Welcome back everyone. I'm still feeling a little allergic, but the worst of the pollen has passed and the landscapers have moved on to greener (or at least more overgrown) pastures. Today we'll continue working on the creature integration, but to do that we'll need to swerve a bit into the world textures. Why? Because Dwarven machines share there texture set with a lot of architectural stuff.

 

Still, you might be asking, wouldn't it be easier for me to just grab the dwarf textures and worry about other stuff later? Well... it's complicated. During the 1900 build, I put together a tightly integrated texture blend from many different sources, all set up with very careful overwrites and with select files hidden to avoid conflicts. In addition to purely dwarfy mods, I have things like texture overhauls for Markarth and glow mapping overhauls that all touch the dwarven textures. Therefore, I'm going to want to drop in the texture replacers as a block to avoid any weirdness. At that point I'll also need to rerun Texgen and DYNDOLOD to make sure there aren't any defective files hidden in those packs (and of course, to update the look of the LODs).

 

Before I dive into that, let me take a moment to share some progress on my Gellerpox Infected. I've been putting a little time into these each day, slowly building up the detail and nuance on them. They're pretty complex models on that score, and I still have a lot of work to do, but they've certainly reached the stage that I could take them down to the hobby shop for a game. I figure by this time next week they should be done. 

 

 

I've been experimenting with some new techniques and resources on these guys, such as color-shifting paints, pearlescent glazes, and using resin dye as an alternative to traditional inks. I can't say I've had 100% success, and I definitely had a bunch of times when I had to re-do things, but in general it's been a positive learning experience. The reason I picked these up is because my wife and I are planning to try out Warhammer 40k 10th edition when it comes out later this year, and we wanted to have at least minimal armies ready to play when it launches. Right now she's leaning towards Orks and I'm probably going to play Death Guard, just based on what minis we liked the most, but that might change after the new rules drop and we can get a feel for how they play. 

 

Getting back to Skyrim, let's take a look at the condition of the old texture stack. 

 

...

 

So this is a big folder, containing about 300 mods. We're going to pick through these and only pick out the ones that contain material and architecture topics. Surely we will dip into the others in the future, but I'm not worried about having conflicts against those ones. I filtered that big list down to about 100 mods that deal with architecture and broad-based environmental topics. This should represent the extended set of overrides for any textures involved with Dwemer Ruins subjects. I omitted any snow or ice related mods because the ENB already came with recommended assets for these subjects and if I dip into my old enhancements for those areas it'll be a separate, more focused effort some time in the future.

 

After trimming the list to today's subject matter, I went through and looked at the mods for any conflicts that might be overriding newer mods I selected specifically for this build. That's mostly Falmer stuff coming off yesterday's work. I kept, tailored, or disabled these mods on a case by case basis. 

 

 

Now let's take a quick walk around the game world. I especially want to see how Markarth looks to make sure nothing is janky or mis-textured. Oh, but before we do that, let's also regenerate LOD, LOD textures, and DYNDOLOD. If individual textures come up with problems, I'll probably just hide them or deactivate their parent mods rather than have a huge fight with them. 

 

 

Pfft here we go... OK, I guess I need to look up this LTEX record and then trace it to the problematic mod. 

 

 

I was a little concerned when this traced back to a mature and widely used mod like Noble Skyrim, but fortunately the issue actually turned out to be a false alarm: the real issue was that I was running TES5LODGen as a background process and that was causing issues with the virtual file system. Letting it remain in focus resolve the issue and successfully output the LODs. The rest of the tools ran fine, though DYNDOLOD did remind me that I have some cleanup to do with the files once this build reaches a more complete state. Fortunately, none of these issues are game breaking and don't have to swerve us onto immediate action today.

 

 

Now that DYNDOLOD is updated, we can do our tour. We're going to visit a few places today -- 

 

• Markarth
• Markarth museum
• Solitude
• Soul Cairn

 

I'll probably also do a little bit of wandering just to take in the sights. I'm hoping that this will do little more than generate some good screen shots, but if I see issues I'll need to take note and begin corrective action.

 

 

My much-loved inner roof textures are back  

 

 

In general, the Silver-Blood Inn looks good, but I need to keep an eye on the dwemer doors. They seem a little glowy relative to the rest of the scene. I might need to look for an alternate option if this disrupts the visual look of darker areas like dungeons. 

 

 

MarkarthWorld looking good and maintaining high (>100) frame rates.

 

 

Understone keep looks great, but Ghorza has black face bug, which we need to investigate. This is probably another artifact of me failing to clean out the facegen folder before regenerating it  

 

 

The textures in the museum look good.

 

 

Solitude retex working well and delivering high FPS.

 

 

Spooky Soul Cairn. After visiting here I went to COC to Riften but crashed out with an SMP bug. Only like the 6th or 7th CTD total since I started this build, so I can't complain too much, but I do need to get to the bottom of those SMP failures at some point.

 

 

Riften and environs. Note how in the first image the SMP wind FX are working on my character's hair.

 

 

And the volcanic caldera adjoining Windhelm. Also looking really sharp, and with FPS floating around 70-80, still above my objective line. So I think we can definitely 'declare victory' on the transfer of the architectural textures and the DYNDOLOD refresh. 

 

OK, that was a fun tangent, but let's get down to business with the dwarven automata. But after all that work, it was kind of an anticlimax... the texture mods I ported over were the bulk of the Dwemer enhancements out there. What's left were a couple of skeleton mods and a bunch of sound mods. They're from Satafinix, a guy who does very high quality work, but screen shots don't exactly convey his improvements, right?

 

 

OK, how about Draugr? Well, this is another case where I already have most of what I want from a previous build, but I need to update a number of files. I won't be installing any substantial content expanders like things that add new weapon or armor types or new Draugr variants... not yet, at least. So we'll be focusing on updating the stuff that's already in the game.

 

We'll use Kajuan's Draugr texture mod as a foundation, then pile on Cannibal Draugr in Solstheim, Draugr Weaponry SE (replace version), and Ancient Nord Stalhrim. Finally we'll grab Haugbui to wrap up the Draugr experience. Let's take a quick run though a few relevant areas to see how the new content looks.

 

 

Looks good!

 

That just leaves dragons on the menu for today, and I'm torn between two different options: Diverse Dragons Collection and Elemental Dragons. There are a lot of aspects of ED that I like, such as the different body shapes and the imaginative attacks. DDC has many of these elements as well, but a bit toned down. Importantly, however, DDC uses a much less intrusive approach to the overall game, with fewer AI changes and large-scale cloak spells. DDC also has a reputation for being more stable. Since I'm aiming for a lighter-weight playthrough, we'll go with Diverse Dragons Collection this time.

 

On the topic of dragons, let's also get the JS Dragon Claws mod installed. Its patches don't help me yet, but I really like the way this mod looks and want to get it in place at least for the vanilla content. We'll also hide some conflicting assets from Ruins Clutter so we don't miss out on any of the new claws.

 

 

Finally, we grabbed a couple of peripheral enhancer mods for dragon encounters to smooth out and improve the gameplay experience.

 

 

And with that, I think we are done for today. While there are still some critters I haven't touched yet, we've got the most important ones out of the way and in the process we've taken care of a major texture update that I had been sitting on for quite a while. I have a few different 'next steps' that I can take, such as starting to work on interior improvements or acquiring overhauls for vanilla quests. I'll think on that and get rolling with the next blog soon