With nearly 17 years in the IT Industry, I can assure you the RC's are nowhere near UA level. And twice already the final beta version changed when it went live, while the Beta's fixed some things, the Live version broke others that the same Beta did not. It was the last two times actually and no matter how look at it, that can only be done through changing the code between final Beta and Live.

Actually this one got quietly fixed. I'm assuming with the last CK update. Which is part of the problem really. They fixed something a lot of us knew was broken, but said nothing, leaving us to wonder in silence until someone decided to try it again. Then it worked, but word of this spreads slowly.

New Vegas uses the same navmesh system, and is just as broken. Skyrim is the only game likely to get the fix too.

It isn't just things like Niftools that are hurting. Wrye Bash and TESVEdit too. Two of the most important pieces of the arsenal outside of the 3D modelling tools. Especially with all the nasty dirty edits the CK leaves behind, as always.

A list of form IDs that the CK inserts telling the game which ones have been overridden in the vanilla game. It was the method Bethesda chose to fix the ESM bug from Oblivion where editing Tamriel's landscape with another ESM caused nice big holes everywhere. The problem of course is we didn't get this functionality in the GECK or in the CK. It had to be provided by 3rd party tools, and generating these ONAM lists often required your whole load order to get processed for them.

======================

We're all in pretty bad shape until that navmesh bug gets fixed. With it still being around, there's not a lot of point in making anything of any susbtantial size because your NPCs and creatures won't be capable of actually navigating the areas. At least if you're talking about major edits to the Tamriel worldspace. Your own custom stuff works fine if you stuff it into an ESM, which is generally good practice for larger worldspace mods and for larger amounts of new interior cells. That's not a solution that's really of any value to smaller mods such as house mods or village mods in Tamriel.

All we can hope for is that whatever resolution Bethesda comes to gives us access to the proper tools to make it happen. If that means fixing navmeshes in ESP files, so be it (and this is what I personally want to see happen). If that means giving us a limited form of their version control code and the ability to save ESM files, so be it. Though if they choose this approach they'll need to stop the Workshop from butchering ESM files during upload. So that involves extra work on a component they don't have total control over.

Also for large worldspaces is essential a way to fix the problem of the Lods they just donpt load at the distance , and some get swapped textures like some nord buildings ... I do not understand how and why they still claim its the same tool hey used , it is not is just a capped version of their tool ....

Also another important thing is that we badly need a system to create collisions in 3dsmax , and nobody is working on improving or fixing the exporter...

Hey, well. Maybe we should say, "Bethesda, make your new DLC's you have planned with the tools we have. Ah... you can't? Why not?"

You are entirely wrong, and I'm not arguing about it.


Official DLCs have (since Fallout) been .esms, which don't have the NPC face data and navmesh bugs.

I do hope we can figure this one out.

It just kills the mood when my grey rocky mountains are ice-cream-swirl brown/white, and some of them look like dwemer buildings.

And that can't be done with the version of the CK we get, which is what Aoikani was getting at.

I have a little Insight probably on another side of things in this that isnt being looked at.

Im a Crew member of the Mod Deadly Dragons if youve been by the FOrums I can guarentee youve seen me hanging around there. Now then heres where I think Big project modding would succeed and where I would see that it would fail.

1st off Going off of DD Theres a reason I basically Stalk the Discussion board of DD. I have the Patience of a Saint. Not to toot my own horn or anything but THe way we have it set up is pretty decent In my opinion. 3Jiou deals with the mod and pops into the discussion board regularly as well 12edShift Is mostly out of the actuall Discussion but he handles the Readme and the Primary long description.

We all talk and coordinate with each other quite well and we have found our Little Niche in the place of Deadly dragons to keep it focused and improving with each patch and or update. And I think thats a integral part of the success in DD.

Using Wars in Skyrim for an example In My opinion there were 3 main things that made it finally fail and they were apparent there for a while.

#1. The Mod was expanding even when pieces of it were Riddled with bugs. When Alex added in Heros & Villans plugin there were bugs within the other Optional plugins that he had yet to remedy and fix. That continued past Heros and villans when there were even More plugins added. And in the end with 30+ plugins total at least 2/3rds of them were known to be Highly unstable.

#2. He did have a Crew Though I didnt really notice if they were really a crew or more Two people trying to help and then Alex going off on his own way. My Opinion stems to the Later due to back in Wars in Skyrim 2 when Pluto came in posting a few help tips Alex basically in a few words said either you do what I tell you to do with my Plans or Ill do my plans anyways and screw yoru mod if it conflicts.

#3 which is what I think was the primary reason for the crash and is related ot both #2 and #1. The Crew ended up leaving WIS. Inner mod fight or just other intrests drawing them away aside in the end 30 incredibly buggy esps for one person to handle would be too much for anyone.

In summery for big projects to be successful in my opinion is there cant be just one person working on it. Also there woudl need to be some kind of Crew setup. FOr DD its worked with each person having their task and then everyone getting together for brainstorming. There also needs to be and understanding of not everythign might be implemented how your mind views it but that there has to be the Forum also to state that Ideas are welcome and appriciated.

There are other examples of Highly Successful mods and unsuccessful ones out there Im sure My opinions and my knowledge are based with these two though.

I would love to see big projects out there adding to the game. I think its worth it there was a project that has since disappeared into the mists of a Morrowind Oblivion Skyrim merger of sorts where you could travel between the continents. That looked awsome alas it faded out. Newer quests would be nice Personally though I would think a Remaking of the Vanilla quests would be better first. Oblivion Dark Brotherhood was interesting and Each quest Gave the ability to gain a item that would otherwise be overlooked. Skyrims Dark Brotherhood is little more than Kill person at Point A gain money From point B Find person at Point C kill them and return to point B For money again. and after everything was said and done there really wasnt that big of a change.

You gained a new sanctuary yay but there was nothing outside of the occasional Guard that talked about the Death of the Emperor. The other Questlines were much the Same the Mages quest in Oblivion compared to the Minor Sidetrack of Skyrim left much to be desired for the Magic classes. There just seems to be some ideas that were started but never fully finished or done with the best foot forward.

^this^
there are going to be teams with patience and organization, and there are teams that wont.
basically there will always be a team like sure-AI [nehrim, cube experimental] and the guys working on the Andorran project. people with large teams that are well organized and have the patience and skill to use the tools available, even if they are a little funky.
bethesda looks like its fixing the navmesh issue among other things, its just not a priority this early in the games life,

imo fixing what got F###ed up in 1.5 is priority for me >< never had so many ctd on vanilla bethesda games before this one. this recent patch is screwy.

Bethesda are in serious danger however of really losing their grip. It only takes one bad game to sink a company and it only takes one period of pi&& poor reaction to serious problems in an otherwise good product (Skyrim only sells as long as there is continued interest in it) to make people look elsewhere. Once a customer base is lost, for whatever reason, it takes much more effort to pull them back in. Bethesda would do better financially to fix what they have already made than go chasing off after another rabbit before they have skinned, boned and cooked the first one.

Even the pom pom waving, Beth adorers have to accept that the vast majority of threads here are about "this is broken", "this needs fixing" and so on. That will very gradually change, but with absolute certainty to "I tried and I have had enough". Like dominoes, once a few fall, others follow and soon the forum will have one or two die hards lurking around.

This early in the games life is pretty crucial if they want sales to continue and to keep the positive publicity flowing. Games do not hold on in the charts when word of mouth gets out that 1) they are bugged 2) the bugs arent being fixed 3) the adaptation possibilities through mods and expansion content are thin on the ground or non existent and 4) people talk about them negatively.

A work colleague speaks of the game in very disparaging tones. He is adamant that this is the last TES he will buy as he has had so many bugs and problems, corrupt save games and the like that the game holds no enjoyment and he sees no hope in a fix. A cant disagree with him.

Lets see what the future brings and what Bethesda are made of.

My attitude is definitely I've tried and failed and have had it for now, but I recognize we are not near the final official patch, or seen any DLC.

Mods though - that is the truly messy bits.

I'm just not into starting new games every other mod update.

I await better official updates and better tools. What else is there?

Says it all really. So Bethesda, you taking a holiday again? any comment to make? as if.

Does it feel good to be this insulting to part of the user base, who by your own logic is NOT to blame here for the problems you're going on about?

I know you know better than this, considering you've been involved in the Oblivion scene for obscene amounts of time, just like I have. Bugged? Yep. Bugs not fixed? Yep. Adaption possibilities through mods thin? Not *NOW* but they were 6 months in to the game's initial lifespan. People talking about it negatively? Yep, never stopped, not even after 6 years have gone by.

And I'm pretty sure when TES VI comes along he'll be right there with the rest of us waiting to snap it up.

Let's face it, while it's probably somewhat healthy to vent our frustrations in this way, we all keep coming back game after game. I see nothing to indicate this will change considering every last complaint being fielded now has been fielded for each of the last 4 Bethesda has put forth. Skyrim will be no different.

I have a solution for that http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1368351-lod-works-im-creating-it-for-merp-at-full-lod/

Also, for the collision exporting, I'll be starting to see if I can possibly develop an exporter in mid June (after exams). No promises though, but I figure it would be a good way to spend my free time in the summer .