Bethesda rumour mill churns in time for E3

I don't normally do much news outside of modding because hey, I'm rubbish at it, ok? But after doing some browsing today there's word on the grape vine that Bethesda is gearing up for the announcement of a "secret" at E3 that starts in just over a week. Now a new Elder Scrolls game wouldn't be a surprise. Since Fallout 3's release over 18 months ago Bethesda haven't announced any new projects in development in their own dev studios (just lots of publishing deals with their various partners). ...

Site problems - 5th Feb 2010

Let me apologise for the spate of problems that have occured today from about 4pm GMT onwards. That time honoured favourite of mine, sod's law, exposed its ugly head again as I worked to fix an issue with the forums. Naturally fixing one minor problem produces one much larger problem to deal with. After my supposed fix earlier in the day it turns out that the table indexes on forum posts (including file/image comments) became out of synch causing all sorts of problems; like posts not being ma...

Modding competition winners announcement

It's now been quite a while since the close of the Millionth Member Competition for TESNexus. While the competition blurb stated that the judging would be done by myself and a panel of judges I decided a while ago that I wanted to do it myself; several authors spent a lot of time to create community mods for TESNexus that I really wanted to play through thoroughly myself and give them the time and attention they deserved. First of all let me say it was a real pleasure and an honour to play th...

Service returning to normal throughout the day

A limited file service has resumed on both of the file servers while files continue to be restored. There's about 5G of the 200G or so files left to transfer, so hopefully by the end of the day service will have resumed properly along with the second file server returning to action. I want to thank everyone for their patience during this period....

New file commenting system

Fresh from my trip to Vegas I have now updated the file commenting system here at TESNexus. The change is immediate and every file with comments enabled will be influenced by this change. Let me run you through it... There is now a new option for file uploaders when they add or edit file pages to the site. This entry sets whether you would like other members to be able to create new topics for commenting. The entire commenting system has been changed to incorporate topics. There is no longer ...

Forum server issues [Updated again]

The main hard drive on the forum server is on the brink of failing, much like the Fallout 3 Nexus file server hard drive did. To make matters a little more interesting I have already begun plans to reconsolidate the webservers here in the UK on some much more powerful hardware and given my current provider their notice. This means that a server move will be taking place around the middle of August and my hope was that the forum hard drive would hold out until then. Sadly I'm not sure it will ...

New Catagories

Our current category structure was getting very over crowded and with a little urging from a certain member who shall remain unnamed, but is known locally as "Arthmoor". Here is a new comprehensive list of all catagories: Default - I forgot to set this. (this one is for me, for those who forget). Abodes Animation Armor/Armour Audio, Sound and Music Castles, Palaces, Mansions and Estates Cheats and God Items Cities, Towns, Villages and Hamlets Clothing Combat Companion Creatur...

Mod authors, your files might need reuploading/updating

The file database became corrupted today due to a user error at 5PM GMT today at which point the site was taken offline pending a backup restore. Unfortunately recent backups had also been affected by the glitch that meant a 13 day old backup had to be used to restore the lost file data. The only data affected by this issue was the actual uploaded file data, that is information on files uploaded to the database. Not file descriptions/images/comments/ratings/etc.. As such any files uploaded to...

FileFront closing its doors - Not anymore!!!

EDIT 4/2/2009 by LHammonds - FileFront is no longer being closed as it was re-acquired by the original founders. Popular file-sharing website FileFront is closing its doors in the very near future. Here's the blurb: We regret to inform you that due to the current economic conditions we are forced to indefinitely suspend the FileFront site operations on March 30, 2009. If you have uploaded files, images or posted blogs, or if you would like to download some of your favorite files, please ta...

File server issues and consolidation

When it rains, it pours! I am aware of the current issues with the file servers for both TESNexus and FO3Nexus. This is a completely unrelated issue to the down-time and work that went on yesterday and revolves around a financial move by myself to consolidate the current servers. Several ISPs are currently in a price war with their 100mbit unmetered services that has brought prices right down. As a result TESNexus and FO3Nexus are being taken down to 1 file server each, along with an addtiona...

New Elder Scrolls game for 2010?

According to GamesIndustry.biz Bethesda are potentially looking to release a new Elder Scrolls game around 2010. This comes from a chat with Paul Oughton, publishing executive for Bethesda: At the moment we've got Fallout 3 for this year and potentially there's a new Elder Scrolls title in 2010," said Oughton. "At the moment we're not that interested in the Wii. We're going to stick to PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. We'll continue to pursue three or four titles a year and go for big titles," he said o...

Testing and possible downtime/slowtime tonight

As part of a new project I am currently working on TESNexus as well as the forums might be particularly slow and unresponsive this evening (13th October 2008), and the site login might run into a few issues. Please be patient during this early phase of development and testing and report any problems you encounter on the forums as necessary. Thank you for your understanding....

Pete Hines on modding Fallout 3

Not really related to the Elder Scrolls (but perhaps related to any future ES games that might surface) but interesting none-the-less is a new interview with Pete Hines that covers the modding situation with Bethesda's soon to be released Fallout 3. Here's a snippet: RPS: Getting more technical - care to talk about the mod situation? Folk probably took for granted that every time we make a game, there's a mod tool. We explained to folk that it takes a lot of time and effort to get that too...

Site downtime postponed 24 hours

The scheduled downtime for today has been postponed 24 hours until tomorrow. The server was loaded in RAID 1 but I need both drives to store all your mods so I've had to request an OS reload that will take some time to do. Once again I plan to take the site down at 2PM GMT and have the site back up around 8PM GMT....

Bethesda Hiring

Matt "GStaff" Grandstaff, community manager over at Bethesda, wanted to let you all know that Bethesda have opened up positions for QA testers. Here's the blurb: We’re hiring for testers in our Quality Assurance department! We tend to favor candidates with programming experience but most importantly, we want people who are fans of our games.Why would you want to work in our QA dept? I’ll give you two reasons. 1. We use our QA testers as interns throughout the year. These interns are ty...

Bandwidth leechers probable cause of recent issues

After doing some grundgy looking around in the server log files I found a number of bandwidth leechers all originating from China. Bandwidth leechers cause mini Denial of Service attacks as they take up multiple (often 50+) connections and use up the servers entire bandwidth, meaning people either cannot connect to the server or download at very low transfer rates. Aside from IP banning these people, which isn't very preventative in this day and age, I will also be looking to limit the total ...

Fighter's Stronghold (official plugin) FREE this week only

As I'm sure many regulars know Bethesda's last official plugin for Oblivion has now been released, and for this week only it is available to download for free. This is a great gesture from Bethesda and I hope people respect it as such. As it mentions on the download page please do not upload this file to TES Nexus, or any site for that matter....

Oblivion: Game of the Year edition ships in North America

The GOTY edition of Oblivion has shipped in North America today for both PC and XBox. Retailing at $50 for PC owners and $60 for XBox360 owners, the game features Oblivion, Knights of the Nine, Shivering Isles and the latest game update. Here's what Ashley Cheng at the Beth Blog has to say: For Oblivion’s GOTY implementation, we wanted to make the process easier - both for us and for our fans. We’ve been working on this version since late last year. The main challenge was figuring out how...

Techies ponder computers smarter than us

Move along if you're looking for gaming or Elder Scrolls news here, this ones just something that interested me. Yahoo! News have a small article up on a recent event in San Fracisco, dubbed "The Singularity Summit: AI and the Future of Humanity" where the thought of near-future computers being smarter than humans is exciting some people. Interestingly, some nerds also predict a date for this event: 2029. Amusingly, I'm pretty sure my computer is smarter than some of the folks I know, and ...

Thrashing to Oblivion

Straight from the Bethesda Blog, gstaff brings attention to a Ukrainian progressive rock band who have produced a cover of the Oblivion theme tune by Jeremy Soule. Personally I couldn't help but sit there giggling like a sissy girl through most of it (don't ask why), but check it out by going to their MySpace page. The page is savoury and, for once, does not contain pink text on a black background -- probably a first for MySpaz. ...