Long time no see guys. I wanted to talk about how this crazy project of mine came to be.
I believe that I started working on this project in 2007, when I was 16 years old (I'm 25 now! ). It started out as a quest mod with just a main quest, featuring many fairy tale references and lots of sillyness. All the modding was done by me, and most of the quests/dialogue/books were done by a writer friend of mine from the UK. As I started this project I had a bit of experience with modding, but not a lot. I learned a lot as the mod progressed, and I had to partially redo the early sections of the main quest because of mistakes I made. I think this serves as a good warning to beginning modders: Don't start your first project with something huge, because you will make mistakes. And fixing those afterwards can be a pain in the ass.
Still, things worked out. But the project got bigger. My friend started writing side quests for every single city and village in the game, and a whole bunch of extra 'Less Generic NPCs' style dialogue that we released as an add-on. Oblivion has a lot of dungeons and NPCs that aren't used for anything special, so we wanted to address that. He also wrote a bunch of books, and we added unique items to various vanilla dungeons. Mind you, all of this was done before the mod had its initial release. Looking back it is pretty insane how big the project became, and I'm surprised I managed to finish it at all without cutting any corners. I guess that's the advantage of not working with a team, and the fact that we relied for the most part on vanilla assets and locations. This screenshot from the walkthrough guide shows the full list of side quests. In 2009, somehow, we finally managed to release the mod.
My writer friend helped me to bugtest the mod, but as the writer he didn't have a completely neutral perspective either. When we released it to the public it turned out that people found some quests really unclear and there were a bunch of bugs. Not a disaster, but it had to be adressed. After several small patches I worked on a big 2.0 update with improved quest directions and many bugfixes. We also wrote a walkthrough for the majority of quests. Somehow my friend convinced me to add even more quests he wrote for this update.
This is the biggest project of any kind I've ever done in my life and while it has its flaws I am really proud of it. Special thanks also go to WalkerInShadows for releasing several updates to the mod (especially for optimizing my awful scripting) and helping people with their questions after I retired from Oblivion modding in 2011. I've done some small projects for other games since but not anything like this. I don't know if I will ever do something like this again. But I don't regret it one bit.
Thanks for reading! I love the Bethesda modding communities and I'm glad I was able to give something substantial back to it.
Discovered a strange issue between the quest A Lost Family and the mod Ultimate Leveling using the XP method of leveling. While I got the correct +2 to Personality for my reward, I ended up gettting a -2 debuff to my available attribute points, which means when I next level up I will be only able to distribute 9 points rather than the normal 11. Not a huge issue but it's clearly not intended behaviour as you wouldn't normally lose these two available attribute points on levelling up with the Vanilla or something like NGCD or similar method of levelling up.
Oh boy. Those tokens are strictly to keep track of what's going on behind the scenes - they're not actual items. I'll take a look at that and fix it as soon as I can.
I'm still finding these Heinz's Tokens. Found them on my followers. So I don't need these for anything?
Ok, thanks! Currently try to play through your main quest and the 'Death's potion thing' quest. Everything seems to be working fine, and the quests are enjoyable.
Is this mod confidently stable and bug-free nowadays? I'm thinking I'll give it a shot with Better Cities, Better Dungeons, and Unique Landscapes, since this mod seems to add a wealth of content to the game. Plus with Vorians' new voice mod I feel obligated to try this out.
Yeah it's pretty solid. I haven't gone through all the content yet, but so far I've encountered no problems with my setup. If you haven't seen yet, there's a new Better Cities patch for this concerning a gravestone object in the Waterfront district.
I have an issue with the Tool Gathering quest for the ClutterMonkey guild. I have all the Tools for Ivor but have no way to give it to him, anyone else have this issue?
I am not getting the second note from Doc. I've gotten all the ingredients and everything is in my inventory, but when I talk to Sleepy nothing happens. I am a vampire and I'm using "Simple Vampirism Expanded", so I'm not sure if that's interfering, but I got the first note just fine. Is there anything I can do to advance the quest?
Edit: Figured it out. in case anyone else has the same problem, just open the console and type "setstage povssquestdwarven 82" without the quotes. A message will pop up saying you have the mortar and pestle (if you don't already have it, you need it, but I got no messages for the items I picked up for the quest including the mortar and pestle). Go into your inventory and click on the mortar and pestle and everything should move forward from there, assuming you have all the ingredients in your inventory.
Congrats, you found a bug. The script on Sleepy is supposed to check for Stage 75 (that's the one where you get the first note) and having all the ingredients, but it obviously doesn't work right. There's a Stage 80, which says "I have all the ingredients"... there was probably (intended to be) a script that checked for you having them, then advanced the quest to 80. I can add it in.
Endorsed! I played it with the new AI voice mod, and while I could notice that the voices were AI of course, the misc quests are are seamless. I couldn't tell what mod it was but I stumbled upon, "Clerical Dalliance" and was happy to see that it gave me some choices (I ran off with the money lol) And I've noticed some other quests that I think are also a part of the mod, they clearly really give some personalty to some NPCs. This alone is worth the mod, so I can't wait to play the main quest!
I do suggest you use the voice mod here: https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/52417
832 comments
Long time no see guys. I wanted to talk about how this crazy project of mine came to be.
I believe that I started working on this project in 2007, when I was 16 years old (I'm 25 now! ). It started out as a quest mod with just a main quest, featuring many fairy tale references and lots of sillyness. All the modding was done by me, and most of the quests/dialogue/books were done by a writer friend of mine from the UK. As I started this project I had a bit of experience with modding, but not a lot. I learned a lot as the mod progressed, and I had to partially redo the early sections of the main quest because of mistakes I made. I think this serves as a good warning to beginning modders: Don't start your first project with something huge, because you will make mistakes. And fixing those afterwards can be a pain in the ass.
Still, things worked out. But the project got bigger. My friend started writing side quests for every single city and village in the game, and a whole bunch of extra 'Less Generic NPCs' style dialogue that we released as an add-on. Oblivion has a lot of dungeons and NPCs that aren't used for anything special, so we wanted to address that. He also wrote a bunch of books, and we added unique items to various vanilla dungeons. Mind you, all of this was done before the mod had its initial release. Looking back it is pretty insane how big the project became, and I'm surprised I managed to finish it at all without cutting any corners. I guess that's the advantage of not working with a team, and the fact that we relied for the most part on vanilla assets and locations. This screenshot from the walkthrough guide shows the full list of side quests. In 2009, somehow, we finally managed to release the mod.
My writer friend helped me to bugtest the mod, but as the writer he didn't have a completely neutral perspective either. When we released it to the public it turned out that people found some quests really unclear and there were a bunch of bugs. Not a disaster, but it had to be adressed. After several small patches I worked on a big 2.0 update with improved quest directions and many bugfixes. We also wrote a walkthrough for the majority of quests. Somehow my friend convinced me to add even more quests he wrote for this update.
This is the biggest project of any kind I've ever done in my life and while it has its flaws I am really proud of it. Special thanks also go to WalkerInShadows for releasing several updates to the mod (especially for optimizing my awful scripting) and helping people with their questions after I retired from Oblivion modding in 2011. I've done some small projects for other games since but not anything like this. I don't know if I will ever do something like this again. But I don't regret it one bit.
Thanks for reading! I love the Bethesda modding communities and I'm glad I was able to give something substantial back to it.
Edit, nevermind saw your other posts so you are clearly already playing :)
Edit: Figured it out. in case anyone else has the same problem, just open the console and type "setstage povssquestdwarven 82" without the quotes. A message will pop up saying you have the mortar and pestle (if you don't already have it, you need it, but I got no messages for the items I picked up for the quest including the mortar and pestle). Go into your inventory and click on the mortar and pestle and everything should move forward from there, assuming you have all the ingredients in your inventory.
says i have to find gauntlets in crayfish cave
I do suggest you use the voice mod here: https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/52417