Saerileth

I'm glad to hear that. Dante has always done right by this community.

Wait, someone stole Gamwich's textures? Break out the pitchforks!

Gamwich is awesome... 'nuff said. You might want to include a fomod option without the pulsing effect on the full gems though. Personally I love them, and they certainly make it a lot easier to find the damn things in the dark, but I've been told they can be a bit distracting, especially with several of them in one place. I believe one person described them as "out-of-sync christmas decorations". ;)

I actually agree to that, but when you make reviewing a product your business (or at least secondary income), there is also nothing wrong with investing part of that compensation into the thing that allows to you review anything in the first place. And that means buying the product you are reviewing. Every major consumer magazine does it (unless they are provided with free samples voluntarily by the owner), I don't see why this shouldn't apply to mod reviewers. Just because most authors have so far chosen to ignore that they are the only ones not profiting from their own work does not mean that reviewers now have a right to lifelong free access to any and all mods. It doesn't work that way.

Still not okay, as he practically invalidates his own review - there is absolutely no guarantee that the mods he acquired are the genuine article. They may have been fakes, or deliberately flawed versions leaked by the author to spite pirates. The relatively elaborate review of Bleakden for example looks different from the screenshots that the original author uploaded to Steam Workshop, e.g. there is no clutter or decoration to be seen anywhere. Now it's perfectly possible (and most likely) that the author cherry-picked his screenshot locations to show off the few decent looking areas, but it's also possible that someone with an axe to grind gutted the mod before uploading it to the pirate site. And even if he did review the original, there is no justification for thievery (much as I like to play rogues in video games, I don't stoop to it in real life). This might be a special case because of the controversy surrounding the whole thing, but reviewers don't usually do what they do out of the goodness of their hearts or because of principle - they make money from ads, especially if they are on youtube. And mod authors see nothing of that money, the only benefit to them is a potentially favourable review. Stealing something and then trashing it ranks pretty high as far as dickmoves go in my opinion, since you're essentially making money off of something you stole, and then add insult to injury by making the author lose customers. There is no justification for that, no matter how bad you think the mod is.

I agree with most of the things that have been said about the whole thing here (we're getting to the point where pretty much every argument has been made several times over)... Hating mod authors that "sell out" is wrong, harassing and abusing them is even worse. Pirated and stolen content is an issue, even more so for modder's resources. The Steam workshop is ill equipped for modding in general, and catastrophically unsuited to selling them - regardless of what your ideology is concerning paid mods in general, the way the system is implemented at the moment it is bound to fail. It does not work this way, as mikegray demonstrated so generously by investing his time and money (I have the utmost respect for you by the way, most of us judge the system without actually trying it, so you are an invaluable source of information). One thing I object to though is the repeated claim that "they should have just made a donation option". The notion that that would fix everything, allow mod authors to get paid for their hard work and make everyone else happy - well consider this: there have been donation buttons on Nexus for quite some time now, and I've spoken to enough people to know that the amount of money most authors received over the years amounts to almost zip. Boris Vorontsov also accepts donations on his ENB page (he even publicly thanks every donator), and yet he nearly went bankrupt a few months ago due to family health issues. Now I realise that people can't afford to donate big sums of money, and let me assure you that no author would ever be offended by a small donation - every little bit helps! It's not so much the size of the individual donations, but the amount of donations made that is the problem. And it tells me that donations would not help the situation at all. People do not spend money on something when they don't have to. Or at least, very, very few of them do. That is just human nature. I'd say the one good thing that could have come from this whole mess is that maybe people donate a lot more now just to spite Valve - but honestly, I'll believe that when I see it. I also find it curious how often I read that "Valve/Bethesda divided a formerly united community". That is only partially true. I admire the STEP forums and have only ever been treated with the utmost courtesy here, but things were not so pretty over at the Nexus ever since the blocking function was introduced (and there was a reason it was introduced in the first place). And I am told things were much, much worse on the Steam Workshop comments even when all those mods were free, which is unsurprising given those forums are completely unmoderated. My point is, there has been a growing rift between an immature and self-entitled userbase, and mod authors that grow increasingly frustrated and cranky as a result. The have been multiple instances of modders leaving the community temporarily or for good because of this. In many ways, this is just the spark that a huge tinderbox of resentment needed to go "boom!". I'm not saying Valve didn't cause this entire mess in the first place, they still messed up big time, but sugar-coating and idolizing the state of our community is not helpful. We're all human.

You make some very good points keith, especially from an economic standpoint. Thanks you for an interesting read. I'd like to comment about the "I can't give a mod for free here on Nexus, and asking for money for the same mod on Steam" thing you mentioned. That doesn't necessarily have to come from Valve (and even if there is such a clause in their terms, I really doubt they'd bother enforcing it). It might also be from the modder's own volition, because can you really ask money for something on one platform, and give it away somewhere else? How would you feel if you spent money on something and only later found out that you didn't need to? Customers who miss the Nexus link for some reason could quite easily feel duped and complain. So I think it's more a question of good form, rather than a legal issue. A paywall with an optional (maybe not so easily visible) free link is not the way to go for a true "pay what you want" scheme, that's what donations are for.

I don't have anything new to add to the discussion of whether or not paid mods are a good thing (those who have seen the updates on my mod pages can probably guess which side of the fence I sit on), but there is one thing that I feel should be said. I see a lot of comments along the line of "paying for mods that only add a crap piece of armor / weapons / other visuals is ********, but mods like Frostfall and Wet & Cold are totally worth it because they add new systems to the game". Now, I kind of see the point when talking about quest mods, seeing as they add several hours of additional gameplay depending on the size of the mod. But with gameplay mods? How are they more worthwhile than cosmetic mods? Both add something new to the game, be it new features or a pretty 3D model. Note that I am not arguing whether or not it makes sense to pay money for cosmetic effects, that is a choice every user needs to make for himself and it really comes down to personal preference. Some people don't care about the appearance of their character's armour and weapons, others do. I merely object to the idea that visual mods are inherently not worth anything at all and that anyone charging for them is a money-grubbing basterd. Because let me tell you, creating 3D artwork (even just a retexture of Cabal/aMidianBorn quality) is probably more work than some script mods I could mention. I just spent the last 3 months modelling, rigging and animating a single character for a video game, and I'm not even done yet. This is by the way the reason why only big game companies produce epic AAA games these days, the sheer amount of work hours and artists required to produce the assets is staggering. One example that is getting a lot of negative feedback at the moment is the Shadowscale Armour that went up with the release of the new platform. Regardless of what people think of Valve, the mod authors in question or the price tag attached, the mesh itself is very high quality and looks to be professionally produced (in fact I get the feeling that Valve hired a team of artists to create it so they could use it as advertisement for the curated workshop). Comparing this mod to Immersive Armours is ludicrous, half of the meshes in Immersive Armours are amateur work and the rest are more or less successfully cobbled together from vanilla assets. And it shows. I'm not trying to bash the author's efforts in any way, his hard work is available for free after all and you don't look a gift horse in the mouth. But there's a difference between a mod author's best efforts and professionally produced assets using professional software, and I don't see why people claim the latter shouldn't be worth any money. It takes a lot of time, training and skill to produce something like the Shadowscale Armour, so even if you decide that you would never purchase an armour mod, at least give credit to the artist for their superb work.

For future reference, I usually include screenshots of all installation options with my fomod archives. They are taken in inventory, so even though ENB is active it has no effect on the items themselves, just the background. So that should count as vanilla lighting. There's also a video in the installation section of my page that shows every possible combination of options in motion (up to v1.2 only). I just uploaded v2.0 which makes a series of minor adjustments: - Most notably I added a bit of 3D detail to the cushion of Barenziah's Stone, so it is now actually elevated instead of perfectly flat. I found it just didn't look right with the normal map alone, especially when viewed from the side. - There is now also a subtle colour shifting animation on the gems themselves, similar to my work with Gamwich on his Rustic Soulgems. The stones slowly change from orange-red to a dark purple and back. The same animation is applied to the crown mesh, but it's even less noticeable there. - There was a missing shader flag on the outer gem layers that caused the gems to lose all highlights when near a shadow-casting light, this is the same problem that Madcat221 discovered with my jewelry meshes, I simply forgot to apply the fix to the Barenziah meshes before. - The new version also uses Tech's optimised FOMOD installer, thanks again for sharing. Note that the animated effect changes only the colours, it doesn't add glow intensity like the animated heartbeat in Gamwich's filled soulgems. As I said it's really subtle, but judge for yourselves ingame. If you really think it's too flashy for STEP I always keep my old versions in the download section, so you can stay with v1.2.

Yes.

No. The issue here is that as of version 2.8, RCI includes dragon claw meshes (and textures) with a different UV map than vanilla. For those unfamiliar with UVs, that's the layout of the textures - raiserfx scaled the entire texture to the left half of the file to make room for his own gem textures. Why he couldn't just separate the meshes and point the gems at custom textures the way I did is beyond me, but that's besides the point. The problem is that these textures still use the same texture path as the vanilla claw textures. The important bit here is that RCI 2.8 claw textures are incompatible with Gemling Queen meshes. In fact, they will only work with the meshes included in RCI 2.8. Now if you install my meshes, they do not include their own textures for the metal base (by design, I wanted to stay compatible to other texture replacers). When you install RCI 2.8, your mod installer of choice will report a conflict about the meshes, but it will simply install the RCI textures, because it doesn't notice the dependancy there. My meshes will expect claw textures in the vanilla texture path and will use anything it finds there, which incidentally happens to be the RCI 2.8 textures for S.T.E.P users. My meshes try to map the entire texture to the claws, not just the left half - it will not work right. If anyone still can't follow this explanation, just open the RCI 2.8 textures alongside the vanilla ones, you will immediately see the difference. I don't know how else to explain. To fix this problem, either a) don't use the RCI 2.8 claw textures (just delete them after install) - this will make the claws use ugly vanilla textures, b) use another replacer for the claw textures and install on top of RCI (you can even use the old RCI 2.7 textures, if you can find them) or c) wait for me to update my meshes to use raiserfxs weird UV layout.

I don't point the base claw textures at a custom directory, only the new gem parts (which didn't have a proper texture at all). So without RCI, the claws just use vanilla textures for the base. With RCI 2.8, those textures get replaced with something that has a completely different layout, which only works if you also use raiserfx's meshes. Either mod on it's own is fine, but without a compatibility patch using both will result in weird, mismatched textures on the metal bases.

I'll take care of a proper compatibility patch after my exam session, sometime in February. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Gemling Queen Jewelry has been updated with three new meshes from the Dawnguard DLC (replacing the Amulet of Bats, Ring of the Beast and Ring of Erudite meshes). Here are some screens: I don't know if the STEP guide would need to be updated for this, as the content is packaged into a new option in the fomod-installer. Also, there might be some debate on whether or not to include them in Core at all, since in addition to the improved geometry the gems also feature animated texture effects that aren't exactly faithful to vanilla. Specifically: - Ring of the Beast: swirling red specks right beneath the surface, befitting an implement of blood magic. - Ring of Erudite: slow, irregular pulsing and slightly shifting colours to hint at the magicka reservoir within. - Amulet of the Bat: malevolent twinkle in the back of the skull's eyes. All of these effects are fairly subtle and I think they fit in well with the lore of these objects, they transform the otherwise bland five-sided stones into something very unique. But that is of course a matter of personal taste, so I'll leave that up to STEP staff. I can't really post comparison screens for these, you'll have to check the animations out ingame. Also I might mention that I've taken some liberties in the vertex painting of the Ring of Erudite compared to vanilla, but I figured the original was limited by the low vertex count, rather than by design. Again, it's up for debate, just compare the two ingame. Oh, and I almost forgot - these new meshes are rigged to the ring finger of the right hand, rather than the index finger as the originals and virtually any other vanilla rings are. This was mostly out of necessity, since there is only a _1 mesh for rings (they don't react to the weight slider) this was the only finger my meshes wouldn't look strange on, either too small at 100% weight or too big at 0%. Vanilla solves this problem by simply letting the upper part of the ring clip slightly into the finger at higher weight, but that wouldn't work with the transparent insides of my gems. I think they look nice there, and it's not something many people will notice at all.

There's a problem with Ruins Clutter Improved v2.8 and my mod. The author changed the texture layout in his latest version, by scaling/moving all of the original parts to the left to make room for his own gemstone texture to the right. Using these together with my mod will result in claws with weird, mismatched patterns on them. For now I suggest installing the 2.7 version of RCI's claw textures on top of 2.8 when using Gemling Queen Dragon Claws, or not installing that component of RCI at all and using a different replacer for the textures. I'm working on a more permanent solution, but it'll take a while until it's ready.

Heh. Nexus staff may or may not even have noticed that I used part of Auriel's Bow in my mesh... if I hadn't asked them what the site policy was on the matter. I was curious. It backfired. But I guess a preemtive measure like that is better than having the mod taken down later. Besides, I'm too honest for my own good. At any rate, the issue is solved now, unless someone points out a weird visual glitch with my supposedly invisible purple bar even with Dawnguard installed. So, to bring us back to the actual purpose of this thread... do you guys think the non-Dawnguard version is close enough the the vanilla design to be considered for STEP core? The 50% option is almost exactly the same size as the original. I'd recommend 80% for anyone who opts for the DG edition though, the handle just looks weird on the smallest bottle.

There's a very fine line between "inspiration" and "copying". That's a harsh lesson I've had to learn as an aspiring artist... you can never be too careful about your sources.

It's a copyright issue. Essentially I'd be distributing Dawnguard assets to people who have potentially not bought it (since it works without it) and that could potentially make Bethesda very unhappy. Which is why Nexus won't host it unless the DLC is required. Mine is a bit of a special case since I modified the source material so heavily, I really doubt anyone would take it amiss. But Nexus is not taking any chances, and I can't say I blame them... it's just such a hassle for everyone else involved. Converting meshes / textures between other TES games and Fallout is prohibited for much the same reasons, by the way. That's why Skywind will refuse to install unless you have Morrowind and it's expansions, otherwise they'd be in one hell of legal trouble.

@Aiyen: technically the phial doesn't need any assets from Dawnguard directly, the parts of the bow mesh used in the handle are integrated into my own mesh obviously, and I also heavily modified the textures (different texture layout to fit elements of the bow and shield in, darkened everything to a more ebony look and added the frost), so I use my own paths for all of that anyway. The problem is, the source material is still from the Dawnguard DLC, and Nexus policy states that I cannot publish those without making the DLC a requirement. Which is how this whole mess started. @Octopuss: I can't wait for a chance to throw badgers at them :P The update is live, complete with a shiny new fomod installer. If someone with the Dawnguard DLC could please test if they see anything out of order with the new meshes, that would be awesome... I'm pretty sure it works as expected, but Skyrim can be finicky at times.

Thanks Aiyen :) Been taking some screens of the naked bottle (I love messing around with Serenity's DoF), and I've decided I quite like the little upward curve. You're right, symmetry is highly overrated. There is one good thing that came from all of this - I was so annoyed at the constant nagging about the blank .esp that I put my mind to devising a way to get rid of it (once I got over my tantrum), and I actually came up with something! The idea is pretty simple, I just added an extra bit of geometry to the mesh that is linked to a totally transparent spot on a Dawnguard texture. As long as the DLC is loaded, the cube will be completely invisible. But try to use it without the DLC installed, and the game will no longer know the texture is supposed to be transparent - you get a bright purple bar across the middle of the mesh. Here's what that looks like: I think that qualifies as "requires the DLC to function properly", so I can safely remove the .esp and everyone's happy. Except for the first idiot to complain about the purple bar because they didn't read the description... that person certainly won't be happy when I'm through. Gotta run some more tests to make absolutely sure the box is not visible for Dawnguard users, but looking good so far.

Oh, I'll just sparkle my way out of court :D Thanks for cheering me up, guys. :) I think I like the 80% version best. The "naked" version didn't turn out as bad as I'd though, somehow it makes the design look a lot slimmer. It's not perfectly symmetrical though, here is a slightly weird upslanting angle along the base of the bottle on one side, where the handle used to be - changing that would be way too much work, so I'll leave it.

Non-DLC version and optional scaled down bottles are out. The smaller variants are manual installation only at the moment, if someone here feels like making a fomod installer for them (preferably with screens) I'd appreciate it, right now I just do not have the patience myself. And if I get one more comment about "why u have useless .esp?!" I'm about to bite someone. I get that they don't mean ill, but is it so hard to read a friggin sticky post? It's frustrating to no end, I didn't ask for this.

*sigh* Very well, I'll make a handleless version one of these days, along with the size variants. Though it doesn't look like it'll be STEP core material anyways. And on the off chance that it is, I insist that you stick a note on it somewhere that a prettier version is available for people who own Dawnguard. About the "DLC promotion"... honestly I think the fact that Skyrim is as moddable as it is is friggin awesome, at any rate Bethesda certainly didn't have to make it so easy for us, or publish an entire Wiki along with their CK. Using that generosity against them and suggesting it was only greed on their part is pretty miserly. Whatever the motivation, the DLCs have been on sale so much lately, they're practically giving them away for free. But let's agree to disagree, shall we?

None of which implies that the phial cannot have a metal handle...

Lore does not technically state that it's forged from those ingredients, that's just what Quintus repairs it with if I understood correctly (and look what a great job he does with that in the vanilla design, none of the other parts of the bottle look like medieval duct tape). The only thing I gathered about the original bottle from the conversations with Nurelion and his apprentice is that the phial is said to have been "made of the magically infused snow that first fell on the Throat of the World". I agree that my design is too far from vanilla to fit the core mandate, but it is as lore-friendly as I could make it. I've spent a lot of time researching this item and anything known about it's creator. About the size, it is rather large I agree. I was going to release optional smaller versions once I get some other stuff done.