If it looks fine in xEdit, yeah, cleaning isn't necessary (but probably wouldn't do anything so why not do it anyway just in case if you're paranoid ;D)
Started playing Morrowind again because OpenMW had another release, 0.47.0, drop about a month ago. It runs even better than before, and has a new lighting system, groundcover support, improved camera and movement and actor physics, and more. It's pretty amazing, tbh, and since the last time I had checked it out years ago, it's apparently added increased draw distance options and lots of other stuff like bump map support. Oh, and this latest release has more improvements for their OpenMW-CS and they're aiming to have it let people develop entirely new, stand-alone games using the OpenMW engine.
Also downloaded the usual mods like Tamriel Rebuilt, True Lights and Darkness, stuff like that. Also tried a nice, cozy house mod called Blightward that's east of the Urshlaiku Ashlander camp in the ashlands. It's in a hollowed-out siltstrider shell (the last time I made a house mod I also made it inside one) and has two NPCs with a pack guar that will fast travel you to/from Maar Gan.
Also grabbed a main menu replacement called Morrowind Definitive Menu Animation (MDMA) that looks really, really fuckin nice.
I've also been playing Morrowind lately and I've been enjoying it for the first time in about 18 years. Previously, I'd install it and some mods and then play for half an hour before the awful combat frustrated me too much. I don't really know what's different this time. I guess I'm just accepting it for what it is.
Also, I really love the weird armor in this game, and I love being able to wear it piecemeal. Asymmetry is definitely my jam! I also still really, really love the chunky low-poly models and low-res textures. Just such a great art style that holds up, to me anyways. That's one thing I really appreciate about the Tamriel Rebuilt content is that it perfectly captures the feel of the original game.
I picked Daggerfall back up recently after a hiatus, and it got too janky for me to want to keep playing through - when I fell through a crack in a dungeon into a space between the walls I decided I'd had enough. But I decided to check out the Daggerfall Unity project to see how well that would work, and whether it would fix the bugs. It seems to work pretty well! With a little bit of work I was able to import my saves, and I stopped getting any of the obvious glitches. I even spent some time getting mods so the sprites would be updated/upscaled, the lighting would be better, the ambient sound more realistic, etc. Works pretty well, the game looks and feels pretty great.
...but it still can't fix some of the inherent problems in Daggerfall, like the monstrous size and complexity of some of the dungeons. Now that I can open the map and see the whole thing (including with better controls, mouse drag/rotation, etc) it makes clear how ludicrous it really is. I still have trouble picking out individual sections of the map, when they are completely encased in winding hallways from another layer. I've been in this damn dungeon for like two hours hunting for something, and now I have to go back and try to find any passages I've missed. There might still be hidden doors or things I haven't found a lever for. And some of the gameplay decisions are still baffling, like forcing you to manually check if you've been poisoned/diseased, because otherwise you might just suddenly drop dead while wandering around, with no warning - like just happened to me.
So yeah, if you want to try out Daggerfall, I definitely recommend the Unity version, but I don't know if that bumps it up enough to recommend at all.
Skyrim at least makes sense, though. Even the most labyrinthine areas in skyrim don’t hold a candle to the procedural ai-driven fever dreams in daggerfall.
The worst thing you have to deal with in skyrim is an occasional “oops it looks like I should be able to turn left here but its really just an overpassing or underpassing hallway”.
Yeah, if you have not already been inoculated against Daggerfall's particular strain of Early 90s Bullshit Jank (it came out before fuckin Diablo 1), you will NOT have a good time playing it, you will constantly bump up against systems that were half-finished and half-implemented and everything else.
Cyberpunk 2077 is very similar in that their reach very clearly exceeded their grasp, but those one or two fingers they DID hook around the goal means it's just so damn beautiful in that flawed sort of way.
All the pre-skyrim ES games have their own flaws like that…
Morrowind’s gameplay itself is very jank (like things like making to-hit rolls just to hit things in a first person interface.
Oblivions levelling sysytem is terrible, but that can be fixed by mods, the engine sucks though, you can make oblivion look better with mods, but you can never really make it look good, even compared to modded morrowind.
But both have some really great content. I would love to see a remake of oblivion in skyrims engine, but Bethesda hates doing elder scrolls stuff for some reason (since oblivion we have had 4(!) full sized fallout games w/dlc but only skyrim for elder scrolls, and ESO but thats very much a different thing)
Figured I'd post an example just to show what I mean - I mean, compared to the original daggerfall map, this is a revelation. The resolution is high enough to distinguish the different pathways, you can zoom out far enough, and the draw distance is far enough, to be able to see the entire map at once. The mouse dragging and scrolling makes looking around way easier than just using the on-screen buttons of the original. And yet, look at this damn thing! This isn't even one of the really bad maps, as this dungeon doesn't use the one way teleporters like some of the others. Trying to pick out a route using this still takes a while.
I was thinking, I think part of my difficulty might be because I imported my character. I built it out according to the UESP guide on making a beginning daggerfall character, which suggests increasing vulnerability to poison and disease, I think because those are broken in the original version, which in the unity version seem like they might not be. I think I might keep playing do less hardcore dungeon delving for a bit, and try to level up my spellcasting so I can get more protections from that stuff.
I mean the map VIEWER is more technically able, sure, but that's because the MAP is unnecessarily complicated and impossible to read from a top down perspective (which is actually the default in daggerfall as well). It's like saying you'd rather navigate using one of those ball bearing maze cube toys to go to the store rather than read a paper map.
Well in morrowind, oblivion, and skyrim your dungeons generally don’t exceed the complexity of, say, your average quake/quake 2 level, wheras a typical daggerfall dungeon is like you took an entire quake episode, folded it in on itself, and dropped a bunch of acid at the same time. You need better tools for that.
One thing seriously though is that I think the later game dungeons are more just big cells with a bunch of hand placed “stuff” in them that may not lend themselves as well to automap tools, wheras daggerfalls maps are procedurally generated and you can probably use the same procedural processes to make the map.
Ok, spoiling this in case this is getting old for people, but I'm kind of worried that having the high-res engine is turning me into some kind of bizarre sicko just entranced by these MC Escher-esque maps. Just, goddamn. This thing has multiple figure 8's across different levels. I feel like there should be a way to 3d print this and put it in a museum.
They will mine ever more Escheresque dungeons for you.
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
Skyrim dungeons were generally a single corridor design with some big rooms along the way and maybe some side rooms to explore. There wasn't a lot of stuff where you could take a wrong turn and wander for hours not getting closer to whatever the main chamber was of the place. There are plusses and minuses as far as that design goes.
Daggerfall dungeons though, those were insane. I remember some amazingly breathtaking (given the low resolution graphics) chambers with giant floating bridges and other stuff. Almost impossible to navigate, but damn impressive.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
I have one of those mods (probably a gem/jewelry/valuable stuff overhaul) that adds a very small weight to each piece of gold, forcing my character to deposit large bags of coins in various "safe" places, so that's a solution too.
Soo...is anyone else now getting immediate CTD after the loading screen with the most recent update?
I thought updating SKSE, RaceMenu, and other DLL alerts would do the job, but...this is a new problem. I thought it was ENB caching problems, but disabling that didn't fix the issue. Usually the game just flat-out won't start, but this definitely feels like a step backwards.
EDIT: Whew, checking about a dozen script/utility/Papyrus for updates did the trick. Though MO2's update notifications aren't starting to slack off.
Synthesis on
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augustwhere you come from is goneRegistered Userregular
So this is tangential of stuff, but...posting more out of interest? I dunno.
Nexus has these things called Donation Points. Link goes into detail, but tl;dr - Nexus takes some of their cash (from various income sources like premium memberships) and also all money from a patreon which folks donate to for all mod authors, make a giant pot, algorithmically divide by number of unique downloads, and pass out DP to all mod authors. You can redeem them for games in the nexus store, donate to charity, give people premium accounts on nexus, or pull it out via paypal.
I'd mostly ignored this and hadn't turned it on, but discussed with some folks on my working server and people have been using it, yaddah yaddah. Anyway, I turned them on (and for my major hubs which are joint works, split evenly among all contributors regardless of how much the initial setup was from on my end) and I've had it turned on for two months now.
So this is tangential of stuff, but...posting more out of interest? I dunno.
Nexus has these things called Donation Points. Link goes into detail, but tl;dr - Nexus takes some of their cash (from various income sources like premium memberships) and also all money from a patreon which folks donate to for all mod authors, make a giant pot, algorithmically divide by number of unique downloads, and pass out DP to all mod authors. You can redeem them for games in the nexus store, donate to charity, give people premium accounts on nexus, or pull it out via paypal.
I'd mostly ignored this and hadn't turned it on, but discussed with some folks on my working server and people have been using it, yaddah yaddah. Anyway, I turned them on (and for my major hubs which are joint works, split evenly among all contributors regardless of how much the initial setup was from on my end) and I've had it turned on for two months now.
....I'm apparently making over $300/month >_>
I still don't understand the whole paid mod fiasco. People want mods, people want to make mods, people need money to live, people can still make free mods... personally I was super excited for it.
I mostly lurk this thread, but as a Person Who Wants Mods, thank you for being a Person Who Makes Mods. 👍
So this is tangential of stuff, but...posting more out of interest? I dunno.
Nexus has these things called Donation Points. Link goes into detail, but tl;dr - Nexus takes some of their cash (from various income sources like premium memberships) and also all money from a patreon which folks donate to for all mod authors, make a giant pot, algorithmically divide by number of unique downloads, and pass out DP to all mod authors. You can redeem them for games in the nexus store, donate to charity, give people premium accounts on nexus, or pull it out via paypal.
I'd mostly ignored this and hadn't turned it on, but discussed with some folks on my working server and people have been using it, yaddah yaddah. Anyway, I turned them on (and for my major hubs which are joint works, split evenly among all contributors regardless of how much the initial setup was from on my end) and I've had it turned on for two months now.
....I'm apparently making over $300/month >_>
I still don't understand the whole paid mod fiasco. People want mods, people want to make mods, people need money to live, people can still make free mods... personally I was super excited for it.
I mostly lurk this thread, but as a Person Who Wants Mods, thank you for being a Person Who Makes Mods. 👍
I can completely understand the paid mod fiasco. Huge swaths of mods were partially, or completely, dependent on the work of others, including people who might want to monetize, people who might be convinced in time, and people who adamantly refused to monetized for any number of reasons--thereby affecting every person down said chain.
The "giant pot" system might be the only model of this that is viable. Aside from the whole, "if you want to donate, you can do so here," which was already in effect for years anyway. It's great to see it's working out for you!
Honestly, I don't find paid modding inherently bad either, for those who want to.
The main issues with it were a) they were applying it to a game that already had only free modding, thereby breaking the existing ecosystem, b) there were no controls in place which allowed someone to take someone else's stuff and release it as a paid mod (or also take a paid mod and immediately offer it as free), and c) the cuts were obnoxious - it was what....80% Bethesda, 20% mod creator? Something like that?
But dead serious - if they'd left Skyrim alone and rolled out the exact same system with Fallout 4, there'd have been complaints, but a HELL of a lot less because point a wouldn't be happening.
Yeah having some way to support modders is great but making it a specifically transactional thing IE: Pay X to get Mod Y is really fraught with issues because of how mods build off of each other and of frameworks that tend to be provided freely.
I'm also more of a Cathedral-type modder when I do get around to tinkering. NexusMod's system is probably the best way to handle it.
The whole thing was practically doomed from the start when you ran into the same distressingly common scenario so immediate obvious that it became evident even while people were still putting on their shoes:
Modder B wants to monetize, and has "product B" that enjoys x thousands of subscribers (leading to a reasonable expectation of profit, whatever, we live in the worst dystopian timeline where we either hustle or die, through not fault of said modder).
It so happens that product B is entirely (as in, "nonfuctional without") dependent on Modder A's "mod A", which they have stated openly will be not be monetized, presently or possibly in the future. Which, depending on A's opinion on B, can lead to an immediate conflict. Never mind potential scenarios, "What if A is not able to update in response to a future mod-breaking patch? Does A owe anything to B?" (Answer: "No.") Never mind more complex, category-crossing dependency hierarchies, which are absolutely common (e.g. a redesign of a companion whose introductory quest relies on script extender), which necessitate agreement between more parties.
The previously socially-accepted scenario--"This mod is free, and I take donations,"--wasn't even without conflict itself (plenty of other games had donation-driven mods shut down when component creators in said mod put their foot down, not even to "demanding their cut" but in simple refusal). But it wasn't hedging on a transactional sale or subscription of said product. It does seem like the most workable models are revenue sharing that attempts the most abstract, self-blinded approach, wherein someone (like Jragghen) isn't being paid for a mod, but for eyeball time on the actual, ad-driven website.
Because it's not like paid mods weren't already a thing in Skyrim. They were for years. And, to a point, they were almost never dependent on other mod content, and were obtained outside of Nexus; and if someone on Nexus realized their free content was enabling a paid endeavor, they were will within their right to take action (say, pulling their mod if that was the only way to stop it). Even if I was never a customer of theirs, I don't really have any moral objection to the specific practice, acknowledging that any dependency on other content taken at their own risk.
Me making a mod that stops NPCs from telling the player they smell like a wet dog after curing Lycanthropism, aside from not really being worth anything (especially after that fix was incorporated into the Unofficial Patches) is immune to this because...it's just a few simple instructions I made on my own. Unless the creator of XEdit changes their policy...
On a less abstract note, I still haven't actually played AE, as I'm waiting for True Directional Movement to be updated (curse you for opening that Pandora's box, Jragghen! ), though an update to Immersive First Person (or rather, it's dependencies) would be appreciated too.
Ok, I just beat the Daggerfall main quest (via DF Unity) and have done enough side stuff already that I feel like I'm done. This is really wrapping up things for me on several levels. This is me finally beating a game I started seriously sometime last year, me finally beating all the mainline ES games, and also finally beating the first one I played - I played a bunch of the Daggerfall demo when I got it with a PC Gamer magazine back in the day and couldn't afford the full game yet, so I've been wanting to play through this for a long time.
I'll just say again thank god for DF Unity, without it I definitely would not have the patience for this janky ass piece of software, and I actually got to play the game much more like it was originally intended. I do think that it pushes the game from 'Do not recommend' to 'Try it out if you're interested', so if anyone is curious, I'd say it can be pretty fun. Playing normal daggerfall I think you need to use guides to know how to actually make a character well and just survive, but I think with the new engine and updates it's more forgiving, and you have more freedom to just play how you want (mostly).
It's really interesting seeing how some of the mechanics were built around this engine being so broad and open ended. As an example, to get Daedra quests to get their artifacts, you have to get to a high enough rank in a guild and use their summoner. Even if you're maxed out with the guild, it's still extremely expensive. Each daedra has a specific day they are associated with, and so can ONLY be summoned on that day (with a couple obtuse exceptions). If you miss that day? Well, you gotta wait a year. Just...wow.
Also, the last dungeon is a real weird one. Probably the weirdest I can think of from any Elder Scrolls game.
Since DF Unity has mod support, I figure I'd recommend a couple. I really enjoyed Interesting Eroded Terrain, especially combined with Distant Terrain and Enhanced Sky. It really made the outdoor areas feel more realistic, and gave a much stronger sense of place. They don't really change the gameplay at all, but they make it a lot more fun to wander around outdoors. Fixed Dungeon Exteriors gives each dungeon type a unique outer building, so that they actually look like whatever dungeon type they are, instead of everything being a door into a sad mound of dirt. Again, no gameplay changes, but it helps build the sense of place a lot. DREAM is the big overhaul package with better textures, cinematics, etc. It has like 10 parts and changes a lot of things. It also has a bunch of links to other stuff.
While I'm at it, might as well finish off with a screenshot in action. You can see the combination of the Interesting Terrain mod and another mod I found adding roads there, that technically work together, but not quite. And the distant view lets you see the really far hills in that valley on the right - which works better in Daggerfall than anything else, because it has such a ludicrously huge map size that you actually can have distant rolling hills.
edit:: actually let me spoiler that
Hrm, playing through oblivion, using the Through the Valleys modset, for the most part (Using oblivion upscaled textures 2x instead of Really textured normals, using improved trees and flora et al and my own edit of Arboretum, ditched dungeon surprise attacks, added push’s costs for fast travel to balance it with mage guild teleportation).
Its a bit of an odd game because it really isn’t bad at all, but there’s never really a hook to draw you in like in morrowind or skyrim. The daedra invasion is supposed to be that but no one outside the main quest really seems to give much of a shit so it fals a bit flat…
Hrm, playing through oblivion, using the Through the Valleys modset, for the most part (Using oblivion upscaled textures 2x instead of Really textured normals, using improved trees and flora et al and my own edit of Arboretum, ditched dungeon surprise attacks, added push’s costs for fast travel to balance it with mage guild teleportation).
Its a bit of an odd game because it really isn’t bad at all, but there’s never really a hook to draw you in like in morrowind or skyrim. The daedra invasion is supposed to be that but no one outside the main quest really seems to give much of a shit so it fals a bit flat…
I did a run recently that I just stayed at Lv 1 and just did the 5 guild quest lines + Shivering Isles. It was the most fun I've ever had with the game. Oblivion guilds do a good job of having a quest line while still feeling like an actual guild.
Oblivion was my entry into the series. I made several characters, partly to explore different builds and partly to avoid the series' Omnicompetent Protagonist Syndrome (where one person ends up holding every leadership position in the game).
I spent several hundred hours playing every quest and exploring every point of interest in the base game and the expansions. Then I uninstalled the game and threw away the disc, and I still won't allow myself to buy a digital version for fear of getting sucked in again. That game had a serious hold on me for a couple of years.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited January 2022
Started a new play through of Morrowind today using OpenMW and the I Heart Vanilla modlist from Modding OpenMW. I didn't want to drastically change the game, just clean up a few things and have some nicer textures and such. I wish Wabbajack supported OpenMW modlists, but I guess because it mostly uses MO2 it's not really compatible with the "OpenMW way" to do mods. Thankfully I Heart Vanilla is a small mod list, only took me about 45 minutes to setup.
Excited to do a play through of Morrowind again. It's been a very, very long time since I did one.
Posts
Congrats on the upcoming release!
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/59381
Also downloaded the usual mods like Tamriel Rebuilt, True Lights and Darkness, stuff like that. Also tried a nice, cozy house mod called Blightward that's east of the Urshlaiku Ashlander camp in the ashlands. It's in a hollowed-out siltstrider shell (the last time I made a house mod I also made it inside one) and has two NPCs with a pack guar that will fast travel you to/from Maar Gan.
Also grabbed a main menu replacement called Morrowind Definitive Menu Animation (MDMA) that looks really, really fuckin nice.
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
...but it still can't fix some of the inherent problems in Daggerfall, like the monstrous size and complexity of some of the dungeons. Now that I can open the map and see the whole thing (including with better controls, mouse drag/rotation, etc) it makes clear how ludicrous it really is. I still have trouble picking out individual sections of the map, when they are completely encased in winding hallways from another layer. I've been in this damn dungeon for like two hours hunting for something, and now I have to go back and try to find any passages I've missed. There might still be hidden doors or things I haven't found a lever for. And some of the gameplay decisions are still baffling, like forcing you to manually check if you've been poisoned/diseased, because otherwise you might just suddenly drop dead while wandering around, with no warning - like just happened to me.
So yeah, if you want to try out Daggerfall, I definitely recommend the Unity version, but I don't know if that bumps it up enough to recommend at all.
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
The worst thing you have to deal with in skyrim is an occasional “oops it looks like I should be able to turn left here but its really just an overpassing or underpassing hallway”.
Cyberpunk 2077 is very similar in that their reach very clearly exceeded their grasp, but those one or two fingers they DID hook around the goal means it's just so damn beautiful in that flawed sort of way.
Morrowind’s gameplay itself is very jank (like things like making to-hit rolls just to hit things in a first person interface.
Oblivions levelling sysytem is terrible, but that can be fixed by mods, the engine sucks though, you can make oblivion look better with mods, but you can never really make it look good, even compared to modded morrowind.
But both have some really great content. I would love to see a remake of oblivion in skyrims engine, but Bethesda hates doing elder scrolls stuff for some reason (since oblivion we have had 4(!) full sized fallout games w/dlc but only skyrim for elder scrolls, and ESO but thats very much a different thing)
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
Figured I'd post an example just to show what I mean - I mean, compared to the original daggerfall map, this is a revelation. The resolution is high enough to distinguish the different pathways, you can zoom out far enough, and the draw distance is far enough, to be able to see the entire map at once. The mouse dragging and scrolling makes looking around way easier than just using the on-screen buttons of the original. And yet, look at this damn thing! This isn't even one of the really bad maps, as this dungeon doesn't use the one way teleporters like some of the others. Trying to pick out a route using this still takes a while.
I was thinking, I think part of my difficulty might be because I imported my character. I built it out according to the UESP guide on making a beginning daggerfall character, which suggests increasing vulnerability to poison and disease, I think because those are broken in the original version, which in the unity version seem like they might not be. I think I might keep playing do less hardcore dungeon delving for a bit, and try to level up my spellcasting so I can get more protections from that stuff.
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
One thing seriously though is that I think the later game dungeons are more just big cells with a bunch of hand placed “stuff” in them that may not lend themselves as well to automap tools, wheras daggerfalls maps are procedurally generated and you can probably use the same procedural processes to make the map.
Ok, spoiling this in case this is getting old for people, but I'm kind of worried that having the high-res engine is turning me into some kind of bizarre sicko just entranced by these MC Escher-esque maps. Just, goddamn. This thing has multiple figure 8's across different levels. I feel like there should be a way to 3d print this and put it in a museum.
They will mine ever more Escheresque dungeons for you.
Daggerfall dungeons though, those were insane. I remember some amazingly breathtaking (given the low resolution graphics) chambers with giant floating bridges and other stuff. Almost impossible to navigate, but damn impressive.
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/60392
~ Buckaroo Banzai
Bravo
I have one of those mods (probably a gem/jewelry/valuable stuff overhaul) that adds a very small weight to each piece of gold, forcing my character to deposit large bags of coins in various "safe" places, so that's a solution too.
all it’s missing is the appropriate sfx
I thought updating SKSE, RaceMenu, and other DLL alerts would do the job, but...this is a new problem. I thought it was ENB caching problems, but disabling that didn't fix the issue. Usually the game just flat-out won't start, but this definitely feels like a step backwards.
EDIT: Whew, checking about a dozen script/utility/Papyrus for updates did the trick. Though MO2's update notifications aren't starting to slack off.
Nexus has these things called Donation Points. Link goes into detail, but tl;dr - Nexus takes some of their cash (from various income sources like premium memberships) and also all money from a patreon which folks donate to for all mod authors, make a giant pot, algorithmically divide by number of unique downloads, and pass out DP to all mod authors. You can redeem them for games in the nexus store, donate to charity, give people premium accounts on nexus, or pull it out via paypal.
I'd mostly ignored this and hadn't turned it on, but discussed with some folks on my working server and people have been using it, yaddah yaddah. Anyway, I turned them on (and for my major hubs which are joint works, split evenly among all contributors regardless of how much the initial setup was from on my end) and I've had it turned on for two months now.
....I'm apparently making over $300/month >_>
I still don't understand the whole paid mod fiasco. People want mods, people want to make mods, people need money to live, people can still make free mods... personally I was super excited for it.
I mostly lurk this thread, but as a Person Who Wants Mods, thank you for being a Person Who Makes Mods. 👍
I can completely understand the paid mod fiasco. Huge swaths of mods were partially, or completely, dependent on the work of others, including people who might want to monetize, people who might be convinced in time, and people who adamantly refused to monetized for any number of reasons--thereby affecting every person down said chain.
The "giant pot" system might be the only model of this that is viable. Aside from the whole, "if you want to donate, you can do so here," which was already in effect for years anyway. It's great to see it's working out for you!
The main issues with it were a) they were applying it to a game that already had only free modding, thereby breaking the existing ecosystem, b) there were no controls in place which allowed someone to take someone else's stuff and release it as a paid mod (or also take a paid mod and immediately offer it as free), and c) the cuts were obnoxious - it was what....80% Bethesda, 20% mod creator? Something like that?
But dead serious - if they'd left Skyrim alone and rolled out the exact same system with Fallout 4, there'd have been complaints, but a HELL of a lot less because point a wouldn't be happening.
I'm also more of a Cathedral-type modder when I do get around to tinkering. NexusMod's system is probably the best way to handle it.
Modder B wants to monetize, and has "product B" that enjoys x thousands of subscribers (leading to a reasonable expectation of profit, whatever, we live in the worst dystopian timeline where we either hustle or die, through not fault of said modder).
It so happens that product B is entirely (as in, "nonfuctional without") dependent on Modder A's "mod A", which they have stated openly will be not be monetized, presently or possibly in the future. Which, depending on A's opinion on B, can lead to an immediate conflict. Never mind potential scenarios, "What if A is not able to update in response to a future mod-breaking patch? Does A owe anything to B?" (Answer: "No.") Never mind more complex, category-crossing dependency hierarchies, which are absolutely common (e.g. a redesign of a companion whose introductory quest relies on script extender), which necessitate agreement between more parties.
The previously socially-accepted scenario--"This mod is free, and I take donations,"--wasn't even without conflict itself (plenty of other games had donation-driven mods shut down when component creators in said mod put their foot down, not even to "demanding their cut" but in simple refusal). But it wasn't hedging on a transactional sale or subscription of said product. It does seem like the most workable models are revenue sharing that attempts the most abstract, self-blinded approach, wherein someone (like Jragghen) isn't being paid for a mod, but for eyeball time on the actual, ad-driven website.
Because it's not like paid mods weren't already a thing in Skyrim. They were for years. And, to a point, they were almost never dependent on other mod content, and were obtained outside of Nexus; and if someone on Nexus realized their free content was enabling a paid endeavor, they were will within their right to take action (say, pulling their mod if that was the only way to stop it). Even if I was never a customer of theirs, I don't really have any moral objection to the specific practice, acknowledging that any dependency on other content taken at their own risk.
Me making a mod that stops NPCs from telling the player they smell like a wet dog after curing Lycanthropism, aside from not really being worth anything (especially after that fix was incorporated into the Unofficial Patches) is immune to this because...it's just a few simple instructions I made on my own. Unless the creator of XEdit changes their policy...
On a less abstract note, I still haven't actually played AE, as I'm waiting for True Directional Movement to be updated (curse you for opening that Pandora's box, Jragghen!
I'll just say again thank god for DF Unity, without it I definitely would not have the patience for this janky ass piece of software, and I actually got to play the game much more like it was originally intended. I do think that it pushes the game from 'Do not recommend' to 'Try it out if you're interested', so if anyone is curious, I'd say it can be pretty fun. Playing normal daggerfall I think you need to use guides to know how to actually make a character well and just survive, but I think with the new engine and updates it's more forgiving, and you have more freedom to just play how you want (mostly).
It's really interesting seeing how some of the mechanics were built around this engine being so broad and open ended. As an example, to get Daedra quests to get their artifacts, you have to get to a high enough rank in a guild and use their summoner. Even if you're maxed out with the guild, it's still extremely expensive. Each daedra has a specific day they are associated with, and so can ONLY be summoned on that day (with a couple obtuse exceptions). If you miss that day? Well, you gotta wait a year. Just...wow.
Also, the last dungeon is a real weird one. Probably the weirdest I can think of from any Elder Scrolls game.
Since DF Unity has mod support, I figure I'd recommend a couple. I really enjoyed Interesting Eroded Terrain, especially combined with Distant Terrain and Enhanced Sky. It really made the outdoor areas feel more realistic, and gave a much stronger sense of place. They don't really change the gameplay at all, but they make it a lot more fun to wander around outdoors. Fixed Dungeon Exteriors gives each dungeon type a unique outer building, so that they actually look like whatever dungeon type they are, instead of everything being a door into a sad mound of dirt. Again, no gameplay changes, but it helps build the sense of place a lot. DREAM is the big overhaul package with better textures, cinematics, etc. It has like 10 parts and changes a lot of things. It also has a bunch of links to other stuff.
edit:: actually let me spoiler that
Its a bit of an odd game because it really isn’t bad at all, but there’s never really a hook to draw you in like in morrowind or skyrim. The daedra invasion is supposed to be that but no one outside the main quest really seems to give much of a shit so it fals a bit flat…
I did a run recently that I just stayed at Lv 1 and just did the 5 guild quest lines + Shivering Isles. It was the most fun I've ever had with the game. Oblivion guilds do a good job of having a quest line while still feeling like an actual guild.
All the individual quest content in oblivion is fine though, the world just never coheres for me into something interesting.
Excited to do a play through of Morrowind again. It's been a very, very long time since I did one.