Well, it's May. Pollen is in the air. Neighbors are mowing their lawn (I guess they missed the memo about not mowing early in the the growth season to protect the pollinators ). My eyes are swollen up, my tear ducts are itchy, and I have a constant low-level headache. So as you can probably guess, I'm not going to be writing a lot of eloquent prose this time. However, I wanted to keep everyone up to date on how the build is going.

 

Today I focused on overhauling the monsters in the game. That took a few forms:

 

• Direct texture improvements and mesh enhancements
• Bugfixes
• Indirect improvements such as behavioral and animation changes

 

The last one is particularly important. Since I'm going to be keeping NSFW creature animations to zero (or at least the bare minimum), I don't need to worry about preserving the More Nasty Critters skeleton. This lets me use a number of Rougeshot's skeleton extenders for critters, which ought to make the creatures look a lot nicer. I'm also trying out fluffworks, which I've had my eye on for quite a while but haven't actually used before. All in all, I've got quite a few additions to the mod list - and I haven't even touched dwarven stuff, draugr, most animals (except for collateral effects of installing fluffworks), or dragons yet!

 

 

I don't think I'll have time to test all of these, but let's walk around a bit so we can at least see a few of these new critters in action. I'm particular interested in seeing how the fluffy beasts look, and I may end up taking a walk to High Hrothgar just to put eyes on the frost troll that consistently spawns there. We'll go ahead and turn on god mode so we can just blast through any enemies we encounter.

 

 

Our initial destination looking scenic in the distance. 

 

 

SMP hair, ENB grass. Both looking good. 

 

 

Everything looked good in Bleak Falls. Ambient lighting was kind of strong in the first stage of the dungeon, and I need to investigate to see if maybe the top level cell data is screwy, but its also possible that since its a tutorial zone its deliberately set to be more forgiving. Now let's COC to Ivarstead and go check out the frost troll. 

 

 

Rift guard looking good in his GAR outfit.

 

 

Troll looks good and animates good. Excellent. How about some of the other monsters?

 

 

Hagravens are working.

 

 

Falmer are working, but they're all spawning as female. I need to investigate this as it could be the result of a leveled list problem.

 

 

In the meanwhile, I found the cause of the unusually bright lighting in Bleak Falls' first stage. I had inadvertently overwritten the top level cell data with a random mod. So that's fixed now. As for the leveled lists, let's take a look at the Falmer NPCs. Poking around, the low-level random spawns should be mostly male. So its possible that the PSBoss female mod is overwriting the wrong body nif.

 

 

And in fact, that's exactly what's happening. Two of the generic male Falmer bodies are getting overwritten in addition to the 'falmer_female' and 'falmer_female_01' nifs. In a higher level game (indeed, in a game where the player is meeting Falmer at the intended level for encountering them - in the 20s) this won't be a problem because body types 3-6 will balance this out. I do actually want non-shaman females to appear in the game, so totally hiding all of these is an overkill solution. Moreover, the falmer_female meshes may in fact be unused in vanilla as after a lot of searching I still can't find anything that's using them. 

 

On consideration, I think I'm going to dump PSBoss's Falmer mod. That mod is presented as having the shamans be less degenerated and more like Snow Elves. But the way its implemented isn't meeting my needs and I'm not in the mood for hand-patching it to work the way I want. Instead, I'll just rely on Falmer by Kajuan and Lore-friendly Armored Falmer to meet my needs in this area.

 

I think that's about what I have the mental energy to handle today - in our next session, I'll keep filling in the gaps in the creature roster. As I mentioned before, dwarven machines, draugr, and dragons are all still on the menu, along with some less exciting critters (notably, there are some animals that got mesh improvements from fluffworks, but still need texture overhauls).