Monthly Archives: May 2013

Games, Rant, TES: Skyrim, Tutorial

My Experiences Navmeshing

Leave a comment

Yesterday, I encountered an interesting bug involving Delphine. She tried to make the Steadfast Dwarven Spider a member of the Blades. It was slightly hilarious watching her march up to the spider and administer the oath to a mute automaton. Lucky I had just saved, so I stopped Delphine from usurping my loyal mechanical follower and reloaded. … then she tried to usurp my dog. Sigh.

Anyway, today’s topic is Navmeshes. This isn’t a tutorial though, so much as a rant.

I remember doing routing in levels I had made for Oblivion. They often took a long time and was very fiddly and irritating in some respects. Or so I thought. I take back everything I may have ever said about Oblivion’s pathfinding system as the past several days have been filled with me trying to get reacquainted with creating levels after dabbling around with it when the CK first came out.

Damn the navmeshing system. Damn it to the Eternal Deadlands!

I’ve spent three days trying to tweak and improve the navmesh in this little farm mod I made for my own use. If it isn’t sunburst style inefficient meshing problems because of the large expanse I’m trying to cover, it’s the autogenerator placing vertices floating up in the air.

On top of it all, I can’t seem to get my followers to actually use the trap door, or the trap door to get a green triangle in front of it so they can. It’s been a frustrating, irritating project.

And the damn thing is only one room. One. Room. With about 60 pots of soil to grow alchemy ingredients in. I thought about releasing it for some few moments while building it. At least, I did until I started the navmeshing! For some inexplicable reason, I can deal with importing and exporting the super-fiddly nif files and edit them in Blender, but can’t do a flippin’ navmesh to save my life.

Criminy.

I’m half tempted to just let the followers float around in midair for no reason and walk all over the top of my potted plants… they’re resilient plants, right? Canis root is a stubby kind of bush anyway. Maybe it’ll prick the bottom of their feet.

AND THEN. And then, I discover that there’s been a navmesh bug in the game with ESP files where the NPCs will stop moving around after you leave, and has apparently been since the navmesh system started being used back with Fallout.

I have no idea how to convert to an ESM file (yet).

I’m having some serious doubts on starting my big mod, the Kenzeft Project… it needs custom levels for the quest line.

At this point, AAAGH. I need something to go right! For once! Just once!

Games, TES Lore, TES: Skyrim

Playing through Skyrim: Why You Should Side with the Imperials

Leave a comment

PSA: This is a video game blog. This is about a video game and the sociopolitical structure in said game. If you are here from truthstreamedia would you can kindly get the fock out of my gaming blog right now. It has nothing to do with any real live governments and everything to do with my opinions on a plot point within a game I enjoy playing. Thank you. – Zen

#1 reason why you shouldn’t side with the Stormcloaks: Ulfric Stormcloak is a brainwashed sleeper agent for the Thalmor.

No. Seriously. It says this in the game. If you play through the main quest and go to the Thalmor Embassy, there are several dossiers you can pick up in the torture chamber, one about Ulfric. If you lost or sold those on your play throughs of Skyrim without reading them like I did at first, go create a new character and go through the quest, and read it this time. Also, pay attention to the Thalmor Embassy and the fact that it has a torture chamber. Which implies that the Thalmor are into some pretty serious party games.

Nobody likes the Thalmor. At least I’m fairly sure that nobody in the game likes the Thalmor except the Thalmor and maybe certain Khajiti groups. I’m willing to bet that nobody who has ever played Skyrim, even as an Altmer, likes the Thalmor. They’re arrogant, rude, corrupt, and cruel. And insidious. As if having a torture chamber underneath the Thalmor Embassy, where Elenwen and her minions torture men and women whose only crime was worshiping a deity they didn’t approve of wasn’t bad enough, there is ample evidence to suggest that the Thalmor were behind Ulfric’s rise to power in the first place. Point being: the dossier and Ulfric’s own comments on the death of his father, the former Jarl of Windhelm, while he was a prisoner.

The idea was for the Thalmor to covertly destabilize the Empire by inciting rebellion in Skyrim and keeping the rebellion going for as long as they could, to weaken the Empire’s resources throwing it away in a war that would in the end, a bitter victory or defeat either way. It seems to me that the Thalmor were hoping that with extremely high causalities in the Stormcloak war, the Empire would be far better pickings afterward.

Personally, I think the Thalmor offered Emperor Titus the White-Gold Concordat because they were actually far more vulnerable and had heavier losses than they wanted to admit. They were fighting a war on several different fronts, and it obviously had taken great effort to take the White-Gold Tower in the first place. By offering the Concordat, they wouldn’t have to keep an occupying force in Cyrodiil while their efforts in Hammerfell continued and were costing them a great deal of resources in the meantime. The mer races are crafty, long lived people, and tend to think and plan for the long term. If they were planning another Aldmeri Dominion that occupied the entire continent, it would have taken a lot more maneuvering than the White-Gold Concordat. In my opinion, there was absolutely no reason to offer that treaty if they already had the Empire by the balls.

If you need any more reason to rethink joining the Stormcloaks, let’s dig into Ulfric’s racism a bit. He hates anything non-Nord. Several people in game repeatedly say this in his own city, from Ambarys Rendar to Brunwulf Free-Winter. He treats the people under his protection as second-class citizens and ignores their complaints. The Argonians get the worst of the lot because they’re not even allowed inside the walls, and I would mention the Khajit except that nobody in Skyrim likes them, and that would be unfair. Any leader worth having would try to better life for all the citizens. Instead, Ulfric is far too focused on his rebellion to even pay attention.

Ulfric’s ideals behind the entire campaign, while sort of understandable, cannot be justified in the way he executed them. The Empire had to sign the treaty in order to survive to fight another day, yet he is angry about that. He continuously refers to the Empire and all the Jarls that supported the decision as milk-drinkers, inferring that they are weak. Yet, it is a wise leader who knows when to quit. If he thinks that the way to a strong Skyrim is by standing alone and standing up to the Thalmor, without the aid of their Imperial and Breton brethren, that’s damned well going to get every single Nord under his command killed. Ulfric is forgetting that ancient proverb, “divided we fall.”

The murder of High-King Torygg also sticks in my mind quite a bit as the actions of a man not honestly taken with his ideals, but one that is merely using them for his own gain and to inspire others to support him in his agenda. A boy that became King too soon, one that had held Ulfric with respect, and had not seen much of battle, slain by someone twice his age and a veteran of several wars, only to prove a point. To kill a King is not going to create a Skyrim that is strong, it only destabilized it, and then Ulfric felt free to say “Skyrim is weak.” I’m willing to bet it was fine before Ulfric came along and made it weak.

What, exactly, did Ulfric go through when he had been captured by the Thalmor and tortured during the war? Is this outburst across the whole of Skyrim just a symptom of his own guilt? Ulfric’s Dossier from the Thalmor Embassy reads that the Thalmor led him to believe that some of the information he broke and gave to them was instrumental in taking White-Gold Tower. It’s a fair thing in my mind that the answer is yes, and his intense desire to stand up to the Thalmor is because he was a broken man.

Taking these things into consideration, it’s quite reasonable to say that Ulfric was just as much a victim of the Thalmor and circumstances as Torygg was, and that’s probably true. However, in real life, someone who was abused or had some sort of previous trauma that led to his eventual negative actions is never exonerated on that justification and is still held responsible for those actions. I feel this should be the case here. Despite what may have happened to him, Ulfric would still topple the Empire for no good cause. The Nords were not being oppressed except by the Thalmor, and in fact did most of the oppressing of the other races in Skyrim, and all they had to do was hide Talos better until the day came when the Empire regained its strength. I understand the desire to worship whom you please, but that was never part of Ulfric’s agenda; it was to “free” Skyrim and in a way himself of the influence of the Aldmeri Dominion, and crown himself King. And then the Thalmor would have a king on the throne that they could manipulate.

I think it’s more fun to play the Imperial side, anyway, because then I can imagine the hell that would break lose when those veteran armies of combined former Stormcloaks and Imperial Legion march on Valenwood and the Summerset Isles.

Games, TES: Skyrim, Tutorial

Adventuring in the Nif – Homecoming

1 Comment

I hadn’t intended on writing a Part 8 to this series, but after setting down the blog and starting the journey over from scratch, let me tell you: it took only an hour or two this time.

I imported the fresh mesh to edit, flattened the chest out again, and this time edited the UV map. It had been a while since I’d done a UV map, so I lingered on that part getting the texture to flow smoothly again. It didn’t require much tweaking because it had only deformed slightly.

When I was done, I went through the process to export it. For a while there I had some trouble getting Blender to import a clean skeleton- for some reason it kept importing a dirty skeleton no matter how many times I closed it out. Either way, I got it working again, and exported my Plate Take 2 mesh.

It worked perfectly! Well, almost perfectly. The ankles and wrists no longer were intensely huge. I tried the mesh out in Skyrim, running, jumping, and walking, with a few other poses, and it- hmm. It was doing that stretching clipping on that flappy skirt thing the plate armor has.

clippging

I knew what the problem was. The bone weights were off, so I went back and redid the mesh a little bit so the weight painting wasn’t so red- I created a smooth transition along the flappy thing. Exported, and tested it out. It was better, but there was still something wrong with it…

To have a basis of comparison, I exited Skyrim and removed the edited mesh. Then I loaded it back up and watched how the default plate armor moved. That was when I realized, “Of course! The plate armor had all those extra bones on its skeleton.” The flap had been assigned to an entirely different set of bones. I should have realized it earlier because I had this exact same problem in modding for another game.

It was easily fixed, actually. I went back into Blender, deleted all of the vertex groups, deleted the skeleton I had imported, and started the bone weight copy again, but this time with the original nordplatef. I copied the bone weights, and then imported a clean skeleton from nordplatef instead of femalebody.

I exported the whole kaboodle and plopped it into the data folder.

nomoreclipping

It worked (mostly) perfectly.

Satisfied, I started back, ready for another good night’s sleep.

There is some clipping at the wrists and ankles, especially if you’re wearing a non-steel plate bracer and armor, but I noticed that was a problem on the original mesh when I was doing my research. I’ve never seen any character in game wear anything but a full set of plate armor,  however, so I’m wondering how worthwhile it will be to fix what the default mesh had wrong with it.

There’s a few bone weights I want to adjust for a more smooth flop to the skirt bone before I start working on retexturing this thing, but that is as it stands at this moment, and my adventure, for the moment, is done.

Games, TES: Skyrim, Tutorial

Adventuring in the Nif – Forget the Arrow, This is Ridiculous

Leave a comment

What had gone wrong!? I was stumped. Everything should (theoretically) worked!

Maybe it was because I’d accidentally moved the mesh when editing it… or maybe I screwed up a setting or something along the way.

By this time, however, I was tired, night was falling, and my stomach rumbled with hunger. It was time to set up camp.

Day 3

Yes, three damn days, whole days, of wrestling with this bucket of Bethesda. I took the morning off to finish writing up these posts you’ve been enjoying over the past several days, going over the steps one by one to make sure I had everything down…

Incidentally, I think I may know what had happened.

In the last post, I wrote how the Wiki Tutorial said to change BP_TORSO, BP_LEFTLEG and BP_RIGHTARM to certain values under the BSDismemberment. Okay, it’s not really Dismemberment, but it might as well be. Thank the architects I had been writing this, otherwise I may not have opened up the unedited, original nif file and discovered that the steel plate armor didn’t use those values. It used SBP_32_BODY, SBP_34_FOREARMS, and…. SBP_38_CALVES.

Plus, in the BSLightingShaderProperty, there were two extra textures than the tutorial said was needed: textures\cubemaps\QuickSkyDark_e.dds and \textures\armor\nordplate\NordPlateF_m.dds. I thought might be the reason why the armor was showing up black in the game.

Also, while reading the tutorial I had missed where it said to make sure that each body part flag under BSDismemberSkinInstance had both PF_EDITOR_VISIBLE and PF_START_NET_BONESET enabled. Only the calves partition had that second one.

I also checked the SF flags as they described and fixed them to look more like the ones in the tutorial’s picture
BSLightingShaderProperty settings for the armour.”

I saved this one as “step 5” and went to try it out in game. I also refresh the texture file, in case something had happened to it.

TESV 2013-05-14 14-43-23-30

Hah! Looking MUCH better! But…

Oh no… oh wait…

TESV 2013-05-14 14-42-32-89

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH

Obviously it wasn’t a problem with the export process.

I loaded up Blender again and imported the blender ready nif I had created in the beginning. It was true… somehow the sleeves and greaves had gotten extended. Also, there was some bone weight issues with stretching while walking. Nothing that I couldn’t handle there, I had done bone weights before when modding for Oblivion/Sims 2 and things like that. No, it was the extra long arms and legs I was worried about…

At this point, I said “Screw it,” and decided to start from scratch. That meant I had to go back and flatten out the chest plate again, but hey, I didn’t really want to even try fixing this.

Heading home in defeat was somewhat disappointing, but at least it was working, and at least I knew how to do it now, and that, my fellows, was the whole point of the journey.

Education, Games, TES Lore

Taking a Break from the Adventure

2 Comments

Sometimes, for the good of your own literary quality, it’s a good idea to break from a large project every once in a while and write whatever the hell you feel like.

Today, I just wanted to write a little bit about the benefits of struggling through learning something the hard way. This is hardly the first time I’ve taught myself, often through trial and error, how to do something, but it’s the first time I’ve really tried to document it.

A reason to learn something like how to edit a nif file is not hard to find. For me, I wanted to increase my skill set. Moreover, I wanted to get back into modding for games. Then, there is the challenge level. It’s incredibly frustrating not being able to do something, but when you finally realize what you were doing wrong all the time, the satisfaction as everything goes right is hard to describe. I suppose I can include not wanting to rely on someone else to bring my ideas to life. They’re my ideas, and who else is better qualified to do them?

Learning in a classroom is fine and dandy, I thoroughly enjoyed college and often miss it, but there is nothing better than learning hands-on for me. Theories and concepts never mean much to me until it comes to life. It was like that in science class particularly. I could read a mathematical equation over and over and still not understand it until we performed the actual experiments that proved it. I remember standing in a lab with my partner using different temperatures of hot water to research Newton’s Law of Cooling and the properties of black metal vs reflective metal (useful to know for cooking) and being late for the actual class because the cooler liquid took so long. Lesson learned. This is why I always add cream to my hot drinks first off. I think that was also a question on the test.

I suppose things like that is why I prefer actually doing over reading about it. Sometimes I get impatient with reading about the theory, or the instructions, realizing I could probably figure it out better just by doing it. That has caused me no end of pain, but at the same time… I feel good about it because it’s allowed me to actually figure it out by myself. Pain, in of itself, is also a very good teacher. On the other hand, sometimes I actually broke things.

The Elder Scrolls mythos actually comes to mind here, a book I had read during playing one of the games, The Final Lesson. It had stuck in my mind for a long time after reading it, and writing up this post reminded me of it again. In it, a master had two apprentices. Their paths separated, and one had to rely on himself, and the other continued learning from the master. It’s a short story, so if you haven’t read it yet, I recommend it. Learning on my own often brings that story to mind.