I have analysed which cells overlap between Elsweyr Anequina and TWMP, and I found that they are exactly the same cells that also overlap between Anequina and the original Valenwood Improved - and all those cells are in Valenwood! Basically it is excessive padding attached to Anequina - this sort of thing can happen automatically in the CS. This is the reason why Valenwood Improved Original or Tamriel.esp for the TWMP version has to be loaded before Anequina, which seems counter-intuitive.

What happens here is this. These new lands have to create new cells outside of Cyrodiil because they do not exist in Oblivion.esm - they go beyond the existing padding. These new cells are created automatically by the CS when you scroll around the land, and the CS assigns them some formIDs. Naturally these IDs turn out different for the various mods, so if you try to load them together, you have multiple cell definitions for the same coordinates. When the game encounters this, it keeps the first definition that it finds and destroys all other cells defined for the same coordinates. So in this case the first definition overrides all subsequent ones, which is the opposite of what happens with everything else.

Destruction of a cell during load means that every non-persistent object in that cell is deleted, so the landscape, the path grid, trees, buildings, flora, rocks - all that is deleted, but persistent objects like NPCs, doors and markers are preserved. Disembodied doors, anyone? Yep, that's where they come from. It means then that it is only safe to allow unimportant empty cells to be deleted, otherwise you are erasing content and creating disembodied markers, people and doors.

Of course it is better not to force the game to clean up your mess. It is better to delete unwanted padding cells from the mod yourself, so that there are no conflicting cell definitions.

And this is exactly what I'm doing for my own game: trimming off padding from Anequina. The border between Anequina and Valenwood is quite clear, both in the original and in the TWMP version, and it is the same in both of them. Unfortunately Iliana is no longer replying to messages, so I won't be able to release this trimmed down version since it is explicitly prohibited to release alternatives to the main download, and cell deletion is not something that can be done with a patch. Besides, it is not strictly necessary... It's just something that I am uncomfortable with.

An update on the overlapping cells between Anequina and Valenwood.

Valenwood Improved original and its TWMP version cover exactly the same cells (in terms of coordinates), while Anequina extends all the way to the West coast of Valenwood and also a great deal to the South. That territory has landscape with texture, rocks and trees but is unreachable from Anequina - there is a solid collision barrier along the border, you can't go beyond it. I suppose the landscape was generated so that you could still see the land beyond that point with LOD.

Valenwood Improved however has a different structure. It simply ends at its Eastern border, and if you don't have Anequina, you would see a giant drop to level zero and fall into that gigantic land tear. Perhaps it was always meant to be used with Anequina - you do get some land tears along the border, but they are small.

However, about half way between Skingrad and the sea in the South, Anequina Western border and Valenwood Eastern border start diverging - Anequina turns East and Valenwood turns West. This produces a very sizeable hole, a hole that is covered by the padding of Anequina. This hole is filled in by TWMP which follows the border of Anequina exactly.

The conclusion is then that if you want to trim the padding off Anequina, you have to make two different versions: one for Valenwood Improved Original and the other for TWMP (with or without Valenwood Improved in it). You still need a patch to repair the land tears along the border - use whatever patch you were using before. This trimming is purely for stability.

I have now trimmed Anequina for TWMP to use with my own game. It shaved off about 15 seconds off loading time of the first save of the game session. It also made every loading of Tamriel noticeably quicker and smoother with a much shorter "settling in" period after loading. I am satisfied.

I've been having visions while cleaning up my TWMP Skyrim Alive. I think this will be coming to The Reach. To complement this and this. Lore police begone!

~~~~~~~~~~
If you don't recognise the first picture, here is some info.

TWMP Skyrim Alive is getting slowly debugged. I am still not feeling like playing it all that much, so most reports - but not all! - come from other people. Fortunately the really bad stuff seems to be over, and now we get the peanuts. I've been doing a lot of cleaning and other xEdit work aimed at making the mod more stable and purging more of the weirdly corrupt records that somehow got into it in the first place. I think there must be some floating point number overflow going on because some rocks are found on the other side of the planet... quite literally. Assuming that Tamriel is in fact a continent on a spherical planet, then the Z coordinates of some of those rocks put them firmly to the other side of the globe. Alice going down the rabbit hole all over again.

I have also been adding notice board quests. Some of these are quite simple, others are a bit more involved, and yet others have interesting consequences like enabling ship transport between a port town in Skyrim and a port town in Cyrodiil. It may not be obvious from the start which quest has "hidden extras". I have a list of quests I want to put in, and I'll be working through it over the next month or so, I expect. The quests come from the background stories that I imagined for the NPCs as I've been creating them - they come from the core of it rather than being a lump added on top, which should ensure that the world feels natural and any weird requests that you might get stem entirely from the weird nature of the NPCs rather than their creator.

Oh, and we'll have a rats quest. Cannot possibly do without! But it's Skyrim, and rats are more... hairy.

Doesn’t xEdit’s undelete action do something strange with the z coordinate? You might be reinstating conflicts, like rocks blocking entrances.

I hear you, Ghastley! This would be most annoying. The newer versions of xEdit use a different technique to undelete records: they give them the Player as the parent and set their "enabled" status to be opposite to the parent. This is an awful choice on so many levels! But anyhow, the rocks on the other side of the planet were caused by a bug in the CS (I hope it's a bug!), I think. They most likely got introduced when I was relocating a castle from the Gnoll Mountain (near Bruma) by selecting a range of objects with the mouse (click and drag to select several objects). I am not exactly sure how or why, but often when you do this, you also get items from the cells on the other side of the world deep underground or high in the skies. With the Gnoll Castle relocation I got both, plus several duplicated cells as well. It took a major effort to clear (and to figure out in the first place).

Skyrim is getting bigger. I looked through my notes for each Hold and found an awful lot of quests waiting to be implemented... And I thought I didn't do quests! Ok, quests it is...

Quests are coming to Skyrim in batches. With the big release done and mostly debugged, I can take it easy and work in bite-sized chunks again. These are all point releases (2.7, 2.8, 2.9, etc.), I feel this is still material that belongs to release 2, not release 3.

The first chunk of this type was release 2.8 that I did yesterday. It took a couple of weeks to complete, but not working on it every day, at a nice leisurely pace. It contains a bunch of quests for Dawnstar, long distance travel by ship and the Docks district of Kogotel. Err... in Morrowind. I was going to connect the gates at the Rift and Dunmereth Passes to the corresponding gates in Tamriel Rebuilt for Morroblivion, but those areas are too unfinished to be playable. Missing meshes and textures everywhere, no interiors or NPCs, no path grids, plenty of CTDs... Not surprising really because these areas are not yet a part of the official Tamriel Rebuilt but only a part of Preview - they are still very much work in progress, in particular in their Morroblivion conversion.

So I decided on a different approach. Build a small settlement just over the border in Morrowind, give it a port, put a ship there and arrange transport directly to Vvardenfell. And thus Kogotel Docks came to exist - just the docks district of what is supposed to be a big city. Whether the rest of Kogotel will appear as well, is anyone's guess...

Kogotel Docks

With a sizeable cargo ship going to Vvardenfell

Distinctive architecture - this is Morrowind

Definitely not Skyrim!

The same ship arriving in Gnaar Mok (the best place for smuggling trade, they tell me)

Does this mean Kogotel is the first stop on your ship journey from somewhere in Skyrim, or do you reach there overland?

In TESV, you sail from Windhelm to Raven Rock, and I assumed that was the remnant of a larger trade with all of Morrowind, that existed before the eruption. So I expected Windhelm to Vvardenfell by ship.

A map of the area would help, wouldn't it.

Raven Rock is not on Vvardenfell though - it's on Solstheim. And yes, we also have ship transport between Windhelm and Fort Frostmoth - the original destination on Solstheim, quite close to Raven Rock.

Kogotel is reached by road taking the Rift Pass from Riften. It crosses the Velothi Mountains. From Kogotel you can take a ship sailing into the Inner Sea, so basically anywhere. I let it sail to Gnaar Mok because it is pretty much on the other shore of the Inner Sea where you come out into it from Kogotel.

Good job! I was thinking of starting a new TES V game just the other day. Now I wonder, why did I do that?

You got tempted by the cool version of TESV - you know, the one without steam.

But even they don't have a ship service to Gnaar Mok.

Um, yes I did.

TWMP Skyrim Alive version 2.9 is out. This one has got another new town - Dunkreath. It's in Morrowind, just on the other side of the Dunmereth Pass. It's got ship transport to Ald Velothi in the North of Vvardenfell (if you've got Morroblivion installed, that is). Other than that, it's got Imperial Census and Excise Office, a couple of shops and a few strange people...

This update also has a bunch of collection quests and two joinable guilds - the Welkynd Masons Guild (become a Free Mason!) and the Dwemer Artifact Collectors Guild (become Chief Explorer). The guilds are not open immediately, you've got to earn the right to join. We don't want to make it too easy! This is my replacement of a typical radial quest system which sends you into the many dungeons that I added in release 2. Still nothing epic (try the main quest for epic! ).


Getting off the boat in Dunkreath

You climb the stairs and it starts snowing...

What's new with you?

This side of the mountains is NOT Skyrim

Who's your tailor?

Entering Skyrim - first impressions

Dunkreath - what an eclectic town!

They seem to have repurposed Dwemer ruins... waste not, want not I suppose.

Also, I just realised: TWMP Skyrim Alive is exactly one year and one day old! I uploaded version one a year ago... How time flies when you're having fun!

I have finally decided to release Lena's Companions in its own right, and not just as a part of TWMP Skyrim Alive. I actually have a dozen companions already... But the release starts with three. I shall be adding new ones when I am happy with the level of testing that they'll have received.

I developed these companions for my own game, they feature in Lena's story. Some, like Hauk Serck-Hanssen, for example, even have a "player" file - a mod that allows you to play as that character. Hauk is my lead character in Morroblivion, and I wanted him to look and feel like the companion that's been with me for over a year now... Yeah, these things have a tendency to snow-ball.

Wow, very impressive!

Yes indeed Acadian is right, this is very impressive. I don't know how you do it. It's been fun watching the development of your mods. Sorry to have missed the birthday party.

Thank you both!

How I do it? I tinker. Start small, and before you know it, you have a bunch of companions running around in a whole new land... Being a programmer helps, too. But admittedly modding has a very steep learning curve - it took me may be half a year to get to a stage where I at least remotely understood what I was doing... Still learning every day.

I spent some time figuring out xVASynth - the voice synthesizer. It was recently revamped and updated, both the engine itself and the voice models for Oblivion. Whoah - it's getting really good! Tamriel is no longer run over by the Daleks... But it is still quite a pain to get from the lines typed into the quest window to the voice files that actually play in-game and have associated lip sync files. I've been testing it on Geralt's Companion file (which is close to release). It's quite nice to hear him inquiring about goblins and ogres, even if he does have a bit of an accent. But then of course, he's an Outlander, so it's only natural.

Let us know what tips and tricks you come up with, as you’re not alone.

I’m trying to get Lynda Carter’s voice from Oblivion over to Skyrim. She did Azura (and Gormlaith) so I want to use her voice for some extra Azura lines. Nocturnal is easier, as her voice actress in Skyrim also did FemaleDarkElf. But the files for Oblivion don’t seem to be at the same level as the Skyrim ones, and need more manual intervention.

Yarob, the Wise (or Wild) Woman for my Orc Hearthfires mod, may get either regular Orc, or Lynda Carter as Sir Mazoga, depending on the results from Azura.

Azura, Nocturnal, and Greta (who can be standard FemaleYoungEager) are needed for the Diablo mod. All the others get by with standard dialogue, and my other mods so far have avoided using any spoken communication.

I'm afraid you're way ahead of me there! I don't do any manual intervention - that's beyond me. I don't have that kind of time. It already took me half a day to just get the lines from the quest window converted into playable MP3s, and that's only a dozen lines. Admittedly, it will go a lot faster next time and won't take half a day, but still, the sheer amount of spreadsheet work required is mind-boggling, and then the voice files generated don't play in game and need an extra conversion step by a different program first. And lip sync generation requires several goes, etc., etc. I am only using standard models, I cannot train any new voices or anything, like I said - you're way ahead of me already!

And I have not done any conversions from.wav yet, so you’re ahead of me on that part. I may try voicing Yarob as FemaleOrc first, just to get that workflow sorted out, and do a further round once the LC voice files are ready. By that time, I might understand how the batch thing works.

Oh, in that case it seems that we're approaching it from different ends. I started with the batch method straight away - it produces MP3 files which play fine when you click them from the file manager, but don't play in game. You've got to use an MP3 optimiser to make them playable, and the thing is, you have to enter the exact same parameters as you do in the synth, but now the resulting files are much larger and actually play... which is kinda nice... Mind-boggling, I'm telling you. I'll write it up once I actually understand what I'm doing.

I had another go at voice generation (in batch mode), and I now have a better idea of what's going on. I wrote it up here, if anyone is interested.

On the NEXUS I found a couple mods that will give a spell to deactivate dark welkynd traps. Has anyone ever had any experience with deactivating dark welkynd stones?

No. But those traps work because they've got a script attached to them. You cannot remove a script in-game, as far as I know, so I wonder how those spells were made. Do you have a link to one of those mods perhaps? Curious.

First let appologize for pusting here. I should have used the Look What I Found thread.
Here are the two mods I found. They both use scripts to temporarily deactivate dark welkynd stones; leave the cell and they become active again, sort of thing or so they say.
ossan_auriga Deactivate Dark Welkynd Stone Mod at Oblivion Nexus - mods and community (nexusmods.com)

Disable Dark Welkynd Stones at Oblivion Nexus - mods and community (nexusmods.com)

Both these mods work in a similar fashion: when the spell is cast, all dark welkynd stones in range are removed from the cell and replaced with inert dummies. It happens so quickly, you don't notice. When you leave the cell, they put them back.

The scripting is very different though, the method and the effect would be the same. Not a lot of comments - you'd have to try them out!

Skyrim, Hammerfell, Stirk and Chain Islands - the Northern Realms - are getting voice files! Uploading as we speak... 176MB 7zip archive - that'll take a couple of hours. We employ snails here for internet traffic.

It took me two days full time and all the curses in the languages that I speak and almost all the curses in the other languages. Learned a few things though, might be useful to others - will post the details in the xVAsynth thread. Very tedious, but worth it!

So now a certain Helga Open-Legs actually tells you that she wants to break out of jail. She is no longer mute!

Oh my gosh, I remember getting Helga out of jail.

I remember reading about it in your stories! Along with the wonder how on Nirn did that girl get such a name...

So now if you install TWMP one day, you can do it all over again and hear her talk!

An anecdote for you. This happened today.

You're playing a game that is rated to have some adult content. You come across a nymph in all its aquatic glory (she is aqua-coloured with a suggestion of nipples). You fall for her charms, even though all she wants to do is kill you and eat your brain. You make a video of this (the fight, not the eating of the brain). You post it somewhere on the internet. You get slammed with a "nudity" punishment. You return to the creator of the game and request that nymphs should be wearing shorts and bras.

The question here is whether you would have fallen for the nymphs' charms in the first place if they were wearing clothes?

Clamshells anyone?

So, the solution is then to play ESO instead because the nymphs there are more modest. (Although they will probably still eat your brain.)

Claire says no to clam shells claining they're not supportive enough.

to answer the question, NO. (If I say yes several pairs of angry eyes will burn holes in my back.)
I've been told that the lack of clothing is a distraction technique used to make the mind more susceptible to natural charm spells. Not really necessary but effective none the less.

Claire wins!

I have too many projects going. Could it be true? It seems so.

I have therefore been on a path of finishing up some of them. Since I released Lena's Companions master files as a separate mod, I started releasing companion files as well. They've been hanging around here for a long time, some of them for a very long time, they've all been in my game in some form or other, but having to clean them up and get them ready to go makes them "finished". It just puts a milestone in the project development path and allows me to move on. Also it gives me a fixed version that I can return to in case my future improvements "improve" them beyond usable...

I still have four companions to finish up, and then I feel I'll be able to park them for a while and get on with something else, such as playing.

"There is no such thing as a black pearl!" Am-Ra frowned at her companion. "I travel all over Skyrim, and all you find inside clam shells, is a bit of meat and sometimes a regular pearl. Black pearls are a fairy tale!"

"Not true," a Khajiit in red coat shook his head. "Khajiit knows. Khajiit has seen a black pearl himself."

The conversation was held in hushed voices, and yet everyone at the Bee and Barb turned around and stared at the Khajiit.

"You're lying," Am-Ra retorted flatly. "You're just repeating the same nonsense as that captain - he even named his ship 'The Black Pearl'. Completely besotted, he is!"

"Captain Octavius Rex is a respectable gentleman who is welcome here any time!" Keerava proclaimed loudly from the bar, noticing that the captain just entered her establishment. The scales on Am-Ra's face changed colour, but she didn't say anything, and the conversation in the room went back to mudcrabs and goblins.

"Did you say you've seen a black pearl yourself?" A Bosmer joined Am-Ra and the Khajiit at their table. He spoke very quietly, knowing that only beastfolk and the Bosmer had sufficiently sensitive hearing.

"Khajiit saw a black pearl," the cat purred. "They exist."

"So if that is true, then perhaps the amulet... Could that be true as well?"

Am-Ra rolled her eyes at more such nonsense, but the Khajiit continued purring: "Khajiit doesn't know for sure for he has never seen the amulet, but Khajiit believes it is true..."

The Bosmer rubbed his chin, then slipped a heavy coin pouch into Khajiit's coat pocket. "If you have any more information, I am all ears..."

The Khajiit smiled a toothy smile, got up and motioned the Bosmer to follow. They crossed the road and disappeared behind the Chapel of Mara - a secluded spot favoured for secret conversations. Am-Ra shook her head at this and smirked, since everyone in Riften knew that if you stood on top of the hill behind the Chapel of Mara, you didn't even need beastfolk hearing to overhear anything that was said below... The sound carried. She knew also what the Khajiit was going to say to the Bosmer: that the black pearls could be occasionally found in the very same clam shells that normally produced ordinary pearls; and that no one knew where the forge was located that could fuse black pearls together into an amulet; and that even if someone stumbled upon that forge by accident, he would not survive it because such a forge would be undoubtedly guarded by a Dragon Priest at least. So what was the point?

The Khajiit returned some time later, inconspicuously dropping a coin pouch into Am-Ra's pocket. He counted a stack of septims, signalling Talen-Jei to bring his usual. "One Velvet LaChance," Talen-Jei put the drink in front of him, swiping the septims into his own pocket.

"Another one fell for it," Am-Ra grinned.

"It's true though, about the black pearls," the Khajiit looked a bit offended. "Khajiit didn't lie."

"No, but Khajiit didn't tell the Bosmer the most important part, did he?" The colour of Am-Ra's scales changed again, becoming iridescent - she was laughing with silent laughter.

"Well, no, we don't want anyone to actually find that forge, do we?" The cat's whiskers were trembling with laughter too. "Who would pay for Khajiit's drinks then?"



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I am working on the next batch of quests for Skyrim. It's all true - the pearls, the amulet, the ship, the captain... the Dragon Priest as well. The trick is to link it all together to get the ultimate prize.

That's it, Skyrim Release 2 is done!

I might have figured out how to make quests. TWMP Skyrim Alive now has over 50 quests... I can't quite believe it myself. Granted, that most of them are small and none are epic, but still. With the synthesized voices, they become fun - I was avoiding dialogue before because I dislike silent lines. But now there's no need to avoid it any longer! Synthesized voices are not as good as natural voices, granted, but they are quite all right by now, I think.

I have repackaged all resources together into a single archive, including voices for the entire TWMP Northern Realms (Hammerfell, High Rock and Skyrim). This BSA is now 1.1GB! I don't plan any additions until release 3 next season, so anything released between now and then will be just for bug fixes.

Well, with that out of the way... Perhaps I can get back to playing?

Got back to playing... Only to find Lena's game crashing outdoors for no apparent reason. I thought, it's over 850 hours, and I swapped mods in it hundreds of times... May be finally I've done it one time too many.

Turns out - no! A couple of weeks ago someone was having issues with my TWMP Valenwood Cities mod in combination with Northern UI and Sheogorath knows what other mods. I could never reproduce their problem, but tried to fix it anyway. And broke the whole mod in the process! Quests remain difficult.

What happened is that I've redone the whole quest logic, now relying on stages rather then quest variables (because it's better and I only just figured out how to use it). But what I forgot to check, is whether those quest variables were used elsewhere in the mod. Because of course I long forgot how it all fits together. Turns out - yes! Some 30 AI packages and 20 dialogue lines had them as conditions... Oops. That mod was basically broken. And those broken AI packages caused instability and CTDs outdoors because that's when Oblivion checks on NPCs that aren't in nearby cells. Boom - crash.

I think in the future I shall not be fixing problems that I cannot reproduce. Leave it as an exercise to the user.


PS. Lena's game is cooked, after all. Ever since I installed Oblivion Reloaded in it and then removed it, I'm having OBSE crashes. I think some garbage is left behind in the save file. Also for some reason the game becomes very slow, then crashes - and I already removed every mod I could think of. With each mod removed, it gets better for a while, then the problems return after game restart. It often crashes on save, too.

Bottom line is, I think, to put it to rest. There is a natural pause in Lena's story anyway - she's heavily pregnant now, she'll give birth soon and there will be no adventuring right after giving birth! Besides, I don't really know what she's going to do next anyway, so may be I'll just let her have a holiday. Start a fresh game some time later. But, considering that this game started on Xbox360 and is now at 860 hours with mods constantly being switched in and out... I think she's done well!

I've been cleaning up my mods, converting some of the batch files into mods, too. Because when I start a new game for Lena, I shall want some of the houses that I modified in her save game, to look the same in the newly started game. So they need to become mods. Much of it will be just private, but some stuff is good enough for general use - such as "Inns Sleep Two" mod that simply makes it so that almost all inns have at least two sleeping places when the player rents a room. Many of them already have a double bed, but because it is made owned by the player, the companions cannot sleep in it. So I added a second sleeping place where there wasn't one and modified all scripts to make it available to the companions also. No one needs to stand guard any longer.

I have also been finishing up unfinished companions, so there are additions there too.

I give up trying to improve the appearance of potato heads...

The thing is, I quite like them. Or may be I am used to them. I looked at all these other options, from complete overhauls like OCO to subtle changes to meshes or textures (or both). And I reverted to plain vanilla.

Vanilla Oblivion faces may not be the prettiest, but I think they are some of the most expressive faces in the video game universe. They are not airbrushed, not smoothed out, and that's their charm. They have individuality and character. Isn't it what we always say about something obviously decrepit and broken - that it's "bijou", "quirky" or "old-worldy"? Well, may be. I like them that way.

So now that I'm on a trek of finishing up my companions, I decided to make their faces for the vanilla potato meshes and textures. It does mean that they can never be quite like the originals, but so be it. People look different in different countries, that's just how it is. Because I said so.

First I did Yennefer Vengerberg (or of Vengerberg). Converting a face from The Witcher 3 into Oblivion potato heads was never going to happen, so I decided to make a new Yennefer altogether.


See if you can tell which is which.

My Imperial Yennefer has a wider face than the one from The Witcher, well, it must be all the sweetrolls. When I tried to make her face narrower, it became distorted and started looking distinctly odd in relation to her frame. Narrow faces work for the elves who also have slender bodies, but they don't work for Imperials, and I chose Imperial as the most suitable race for Yennefer. So that's that.

The second challenge was that of Jowan from Dragon Age Origins. I spent many hours trying to get his face right, changed races for him and all that, only to revert to something I created almost from the start.


Also here Jowan's face is a bit wider in Oblivion than it was originally, but well, you know, sweetrolls. The same problem - making his face narrower makes it look distorted.

I was also not able to replicate those straight eyebrows - it was just not happening. In the end I just went for a face that I liked the look of, even if it isn't quite the same.

Lighting also makes a big difference. For example, Jowan's hair looks a lot lighter in this picture than in the original, but actually that is due to lighting. His hair is quite dark and makes more of a contrast in daylight. You can't win them all.

But why do I shy away from custom races? Because a lot of interaction with all other NPCs depends on the NPC race being one of the ten official races. A custom race is not going to be recognised, making your companion a bit of an outcast. I tried it and didn't like it. There is a lot of dialogue and monologue in Oblivion that is linked to the race, and all that gets lost with custom races. It becomes particularly striking if you use mods that restore abandoned voice files (recorded voice files that were not included into the game after all). So unless the personality of the companion already makes him a bit of an outcast, I prefer to stick to the official races.

I am taking a break from modding. I got stuck a bit trying to remember what Scorpio was all about - he was Lena's companion in Dragon's Dogma, but it's been quite a few years since I played that game last. So I fired it up again, on Xbox360. It's a great game!

But like any game, it can be improved with mods... I didn't want to change it all that much, but there were a few things that were bugging me then and that I found to be bugging me again this time around. So when GOG.com had it on offer for a mere £3.89 rather than the usual £23.99, I grabbed it. (Offer ends in a few days, by the way.)

When I looked on Nexus however, I didn't find all that many mods. We are truly blessed with Bethesda games in how modular they are, how easy to change anything and everything around, add quests, add whole new worlds... Not so with Dragon's Dogma and many other games, as I found. I was also not able to convert my Xbox360 save to the PC, something that people had done in the past but that became broken with a newer version of Windows.

No matter. I started a new game on PC, with a few mods that indeed change the bits that bugged me last time around. Long live modding! So it's back to more story writing and less modding, and no playing Oblivion for a while, because now I'm all in Dragon's Dogma again. Amazing how quickly I got sucked in... And once you're in, there's no other way but through...

Playing Dragon's Dogma now and turning it into a bit of Dragon Age... It's all dragons, anyway. It has to do with companions, but that's a bit off-topic (see my mod for Dragon's Dogma).

What is on topic however, is that playing Dragon's Dogma, Dragon Age and Two Worlds II recently made me realise that what I miss in Oblivion is the specialisation of weapons and armour. All these games have some limitations to the weapons and armour that can be used together. For example, you cannot use a bow with heavy armour, or in Two Worlds I you cannot even swim in heavy armour - you drown. In Morrowind I believe you get reduced spell efficiency if you are wearing a helmet or gauntlets (or was it in some other game?), the argument being that metal shielding is not good for magicka flow.

I have already made a mod for myself that imposes a spell efficiency penalty if you are wearing gauntlets. Cloth gloves are fine, but armoured gauntlets get in the way. I enjoyed playing this way, and now I'm thinking to extend this similar to the other games.
- No bows or daggers with heavy armour, check.
- No waterbreathing in heavy armour? Ooooh... May be a bit harsh. Battlemages wear heavy armour.
- Heavier penalties to magic when wearing armour, unless armour skill is very high. So instead of 90% spell efficiency when wearing armour, you'd start with, I dunno, 70% efficiency. But then raise it to 100% instead of 95% at Expert level armour skill.

Something along these lines. Essentially requiring you to wear light armour or no armour if you want to use light weapons or magic. Got to think on it but stay tuned.

Back in Oblivion I started a new game with Lucien Lachance as the protagonist - he is going to Mournhold to prevent another war of assassins. That is, he is going to play Tribunal DLC. But before he boards that ship that takes him to Gnisis, he decided to take a detour to Anvil, which in my universe is his home town. Have you noticed how we have zero background on his character in vanilla Oblivion? Well, I filled it in. Leaving out the details of why he went to Anvil, let's just say that Anvil needed an update.

I have been using several mods that extend Anvil Docks, most notably Anvil Bay Expansion, and I built the rest around it. But I never looked too closely at what's inside that mod... What a mistake to make, eh? My game had been suffering from CTDs and lag for a long time, why, just about since I installed that Anvil Bay Expansion... err... The big problem with that mod is two (!) computation-heavy quest scripts that run every frame, yet do absolutely nothing. That is, they do all those calculations but there is no visible effect (apart from the lag and the CTDs). The author tried to implement sailing ships, it never got finished, but the scripts remained activated. So, I fixed that. Then looked closer still... oh dear. Plenty of player homes, but all containers respawn... quests that cannot progress... no path grids in any of the interiors... lighting issues... both lack of lighting and too many light sources which hits the frame rate...

And so I ended up spending a few days fixing it all up and adding some more stuff, some new dungeons, some new quests, voiced dialogue... the lot. The result is my new mod - Anvil Docks Extended which covers exclusively Anvil Docks (so not the North of the city and not inside the city, and also not in the castle, etc., etc.). It will probably conflict with Better Cities or Open Cities or whatever else is redoing the docks. It is meant to be complete, I don't believe you can squeeze anything else in there without making it too crowded. Anyway, made for myself at first, then decided to share. Have fun with it if you decide to try it out, but remember: all is not what it seems! Keep your wits about you. Just saying.

More merging activity today. Discovered quite by accident that Dungeons of Tamriel is an outdated merge - the author had updated the individual components but never made a new merge. So I made my own. Also thought it would be nice to connect the sewers from this mod with the sewers from Sewers For Every City. Did that, twice. Published the lot under Sewers and Dungeons Linked in Every City. Kinda neat.

Secondly I finally decided to publish a merge of my patches and whatnots for Morroblivion, especially that a few of them had never been published on their own: Morroblivion Towns Extended. All further updates will be made to this merge and not to the individual files.

A lot of hard core mod building has been going on here lately. A lot of scripting. A lot of discovering that things don't work as expected...

I have been adding a whole new level to my companions system. The idea is to introduce mutual help in combat, a combination of ideas from different games.

When the player or one of your companions gets knocked out in battle, he won't get up after 10 seconds anymore, he will stay knocked down until you or another companion helps him up, or until the battle is over. If the whole party including the player is knocked out, it's game over, unless you have a wakestone. If you choose to use a wakestone, it is destroyed but the whole party gets up with fully restored health.

When one of the companions or the player is knocked out, the other companions get a call for help. They will attempt to disengage from combat and run to the fallen comrade. One of them has to reach and "activate" him, which revives him. The player can do it too. The fallen companion gets up with 1/3 of his health restored - the default state when getting up after being knocked out.

The wakestones come from The Everfall - a new dungeon with difficult enemies that sometimes drop wakestones, so you can go hunting for them, like you do at some point in Dragon's Dogma. What also comes from Dragon's Dogma, is The Rift and riftstones - gateways to the Rift. No, it isn't a Hold in Skyrim...


The Rift is a space between worlds. You enter it by touching a riftstone and find all your potential companions summoned there as well.


You can talk to them and ask them to join you as usual, and when you exit, they will follow you. All others are returned to where they were before they were summoned.


Of course, there are no riftstones in Tamriel, after all, they come from another world. Several companions will help you build riftstones, however. The first one is the hardest... like all things in life. It opens the Everfall, and with each new riftstone, the Everfall gains another level. Each level has an exit in the "real world" - the place where you built the corresponding riftstone, but equally each level of the Everfall is connected to a central hub. So if you survive long enough and don't get lost in the mazes, you can potentially enter at one riftstone and exit at another.

This system comes with a configuration file. You can disable the whole help in combat idea and play in vanilla. You can still go hunting for wakestones, but they become useless baubles then. You don't have to build riftstones, obviously, it's a choice too. No riftstones means no access to the Everfall either, and no wakestones.

What is also configurable, is which companions can be potentially summoned to the Rift. It isn't hard coded - it comes from a configuration file: mod name plus companion's RefID. This can be any NPC really, as long as they have been set up with Lena's Companions system. This means that you can merge companion files with other mods, rename them or make your own companions with my template - you can register them all for the Rift. Up to 50 companions can be registered. This also means that existing companions don't need to be updated to make use of this system. As soon as you befriend them and they agree to join you, they can be summoned to the Rift.

So yeah, I've been busy. Still a lot to do here...

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On an unrelated topic. You find that if you don't use mod A in your game, then the game crashes with a CTD. So it's the fault of mod A, surely? Go ask the author of mod A why your game crashes, for they will certainly be able to help.

This sounds very promising. Pretty sure I'd have to learn how to create my own companions and start a new game with something like this. Tempting, very tempting.

Thanks, Macole! It will take some time to test it properly, and who knows what Oblivion is going to do with that call for help system. You can tell an NPC to stop combat, but it is ultimately the game engine that decides whether or not they'll heed your call... I see a lot of dungeon delving coming up to test this out!