Something has always been missing in Cyrodiil. Where have all the children gone?
Well, now they are back!
Approx 90 children of various races and ages are roaming the streets of Cyrodiil towns, several babies are sleeping in their cradles, and you will also find that a new generation is on its way, as some female npcs actually are pregnant.
All the children are fully voiced (around 1300 voice entries), fully scheduled and living with their own families. Many of them have siblings, best friends, hobbies, pets, horses, chores to do over the day etc. In other words, each one of them is unique, which you will find if you spend some time looking at their behaviour, talking to them or listening to them talking to each other or to other npcs.
You'll find the children in or outside the towns during daytime, playing on the streets, in the parks or maybe at one of the playgrounds. In the evenings and nights, they'll be home with their parents.
You can interact with the children, talk to them, ask them about their thoughts, play games with them or offer them simple gifts that you can buy in many of the stores.
You can not harm them, and you are not supposed to. As Cyrodiil is a dangerous world, all kids have their own amulet of instant teleporting that they will use if you injure them.
Compatibility notes:
OCO2 character overhaul: Fully compatible, the children races will not be affected. However, the optional file "HGEC Texture compatibility add-on" will miscolor the hands and feet of the children. To my knowledge, no other available textures will cause any issues.
Better cities: No severe side-effects during testing, however some of the playgrounds are affected, and a patch might be made later on.
Open cities: We haven't really tested this, but I expect that a patch will be requested
Some further notes:
- The animations that are making the children so lively are by Uumpa, and they are motion capture animations. This means that they don't have a normal collision. Therefore, the children might occasionally do their animations into statics. I have asked experienced animators for advice, but have learnt that there is not much I can do about this. So, the side-effect of the lively and active kids is that you might from time to time see them do animations into statics or even into other npcs. I hope this won't be too immersion-breaking.
- There are only two voice-sets used for this mod. Both are made by my own children. The boy's voice was actually recorded for Children of Morrowind, and as the boy is now a young man, he hasn't been able to add anything further. Therefore, the girls have a lot more dialog than the boys. When I made Children of Morrowind, I used voices from many children of members of the community. In return I promised to ensure that nothing would "happen" to the kids - no kids being killed, no abusement in screenshots etc. With the wide range of mods available for Oblivion, it would be much harder to make the same promise today. Therefore, I have choosen to only use the voices of my own children, who are old enough to ensure me that they are fine with it. The quality of the voice recording may vary, as many of them were made long ago. I have tried to edit them as well as possible, and I still felt that the genuin small-girl voice that my daughter used at the age of 5 added so much that I kept the files in spite of the not-so-high technical quality.
Version 1.1 is now available, with the following improvements:
- Now compatible also with Nushka's HGEC textures for OCO2 - Clothing meshes have been reworked and some kids are wearing necklaces/amulets in order to get rid of visible neckseams - A few additional voice files have been added
After reading some of the comments regarding the "pregnant child bug" I decided to take a look myself: it's not a bug, or caused by another mod as @abelyo suggests, it's by design in this mod. Perhaps for the sake of Emma or her helper's interpretation of "realism"?
This child NPC in question is Ariadne Doran in Chorrol. The mod contains a script called EMChildren1. It begins:
The item "1empregnant" is the green and blue maternity dress that all pregnant CoO characters wear. The script simply adds this dress to their inventory and the "pregnant" flag makes it so that NPCs with that item always wear it. Since the item is added by script, not merely manually placed in Ariadne's inventory @TheRomans suggestion to open up her inventory in CS wouldn't work (she only has her "normal" schoolgirl dress in there before the game initializes). Instead you'd have to edit the script (but see below if you're afraid of editing mod files). Btw, this doesn't seem to be some kind of oversight or anything as I'm almost certain Ariadne Doran is the only NPC in the script who is non-Vanilla. I recognize most of the other names.
So... if this issues bothers you enough you can do what I did and simply edit the script (make a backup first of course) in CS by commenting out Ariadne's line (i.e. add a semicolon in front of it). In a new game this will prevent her from getting the maternity dress and the flag (I tested this on a fresh save).
However, if you're in a current game this is only the first part of the task because the item is already in her inventory and the flag is already set. In that case you'd have to open up the debug console, click on the NPC you want to edit (or, if they're not in your cell, type "prid <refid of target NPC>") and then use the command:
removeitem xx0574E9 1
"xx0574E9" is the objectid of the maternity dress. Replace "xx" with the order designation of the Children of Cyrodil mod in your load order. So in my case it would be "140574E9". Note that the load order designation utilizes hex instead of denary so follow the designation listed in your mod manager (I use Wrye Bash).
Both Ariadne and the Vanilla NPCs have their regular clothes so they'll just default to that once the maternity dress is taken away. Ariadne wears a red dress.
If you don't want to edit the script just doing the removeitem command *should* work: the pregnant flag is already set so they won't be given a new maternity dress and there shouldn't be any other way for them to acquire one. But I make no promises, and if you don't edit the script then you'll have to this for every new game you start.
I actually ended up removing most of the Vanilla NPCs from the script as well as you talk to several of them extensively in quests and, given that several discuss their families, it would be weird that none of them would mention a baby.
Are there any patches anywhere to make the child races better reflect what they are like Oblivion Character Overhaul v2? To fix things like the Elven children walking around with regular human brown eyes
[edit] Nevermind, uninstalled the mod after seeing npc's trying to talk to kids. Ideally I just want the kids to be on the same level as clutter, never interacted with and never disturbing other parts of the game. Just wanted kids running around in the background in some areas since it feels weird that they just don't exist in Oblivion
As I've read, when Oblivion was being developed, there was a debate about having children in cities.
Some people wanted them because it would increase immersion, but Bethesda was afraid of ppl making videos of killing the children and jornalists exploit it to harass TES and Bethesda's public image. So it was decided to keep children out.
Still, vanilla has a few zombs and dead bodies and skeletons that are small and clearly from children.
So, Emma made this mod to add children, but developed scripts to not let us attack them.
@Incudust - That's an easy answer: Bethesda purchased the Fallout IP from Interplay (when they went bankrupt and were forced to auction their assets), then they made Fallout 3.
Children has always been a thing in Fallout, and is absolutely a core feature (just as Orcs, or Elves are a core set of Elder Scrolls), and so not having them in F3 wouldn't go over well with fans. Potentional of backlash also didn't matter as much, as they had a way to then deflect that ("We wanted to be faithful to the franchise"), but they did put in minimum effort to prevent players from killing children.
There were no backlash against Fallout 3 for having included children (even with mods introducing the ability to kill them), nor was there any backlash for New Vegas having children, so it was safe for Bethesda to do the same for Skyrim.
The children are really well done, and the animations are unique. It's quite amazing, as always from Emma. But I deleted the mod quickly when I realized the kids don't fight and have no weapons, armor, spells, etc. They're strictly there for looks, and there's so many, running around & doing animated cartwheels, that they significantly affect fps. Also I did notice the animations take them into static objects sometimes. Even so, I might've kept the mod if they could be equipped and be able to fight when provoked; they could've simply been set to essential to avoid being killed, rather than disappearing into thin air. A very nice try, but a miss.
Is anyone else have huge FPS drops with this mod? I have no idea why but as I was trying to figure out why my FPS dropped so hard in cities, I went into a house full of children and realized that their models just tank my performance REAL bad. I am talking like from 90 to 20 FPS. Currently trying to figure it out but if someone experienced this too please let me know how to fix it, I really like this mod and dont really wanna stop using it.
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Mod of the month March 2015!
Children of Cyrodiil
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyPOGWJrBgg
OCO2 character overhaul: Fully compatible, the children races will not be affected. However, the optional file "HGEC Texture compatibility add-on" will miscolor the hands and feet of the children. To my knowledge, no other available textures will cause any issues.
Better cities: No severe side-effects during testing, however some of the playgrounds are affected, and a patch might be made later on.
Open cities: We haven't really tested this, but I expect that a patch will be requested
Some further notes:
- The animations that are making the children so lively are by Uumpa, and they are motion capture animations. This means that they don't have a normal collision. Therefore, the children might occasionally do their animations into statics. I have asked experienced animators for advice, but have learnt that there is not much I can do about this. So, the side-effect of the lively and active kids is that you might from time to time see them do animations into statics or even into other npcs. I hope this won't be too immersion-breaking.
- There are only two voice-sets used for this mod. Both are made by my own children. The boy's voice was actually recorded for Children of Morrowind, and as the boy is now a young man, he hasn't been able to add anything further. Therefore, the girls have a lot more dialog than the boys.
When I made Children of Morrowind, I used voices from many children of members of the community. In return I promised to ensure that nothing would "happen" to the kids - no kids being killed, no abusement in screenshots etc.
With the wide range of mods available for Oblivion, it would be much harder to make the same promise today. Therefore, I have choosen to only use the voices of my own children, who are old enough to ensure me that they are fine with it.
The quality of the voice recording may vary, as many of them were made long ago. I have tried to edit them as well as possible, and I still felt that the genuin small-girl voice that my daughter used at the age of 5 added so much that I kept the files in spite of the not-so-high technical quality.
- Now compatible also with Nushka's HGEC textures for OCO2
- Clothing meshes have been reworked and some kids are wearing necklaces/amulets in order to get rid of visible neckseams
- A few additional voice files have been added
If I was to make any children adoptable, it would only work with girls, and not the smallest ones. I don't have voice-files enough for the boys.
Crowded NPC: "Go ahead."
Kid: "Am I too noisy?"
Crowded NPC: "Yes"
Kid: "Goodbye."
Crowded NPC: "Take care."
LOL, the dialogue is to die for. They are so adorable that you want hug and squeeze them until their eyes pop out!
After reading some of the comments regarding the "pregnant child bug" I decided to take a look myself: it's not a bug, or caused by another mod as @abelyo suggests, it's by design in this mod. Perhaps for the sake of Emma or her helper's interpretation of "realism"?
This child NPC in question is Ariadne Doran in Chorrol. The mod contains a script called EMChildren1. It begins:
The item "1empregnant" is the green and blue maternity dress that all pregnant CoO characters wear. The script simply adds this dress to their inventory and the "pregnant" flag makes it so that NPCs with that item always wear it. Since the item is added by script, not merely manually placed in Ariadne's inventory @TheRomans suggestion to open up her inventory in CS wouldn't work (she only has her "normal" schoolgirl dress in there before the game initializes). Instead you'd have to edit the script (but see below if you're afraid of editing mod files). Btw, this doesn't seem to be some kind of oversight or anything as I'm almost certain Ariadne Doran is the only NPC in the script who is non-Vanilla. I recognize most of the other names.
So... if this issues bothers you enough you can do what I did and simply edit the script (make a backup first of course) in CS by commenting out Ariadne's line (i.e. add a semicolon in front of it). In a new game this will prevent her from getting the maternity dress and the flag (I tested this on a fresh save).
However, if you're in a current game this is only the first part of the task because the item is already in her inventory and the flag is already set. In that case you'd have to open up the debug console, click on the NPC you want to edit (or, if they're not in your cell, type "prid <refid of target NPC>") and then use the command:
"xx0574E9" is the objectid of the maternity dress. Replace "xx" with the order designation of the Children of Cyrodil mod in your load order. So in my case it would be "140574E9". Note that the load order designation utilizes hex instead of denary so follow the designation listed in your mod manager (I use Wrye Bash).
Both Ariadne and the Vanilla NPCs have their regular clothes so they'll just default to that once the maternity dress is taken away. Ariadne wears a red dress.
If you don't want to edit the script just doing the removeitem command *should* work: the pregnant flag is already set so they won't be given a new maternity dress and there shouldn't be any other way for them to acquire one. But I make no promises, and if you don't edit the script then you'll have to this for every new game you start.
I actually ended up removing most of the Vanilla NPCs from the script as well as you talk to several of them extensively in quests and, given that several discuss their families, it would be weird that none of them would mention a baby.
It's still a great mod though.
[edit] Nevermind, uninstalled the mod after seeing npc's trying to talk to kids. Ideally I just want the kids to be on the same level as clutter, never interacted with and never disturbing other parts of the game. Just wanted kids running around in the background in some areas since it feels weird that they just don't exist in Oblivion
Some people wanted them because it would increase immersion, but Bethesda was afraid of ppl making videos of killing the children and jornalists exploit it to harass TES and Bethesda's public image. So it was decided to keep children out.
Still, vanilla has a few zombs and dead bodies and skeletons that are small and clearly from children.
So, Emma made this mod to add children, but developed scripts to not let us attack them.
Children has always been a thing in Fallout, and is absolutely a core feature (just as Orcs, or Elves are a core set of Elder Scrolls), and so not having them in F3 wouldn't go over well with fans. Potentional of backlash also didn't matter as much, as they had a way to then deflect that ("We wanted to be faithful to the franchise"), but they did put in minimum effort to prevent players from killing children.
There were no backlash against Fallout 3 for having included children (even with mods introducing the ability to kill them), nor was there any backlash for New Vegas having children, so it was safe for Bethesda to do the same for Skyrim.
Which means that there is no excuse for Bethesda to have excluded kids from Oblivion.
Currently trying to figure it out but if someone experienced this too please let me know how to fix it, I really like this mod and dont really wanna stop using it.