• Skyrim Modding – Dynamic Loot

    I find myself in a curious predicament. Basically, I find myself in the role of the “idea guy”. I have what seems like a rock-solid idea, yet am not able to personally implement it… it’s a somewhat distressing situation.

    The issue is this:

    Normally if I get a modding idea I simply fire up the relevant modding utility and make it. In this particular instance though I seem to be totally disinclined to learn how Skyrim’s scripting language differs from Oblivion’s (never even mind the fact that I haven’t dealt with Oblivion in what feels like decades). Even if I were interested in figuring it out, it would require using a Toolset and I pathologically avoid Bethesda-made Toolsets because they tend to be clunky messes for the most part. So I’m doubly stuck and it’s eating at me something fierce.

    What’s the idea? The idea is simplicity itself:

    Quite some time ago someone made a Dynamic Loot Mod for Skyrim that created dynamically enchanted weapons/armor on enemies. They did this by making a ton of pre-enchanted ‘blueprints’. That method is incredibly inefficient and introduces all sorts of continuity issues if used with any sort of weapon/armor rebalancing Mod. What I want to do is use a method similar to that used over in the Dynamic Weapon Speed Mod, switching out the ‘change the speed’ bit for ‘add enchantment x’. That way anytime the base unenchanted version of an item is spawned it would get dynamically enchanted (all the default generically enchanted weapons would be replaced by the unenchanted version through TES5Edit’s “Change FormID” functionality).

    This should not require much effort, which raises the question of why hasn’t it been done yet (though perhaps it has, as I’ve only checked Google and Nexus). Can you not add enchantments to weapons via quest or item-based scripts? The default enchanter obviously uses a script to add them and the Enchantment Shouts Mod appears to add enchantments on the fly… so that doesn’t seem to be the case.

    Maybe it’ll eventually bug me enough that I’ll actually investigate some day. It’s more likely I’ll just fix the bugs in the existing Dynamic Loot Mod (such as its Orcish Shield templates using the Draugr Boots item values) and then forget about it though, as Skyrim angers me to the point that I have little desire to actually play it.

    —————-
    UPDATE
    —————-

    So yeah, I made that patch for Dynamic Loot after all. Not going to bother uploading it to Nexus because I’m lazy.


  • Prophet of the Dead, Ever After, & Slashback

    Prophet of the Dead is the fifth and final book in Richard Lee ByersBrotherhood of the Griffon series. It wraps up the Rashemen storyline while leaving Jhesri’s internal combustion issue hanging for a future series. It’s neither bad nor particularly notable.

    Ever After, by Kim Harrison, is the eleventh main entry in the Hollows universe. It has three primary features; finally giving some solid background information on the demons and revealing the exact relationship they had with the ancient elves, trimming the main cast down to manageable levels (though the way it was done in a particularly central case seemed a bit haphazard), and advancing Rachel’s relationship with Trent.

    Rob Thurman‘s most recent Cal Leandros novel, Slashback, curiously does not deal with the other Auphe hybrid at all. It instead focuses on a serial killer related to the brothers’ past. The key events in here are Cal and Niko learning that angels/demons actually do exist (which was shown in the Trickster series), Cal once again losing access to his gating ability, and the introduction of reincarnation. I’m not happy at all about those last two… particularly the reincarnation bit.


  • Daughter of Smoke & Bone & As the World Dies

    I read the first two books in Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke & Bone series a few months ago, and put off commenting on them for this long for reasons mentioned in the second part of this post. I remember little about them now besides that the first book was very, very interesting while the second (Days of Blood & Starlight) felt like it got lost within its own mythology. The connection to the ‘real world’ was almost entirely severed and it shifts from being Urban Fantasy to almost pure Fantasy. It’s not a shift I was particularly fond of. The way it concluded though indicates that the third book might have more of a mix to it.

    The As the World Dies trilogy is a set of zombie novels by Rhiannon Frater (The First Days, Fighting to Survive, Siege) whose first installment starts out fantastic. As things progress however and the main characters reach ‘The Fort’ it starts to fall apart. Maybe it was the strain of trying to create unique voices for so many different characters, but the end result is a collection of… well… characters. Characterizations rather than people. They feel fabricated, typecast. I ended up having to force myself through the second book and was so put-off by the dialog that I avoided reading the third for almost three months. Just read it now, finally, and… I don’t even know. Mysticism was introduced out of nowhere to completely dominate the story and end things on a… happy, I guess, note. It reminds me of how reincarnation was pulled out of thin air in Nalini Singh’s Guild Hunter series or of what I’ve heard regarding the ending to Lost.


  • Baldur’s Gate 2: ToB Ascension

    I only, just now after years of having it installed, got around to playing through Throne of Bhaal with the BP Version of the Ascension Mod. It was not worth the effort.

    The default final battle is a slog, there’s no denying that. The Ascension final battle? Even more of a slog. Not only does it double down on the cheap plot-invincibility bullshit… it adds an extra battle. The default has you facing off against the various Elemental Princes interspersed with mini-fights against the Final Boss. The Ascension version has you facing off against a bunch of demon groupings (in place of the elementals) followed by a fight against the five earlier bosses plus Gromnir/Sarevok. When you kill some of them the Final Boss makes their appearance and starts attacking as well.

    Now if it just ended there it could definitely be seen as an improvement as the whole ‘repeated end boss fights’ bit in the default is beyond annoying. Unfortunately, once you get the Final Boss down to ‘near death’ they get scripted invincibility and do that whole default “recharging” bit, being instantly restored to full health. They do this twice… same as the default. So not only do you still have to face them repeatedly you have to do it with no rest breaks in-between while also re-defeating those five bosses from earlier. Total bullshit.

    What about the ‘improved’ boss battles though? Improved Yaga Shura is dumb. Having to sit around twiddling your thumbs for minutes on end waiting for plot invincibility to slowly wear off is not fun, it’s just a waste of time. Sendai suffers from the same issue; now you have to hack at her for 5+ minutes to finally whittle down her ludicrous plot-granted health buffer while she teleports between three locations. How is this fun or ‘tactical’? It’s just pointless busywork. The Gromnir, Abazigal, & Illasera fights seemed pretty much the same as I remembered them (perhaps they were overridden by SCSII?) while the Balthazar sequence was skipped due to talking him out of the fight (huge improvement).

    So yeah, one of two things is going to happen now:

    1) Uninstall Ascension and forget it exists.
    2) Edit the script so that the first ‘death’ kills the final boss, skipping the recharging bit.


  • Solving Spontaneous Windows 7 ‘Not Genuine’ Issue

    After installing a recent (~2 days ago) security update, I restarted my PC to find out that suddenly my Windows installation was not genuine (and also that my audio codecs had all stopped working).

    Spent hours trying to sort through the Windows Help site to get to the livechat/phone help area… in vain; couldn’t find either. After much Googling I finally stumbled across a working fix for the issue.

    It’s a sad day when Microsoft’s own update service invalidates itself and it ends up literally impossible to contact any form of customer support.


  • Steel’s Edge, Undead to the World, & Lesser Evils

    Ilona Andrews‘ fourth Edge novel is allegedly the last centered on this particular cast of characters and it does a very good job wrapping up the loose ends from the previous two books. Namely Lark’s mental trauma and the mystery of where Rose’s father disappeared to. I think it may be my favorite out of the four, mainly because of the protagonist’s (a fallen healer) personality.

    Don DeBrandt’s Bloodhound Files series (as DD Barant) is unique among the multiple series I read in that I undoubtedly enjoy it while reading it, but somehow manage to forget nearly everything that had occurred in earlier books by the time the next installment arrives. This sixth book is no different, as despite my confusion in regards to what was going on (particularly acute as this one takes place in an alternate dimension) it ended up enjoyable anyway. The cliffhanger ending though? Not so much.

    The second of Erin M. EvansBrimstone Angels novels is interesting for feeling less like a story and more like a window into its characters’ lives. The series of events has a surprisingly natural flow to it and the only part that really feels contrived is Rhand’s interest in Farideh.


  • Xenoblade – Dolphin Setup

    Here are some things related to running Xenoblade on Dolphin since it took me a disturbingly long time to work them out.

    First off, you need a high base-speed processor. The number of cores is mostly irrelevant since Dolphin can only use two of them; meaning a 4-gig two-core will run it better than a 3-gig 8-core. Second of all… you need to not screw up your settings. The settings I finally ended up settling on that give only slight slowdown in some areas/battles (with an AMD FX-6100, GeForce GTX 460, and 8GB RAM) are:

    – OpenGL, 1920×1080, Auto, Use Fullscreen, Hide Mouse Curser, Render to main Window
    – 2x Native Resolution, No AA or Filtering, Scaled EFB Copy
    – Skip EFB Access, Texture, Fast, Disable, Fast Mipmaps, Disable Per-Pixel Depth, OpenMP Decoder
    – Load Custom Textures

    – Enable Dual Core, Enable Idle Skipping, Auto, JIT Recompiler
    – Use Panic Handlers
    – DSP HLE Emulation, DSound, 48000 Hz

    After you get things set-up so that you can actually play the game at higher-than-base resolution, you’ll want to go over here and grab some hi-res textures. The packs pretty much only cover the interface, but something is better than nothing.

    Also, here’s an altered version of the PS3 button pack from the first link made to fit my custom control scheme:

    ——————————————————————
    Button Setup – Wiimote Classic Extension
    ——————————————————————

    D-Pad Up = D-Pad Up
    D-Pad Down = D-Pad Down
    D-Pad Left = L1
    D-Pad Right = R1

    Left Stick = Left Stick
    Right Stick = Right Stick

    A = Square
    B = X
    X = Circle
    Y = R-Stick Button
    + = Triangle
    – = L-Stick Button

    L = L2
    R = R2
    ZL = Select
    ZR = Start


  • Hacked… or something. Whatever.

    The WordPress installation was hacked with some sort of embedded redirect to “tigoe.net”. No idea why anyone would want to waste their time with that, but whatever.

    Didn’t see any easy way to fix it (nothing in the .htaccess file), so that installation was deleted and we now have a brand new one with all of the old functionality (and almost none of the content!). Looks like that Mayan prediction of a new beginning was surprisingly accurate.

    UPDATE: I’ve recently discovered that the site ended up wiped that first time due to Dreamhost’s server move. Turns out that someone had the same database name as I did, and when everything was consolidated onto the same server my database information got overwritten by that other blog’s. I’m using a more specialized name now, so hopefully such a thing won’t occur again.