DocClox

Wow. That is very nice indeed. It drops my FPS from 61 to 35, but nice nevertheless. It even works with night-eye spells which I wasn't expecting. Decisions, decisions ...

... you catch yourself looking at a pond in real life and thinking "gosh, that water looks realistic". Yeah, I got that. Driving into work, I saw some yellow flowers by the side of the road concentrated on them, then wondered why they didn't disappear into my inventory.Just so long as I don't start swerving to try and catch butterflies ...

I think one of the recurring themes of the Elder Scrolls games is that the PC quests to become a being of near godlike power. In Morrowind the Nerevarine kills at least one God and (depending on how you play the game) is capable of leaping from one end of the map to the other in a single bound and similar godlike feats. The Champion of Cyrodil defeats Umaril the Unfeathered and Jyggalag and before assuming the mantle of Sheogorath. Even the Dragonborn, possibly the least powerful of TES protagonists[1], manages to defeat Alduin World-Eater, a feat worthy of legend. I have no problem with any of these people being able to forge a better blade than many of the gods :) [1] I've not played Arena or Daggerfall however, so I may be wrong.

Interesting question. I don't think comparing 1 & 2 with 3 and NV is really a fair comparison. They're very different games and each excellent in they're own way. Choosing between one and two is tough. FO2 was the first of the series I encountered, and I have great nostalgia for the game. Looking back though, I think some of the elements felt a little forced in comparison to Fallout. It's a slight thing, but if I had to choose, I'd choose FO1. For 3 and NV, I'd go for FO3 every time. I prefer the music, the setting, the characters, pretty much everything really. Which I find odd in some ways: Obsidian has a lot of the original Fallout series devs I believe and in a great many ways NV is a better Fallout than FO3 ever was. The deathclaws and radscorpions are again the terrors I remember from the original games; the setting is more akin to that of the originals, the super mutants more nuanced rather than the stereotypical thugs of the Capital Wasteland. So why don't I enjoy it the most? I've talked to some hardcore Fallout fans who assume that Bethesda didn't entirely understand the cannon, and basically got it wrong. I tend to think that where they compromised on Fallout lore, they did it based on experience of what worked well and what didn't in a Gamebryo based environment. I think NV is a better Fallout, but I think FO3 is a better game. Certainly it's the one I enjoy the most.

I'd have though so. You'll need to point the path for your game install folder at the right place, but otherwise I'd expect it to be ok. Best thing though is to try it.

The crash seems to have eaten my update, so briefly: rolling back my "silly" mods and running with a sensible profile didn't clear the problem. Furthermore a similar symptom manifested when I tried to run Bodyslide through MO: I got the logo and an MO process running in the background, but the bodyslide app never launched. Rolling back to the stable version of MO made the problem go away. The ILS problem seems to have been related to the mods I was running (and in particular some script bloat from one of them) rather than MO.

I'm getting a weird one, and trying to narrow it down a little. What happens is that I get an ILS. Then when I try to restart MO it gives me the splash, but then nothing. The process is running, but I never get a window. I can kill MO and it'll sometimes restart, but I've seen errors accessing parts of the data folder afterwards, and on one occasion the SSD where Skyrim and MO live disappeared entirely. Sometimes it takes a cold boot before I can get MO to launch again. Although killing the stalled MO process and then starting Skyrim outside of MO seems to help. I should add that MO is not the only suspect here. I had a mod loaded that makes a lot of changes to whiterun and kicks off a lot of scripts in the process, to say nothing of Interesting NPCs and EGO (this is a "messing around" game, not a "serious play" game :)). It's only the filesystem weirdness and the fact that I'm using the MO beta that makes me wonder. So: anyone had a similar experience? [edit] Probably unrelated, but running Script Scalpel through MO to try and diagnose the issue, I had a problem where SS couldn't find a BSA and crashed. The BSA was there, but MO had unpacked it but wasn't able to remove it for some reason, while SS wanted to read it and couldn't. As I say, probably unrelated, but chimes with "general filesystem strangeness"

Damn! So Rob would still be alive if I hadn't sent him that email? /me hangs head in shame

I think the first one, "A Game Of Thrones" is my favourite. I didn't enjoy the second one much, mainly because I was still expecting it to conform to the format of the stereotypical fantasy epic. It wasn't until Rob Stark met his end that I realised that we weren't in Kansas any more. Once I realised that ... they're all excellent books. But the first one is still leading the pack. Although A Dance With Dragons gave it a run for its money. I just hope he gets the next one out the door in less than ten years. Old George RR isn't getting any younger.

On the other hand, I have a pet peeve for ENB creators who don't show some dark shots. Like one at night, one domestic interior and one dungeon. I don't mind if a dungeon is as black as the hobbs of hell, but when I can't navigate around Breezehome without a canlight spell, you have to wonder what is the point.

I like the way you think, Spelly. I tend towards the Harry Flashman School of Adventuring myself :) I'm not sure the sneak tools wouldn't make life a bit too easy on my setup, although the Deadly Combat mod the author recommends probably goes some way to offset that. The blackjack is a nice find though. I've been looking for something along those lines for a while.

That's fair. If anyone wants to argue the toss, I'll be happy to talk about it over in Banter Inn :)

Well, first and foremost, I'm definitely not arguing in favour of sexual content in STEP. I don't personally think that optional nudity would be a terrible thing, but then I'd be equally happy if STEP kept everyone's undies on at all times. On the subject of immersion though ... my first Beth game was Fallout 3. I got out of the vault, found my way to the Springvale High School and got attached by raiders that I managed to dispatch. Then following long ingrained gaming instinct, I looted the bodies - to find that all these grubby raiders with their scruffy cobbled-together armour were wearing spotless brand new sports bras and undies. Now that was immersion breaking to my mind. I'll grant that violence is going to be a part of life in Skyrim, but presumably so is sex (or else there'd be no-one there to commit all the violence). And while I can certainly appreciate that many people aren't interested in aspect of the setting, for others it's omission is every bit as jarring. Now this isn't to say that some of the models kicking around aren't unrealistic for the setting, because they surely are. And it isn't to say that some of the screenies kicking around out there aren't weird and freaky and completely out of place given the setting, because they surely are. But that doesn't mean that adult content can't be produced that respects the setting and the lore. I mean the island of Westeros isn't that dissimilar to Tamriel, and look at Game of Thrones - nothing there that probably wouldn't have really gone on, and nothing that wouldn't fit in Skyrim, really. And like you say, personal opinion. :)

See, to my mind, by that logic you'd want to take the violence out of the game so you could, I don't know, read autopsy reports maybe. Or go watch boxing matches with real human beings. And instead of all that distasteful imperial-vs-stormcloak intrigue, you could go and listen to political debate Really, I'm not sure there'd be much of the game left if we take argument to its logical conclusion.

it might be that you have a category ticked, or a filter set. That will hide the overwrite folder. I've been caught like that myself :)

My all time favourite TES character was in Morrowind. I had this Nord lass called Hildy who pretty much developed a mind of her own. She got out of customs at Seyda Neen and decided she didn't like being told what to do. So she walked straight past the silt strider, and kept on going, stumbled across Vivec didn't much like the look of the place, and in the end, she didn't really stop until she hit Sadrith Mora. Where she fell in love. It wasn't anything I'd planned. But you had this little Nord girl whose idea of sophistication was singing Ragnar the Red in a smoky tavern, and here she is presented with this impossibly alien city unlike anything she'd ever imagined ... and she just had to be a part of it. And so most of that play through centered on Hildy's attempts to make a place for herself in House Telvanni. Always trying to solve problems with her hammer, only learning the minimum magic needed to progress; never really "getting it", but desperately wanting to belong. I think she got as far as Mouth before something horrible happened to the save game and I had to abandon the character. I like to think she went on to set up shop at Uvirith's Grave and eventually earn the respect of her fellows. Every now and then I try and recreate the character, but somehow it's never quite the same :)

I have a dark elf illusionist called Ashley somewhere. She got to around level 145, no uncapper needed, although I did rather abuse the "Legendary" skill mechanism. Basically she got the Illusion Master skills and enough buffs to reduce the cost of illusion spells to near zero, then rolled the Illusion skill back to 15, wandered into Fort Greymoor and started chain casting Harmony. You can get three skill raises per cast at 15 skill, so you get back up to 100 quite fast. Then roll it back and repeat. You need to keep the illusion perks, but the extra levels generates plenty of extra perk points. Also exploited alchemy somewhat; Hearthfire greenhouse to grow paralysis precursors, sell the potions, add perks to alchemy and speech, and when the money starts rolling in buy grand souls and work on the enchanting. That being how I got the illusion buffs in the first place. now I think on it.

Wotcher All. Kudos on all the good work going on around here. Skyrim player, occasional modder and sometime indie games dev here. My Skyrim modding efforts have mainly been over on LoversLab, so probably not very relevant to STEP. At least not unless you massively reconsider what constitutes acceptable content for a STEP pack anyway. I ah... I shan't bother holding my breath whilst waiting ;) I generally prefer to keep my RL persona separate from my modding one, but I answer to "doc" if that helps :)