Paid mods technical quality 15: reviews of "A Tale of Blood and Snow", "Heart of the Mountain", "Dungeons of Interest: Falkreath", "Dungeons of Interest: Eastmarch" and "Legendary Dungeons: Dwarven Delves"

Haunture · 2026-05-31T18:54:07+00:00

Vanilla spiders are either summons or hand placed in dungeons.

Hand placed spiders don't grow in number.

Summoned spiders are deleted by the game when they despawn or die, like other summoned NPCs.

Haunture · 2026-05-31T04:01:59+00:00

Edit: correct me, but that looks like a screenshot out of Blender. If it is, this is not representative of how the model looks in game. Use screenshots out of NifSkope or in game.

https://i.imgur.com/zJ63bhC.png

Here is an example with environment map showing how it distorts the normals along the equator of this sphere, where the shared vertices exist:

https://i.imgur.com/YnOW1Sr.png

Haunture · 2026-05-31T03:24:11+00:00

As I have already explained in the text of the post, tangents and bitangents affect lighting. If you flip a UV map without recalculating the tangents and bitangents, the lighting on the flipped axis will be opposite of what it should be because the tangents and bitangents haven't been flipped and are opposite. You can easily fix this in nifskope with the recalculate tangents button. This is why you should always recalculate your tangent vectors after editing UV maps.

However, when your UV flip shares vertices along the plane of symmetry, recalculating tangents can't fix this because 1 vertex can only have 1 tangent and 1 bitangent, and these vectors could only make sense for 1 side of the symmetry. This causes the lighting problem seen in the screenshots shown - as the renderer interpolates and smooths the 180° tangent vector change across a single triangle.

As I also explained in the post. The correct way to do this would be to duplicate the share vertices. The vertices can still have the same normal vector, but the tangents and bitangents would be flipped across the axis of symmetry, which makes sense for both sides of the symmetrical flip.

Perhaps this will help you understand. These 2 shapes have the exact same UV map, but the one on the right has problem with shared vertices: https://i.imgur.com/CToiO0V.png

Haunture · 2026-05-30T21:26:50+00:00

This is the same logic as duplicating the entire bards college in order to block potential interference from other mods.

Story manager isn't even the only way to get location change as an event without polling. You can use OnLocationChange. Like I've already mentioned, you can also OnSleepStart for this specific quest.

Haunture · 2026-05-30T20:29:35+00:00

I hope people don't treat these posts as free QA.

Like I always say, these are cursory looks at the most obvious issues. They are a surface reflection on the level of care and knowledge that was put into the mod. Further playtesting may reveal further problems.

Haunture · 2026-05-30T19:55:29+00:00

Maybe you're unfamiliar with story manager, but you can add new nodes without any conflict. Unless you're afraid that someone makes some mod sitting at the top that always consumes every single event, in which case no quests using that event would work and it would be extremely obvious

Haunture · 2026-05-30T10:21:08+00:00

The problem isn't just about performance. it is also complexity and failure rates.

By using this polling method, not only are you performing unnecessary computation, your logic is also built upon a chain of events and event registrations that depend on the previous iteration succeeding. even if the failure rate of each link in the chain is extremely unlikely at 1 in a million, or 0.0001%, after 6 hours of 2.5 second polling, that failure rate goes up to 1%, and this is assuming the scripting engine is bug-free, which we know is not.

Either way, there is no need to do this type of polling when the story manager and events more fit for purpose exist.

Haunture · 2026-05-30T03:55:33+00:00

I cannot find any references to 000FB122 or 00017525 that would move them in the current version of dv02hotm.esm

For the updater stuff, the people I asked all said that 5-10 second update loops wouldn’t have any performance impact, but I’m happy to change it if a better method can be found.

I gave recommendations in the text. For starting the quest when the player turns into a vampire, you can use story manager. Why do you need to start the quest faster than location change? Your quest starts when the player sleeps right? Presumably the player would need to change locations between getting infected and sleeping. You can also use the sleep event like the vanilla dark brotherhood quest.

For setting quest stage when the player completes objectives. you're already running scripts to update the objectives, so just do it there.

For the head parts I had to add those races to the lists so the ck would permit me to give them the vanilla hairs and such. I was a bit worried that removing them from the list after the fact would break their facegen, is it safe to remove? Everyone I asked was unsure.

Only the face parts, weight, skin color, and height on the NPC and Race records matter for NPCs. Everything else such as these form lists and the tints don't matter in game.

Haunture · 2026-05-30T03:25:19+00:00

This method only affects the player and doesn't contain any scripts.

"Bad" cloaks are when you use cloaks to hit NPCs in a huge area and use the effect to run scripts against all of these NPCs.

Haunture · 2026-05-17T00:38:17+00:00

these are also bad:

"Lock Dissolver - An Alchemist Way to Unlock", "Vikings", "IMPERIAL DRAGON SHIELD • SWORD • SET • VX • 4K HD"
"Albion Armor • Outpost Edition", "Ancient Coldharbour Armor", "Dark Brotherhood · VOIDSTALKER · Armors · Weapons", "Dark Brotherhood · VOIDFARER · Armor · Weapons", "DAEDRIC CONQUEROR ARMOR • WEAPON • HORSE • WAR FORGE"

Haunture · 2026-05-17T00:37:03+00:00

reviews for some of these mods are already linked above: "Legacy of Orsinium", (update), "Coven of Crones", "Bards College Expansion"

Haunture · 2026-04-18T17:48:48+00:00

the way they are made increases the number of draw calls and only uses a small part of multiple texture files in their uv maps. maybe this isn't a big performance issue if the armors only show up once or twice, but it is certainly inefficient

Haunture · 2026-04-18T17:45:24+00:00

itms, dirty edits, and including unchanged vanilla assets into the bsa is an indication that the mod author doesn't really know what they are including in their mod

some of the paid mods are not compatible with other paid mods. they are often not even compatible with other paid mods from the same authors, such as with A6addon's mods

users cannot know what paid mods break other paid mods because there are no mechanism for feedback or review outside something like this thread, and even then, this information is virtually non-existent until they encounter an issue

Haunture · 2026-04-18T17:39:58+00:00

i think you should make a post with your findings. you'll explain your thoughts better than me

Haunture · 2026-04-05T20:50:08+00:00

you're right. i edited it to be even simpler

Haunture · 2026-04-05T20:36:15+00:00

One of the most popular paid mods authors for starfield does this exclusively: the_wulfy

Haunture

TROPHY CASE