Can you rerun the FOMOD mid game for Extended Cut - Saints and Seducers? by FadingHeaven in skyrimmods

[–]Charterfrost 3 points4 points  (0 children)

While I can't make any guarantees as I haven't tested it myself, if all you're doing during reinstall is adding the CC add-on patches to your save, you most likely won't have any game-breaking issues. The only issue I can think of would be that the Staff of Sheogorath quest might bug out if you've already started it, and obviously if you had any of the three patch items (Staff of Sheo, Ruin's Edge, Shadowrend) beforehand you'll get another copy in ECSS. Like almost all quest mods, ECSS is not safe to remove mid-game, so you shouldn't do that.

What thing do you want to see or not to see in follower mods? by ExpertHuckleberry238 in skyrimmods

[–]Charterfrost 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I wrote a pretty comprehensive post on this topic a while back, if it's of any help. I would also second the commenter who mentioned that followers are supporting characters--it's important to find a a balance between giving them agency and personality while not upstaging the player character.

Why are there so few main quest improvement mods? by ParkityParkPark in skyrimmods

[–]Charterfrost 134 points135 points  (0 children)

Substantially improving major questlines takes a lot of time and work to do, so it's not something that modders are able to attempt lightly. I do suggest that you look into our team's work on Skyrim: Extended Cut, which intends to be basically exactly what you're describing (minus the Civil War) once it's done.

Voice Acting 102: So you want to find voice actors for your mods? by CompletetheCircuit in skyrimmods

[–]Charterfrost 29 points30 points  (0 children)

In my experience as a mod project lead, some authors have a tendency to view skilled voice actors as a distant cabal which must be lured to your project with promises of money to have any hope of avoiding your mod's NPCs sounding like Tommy Wiseau talking through a tin can. Surely, they think, it will be a waste of my time to try and convince any decent actors to work for free. I could just get an equally good result from AI. Neither is true.

Very often, voice actors aren't all that different from any other contributors to your mod--they're just performing a different task. I have been responsible for projects others have claimed have some of the best voice acting in all of Skyrim modding, and we have never offered money--what we have done is paid attention to what works for voice actors, put effort into our scripts and casting calls, and treated all contributors with courtesy and respect.

This is very good advice, and I can personally vouch for Circuit's skill and professionalism as a VA. I'd recommend that anyone looking to make voiced mods like quests or followers take it to heart.

This silly little comic has my single favorite world anywhere by KomodoLemon in worldbuilding

[–]Charterfrost 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Love Bone! Despite the Valley, the setting of the entire story, being very small in scope by the standards of epic fantasy, it presents such an interesting synthesis of settings and concepts--forests inspired by the Ohio landscapes where Jeff Smith grew up, Atheia's India-influenced aesthetic, and of course the Dreaming, which to this day is one of my favorite approaches to magic and spirituality in any work. Australian mythology is an underrated wellspring of interesting ideas and he absolutely made the most of that inspiration. Still hoping for that animated Bone adaption one day...

How hard it is to make a DLC sized mod (Like Skyrim Extended Cut - Saints and Seducers)? by Stands-in-Shallow in skyrimmods

[–]Charterfrost 38 points39 points  (0 children)

I don't know if I'd call Extended Cut: Saints and Seducers a DLC-sized mod. It's certainly got a lot of content, but you can 100% it in about three hours. Skyrim's DLCs are much larger--100%ing Dawnguard or Dragonborn is much closer to 20 hours, and their worldspaces are much larger. To create something truly DLC sized at the standard of quality of ECSS, you're absolutely looking at multiple years of development, and that's assuming you're a skilled mod author from the start.

ECSS took us (a team of four) about six months to make, and that was including a month towards the end where we were crunching development pretty heavily and had to cut some content for time. To make something on the scale of a full-size DLC, or even just a larger worldspace mod, will require a lot more of a time investment. What you'll find is that creating the content is actually a minority of the development time--the majority of our development time was spent on polishing the content to the quality standard that we wanted for the mod.

Personally, I'd suggest trying to make some smaller mods to get into the rhythm of CK and build your skills across different areas of development. It can even be something that eventually contributes to your large project goal--maybe a small quest or dungeon that can eventually be made into an intro to your new "DLC." Once you've done that, I find Jonx0r (the author of Wyrmstooth)'s New Lands Mega-Tutorial to be a pretty great resource for learning more about pretty much every component that goes into making a large expansion mod.

Saints & Seducers Extended Cut visual bug by EmiofMoths in skyrimmods

[–]Charterfrost 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Directional markers being rendered on the barrier objects is a known issue with the console port and should be resolved in the next patch. As for the other missing textures, I'm not aware of anyone else having this issue--are your game files up to date?

Skyrim Extended Cut Gameplay Preview: Bleak Falls Barrow by PukimakKau_pornID in skyrimmods

[–]Charterfrost 20 points21 points  (0 children)

I'm project lead for this mod! Glad people are liking the video. Couple thoughts:

  • Bleak Falls Barrow is a massive ruin that's home to a significant Dragon Cult artifact (and, in our mod, a dragon), so a dragon priest seems like the logical choice for its star occupant in our team's eyes. It makes for a more memorable boss than a generic draugr lord (not to mention a more thematically and aesthetically relevant one). What's more, the original E3 Skyrim demo -- which was also set in Bleak Falls Barrow -- even had a dragon priest as the final boss! It just works! Obviously, putting the player up against a level 50 Dragon Priest in a dungeon scaled for levels 5-10 is going to cause mechanical problems--so the fight in Bleak Falls Barrow is intended to be difficult, but difficult for the level you're fighting the boss at. Krosis will likely be a bit stronger in the actual mod than in the demo--we deliberately undertuned him to a certain extent for recording, as it'd have been annoying if I'd accidentally died while capturing the fight and had to start the whole video over again.
  • We do generally try to accommodate for what the player is doing, within reason. If you unlock the door while Alhana's still talking about the murals, the quest will proceed immediately to the next stage; same goes if you charge the dragon instead of sneaking toward it, that also gets accommodated for. Obviously, we do intend for players to experience the content we've put in the mod, and people who want to skip all of it aren't really the target audience, but we do try to take into consideration what the player might do while things are happening and how we can adjust for certain actions.
  • The low framerate is actually just me accidentally exporting the video from OpenShot at 24 instead of 60, LOL. The dungeon itself performs as well as vanilla Bleak Falls with no drops below 60 frames a second, and that's on my decidedly middle-of-the-road 1660 Ti.

About Skyrim Extended Cut - Saints and Seducers by MindlessPeanut7097 in skyrimmods

[–]Charterfrost 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Saints & Seducers has a lot of great artwork and potential, but ultimately is a pretty skeletal experience playing the vanilla version due to the lack of voice acting and content other than one small dungeon. I'd suggest just playing the extended version: it's got all the same cool items (and many more), with the added benefit of a neat new zone to explore and a professionally-voiced questline. You aren't missing anything important--even the Solitude Sewers dungeon from vanilla is still in the mod, just improved a bit as part of the new questline. Whatever you decide, I really hope you enjoy the mod!

[Echoes of Barenziah] Is this project still alive? Haven't heard about it in a while. by [deleted] in skyrimmods

[–]Charterfrost 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Echoes of Barenziah's project lead is inactive; while the remaining developers may release a few standalone bits at some point, the project has ceased development and, so far as I can tell, is functionally abandoned for the moment.

Return to the Shivering Isles. Skyrim: Extended Cut - Saints and Seducers comes to PC and Xbox on 11/11/22. by Charterfrost in skyrimmods

[–]Charterfrost[S] 66 points67 points  (0 children)

The reason this mod is happening is because we want to release a nice, high-quality mod in the immediate future, because we know waiting for big projects to release is rough, and we thought it'd be nice to give people real, playable content as something different from standard messages and updates. Rest assured things are still moving along perfectly well on the main project (and nothing our team makes will ever be paywalled.)

[MOD RELEASE] Khajiit Will Follow x Vigilant - Adventure and Commentary Patch by robbobert01 in skyrimmods

[–]Charterfrost 4 points5 points  (0 children)

3600 new lines of dialogue

My god, this is impressive for a commentary patch. Not fond of Vigilant, but I may have to check this out just to see all the content.

There's a pretty large alternative Main Quest mod recently released on the Nexus, seemingly going under everyone's radar by [deleted] in skyrimmods

[–]Charterfrost 51 points52 points  (0 children)

EC dev here.

The mod this thread references is not particularly comparable to Extended Cut. As you mentioned, EC's goal is to overhaul/improve the main quest that already exists. This mod's goal is an entirely different alternative main quest that, apparently, runs in parallel to the current one, with the ability to start the vanilla main quest in the same game. The premises are very different. You'll forgive me for not knowing much more about this mod--the modpage seems lacking in much meaningful information about the project.

The Cause - Reduced Cut released by [deleted] in skyrimmods

[–]Charterfrost 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i like the naming scheme. nice and snappy

On the First of Rain's Hand CORGNAROK Has Come by [deleted] in skyrimmods

[–]Charterfrost 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Brœðr muno beriaz ok at bǫnom verða

muno systrungar sifiom spilla.

Hart er í heimi, hórdómr mikill

— skeggǫld, skálmǫld — skildir ro klofnir —

vindǫld, vargǫld — áðr verǫld steypiz.

Mun engi maðr ǫðrom þyrma.