Royal Bed

Thanks again go to Tamira and Stroti for this excellent bed. I’ve been looking a long time for something like this to decorate the bedrooms of the upper classes of the Frontier. I quite dislike the vanilla beds and some of the modded ones are just not suitable. This one is suitable beyond words though. Stroti’s Castle Furniture is a resource ported to Skyrim by Tamira; it supplies medieval furniture for your castles and upper class homes.

Stroti and Tamira are the number one resource providers for this mod, it seems, and that’s really great since I used a lot of Stroti’s stuff in Dibella’s Watch for Oblivion and without Tamira that mod wouldn’t have gotten off the ground because she was my very meticulous playtester back then too. Good times. Thanks again, my friends!

 

The young and beautiful Baroness of Tyrrha is supposed to be vain and girly. Her surroundings are beautiful and she likes to collect art; like statues and paintings. I want her Tyrrha Manor House to reflect that personality without going overboard and getting silly. This Medieval bed suits her fine tastes perfectly!

Beautiful barkeepers

There. Grey-faces are fixed for at least the NPC’s I’ve created so far. These two barkeepers now look a whole lot better. They’re still giving me the scary stare though. We’ll deal with that later.

The fix is simple. You just need to select your NPC’s in the Object window in the Creation Kit and press Ctrl and F4. This generates their FaceGen Data which is then found in textures/character/FaceGen Data/FaceTint/[your mod name]. Since I’m working with an .esm, I needed to open the .esm-file in the CK and do it. It works similarly with .esp’s. The only problem I see is that it generates quite large files and it will swell my file-size even more. Sigh.

 

Grey-faced staring people

 

This is what meets me inside The Frontiersman pub in Anvil Nova right now. Grey-faced staring people. The grey faces are easily fixed, but the sick staring is harder to do something about. Like they’ve never seen a player character before.

Orvar the Smith

Here’s the first working man in Anvil Nova. It’s a joy to see when the NavMesh and AI packages come together and really work as intended. Orvar works outside during the days and goes inside during the evenings. His wife runs the shop inside.

I wanted to start with the town smith because he creates nice, atmospheric sounds when he’s working during the days. His hammering can be heard all over town.

NavMesh, my old friend

NavMesh is the fear of all Skyrim modders. NavMesh is the area which specifies where NPC’s can walk and move, and it needs to be done for both exteriors and interiors. In the editor it shows up as a red area made up of lots of little triangles pasted on the environment. In-game, it doesn’t show at all, so the player won’t notice a thing. Only when NPC’s start moving strangely or followers stop following.

Most of Anvil Nova is done with NavMesh at this point and looking fine. In some sick, perverted, way I find it fun too to create NavMesh, although it’s considered probably the most tedious process in the entire modding experience in Skyrim. I think Bethesda could have solved this better.

I need to start by NavMeshing the towns and cities and then the roads in-between them properly. All other NavMesh will be half-hearted until later. If I try to do all the NavMesh perfectly from the start, I’ll drown under the workload. So a bit at a time. At least, Anvil Nova is going to function perfectly with NPC’s and NavMesh by the next alpha update! Yay!

NavMesh in Anvil Nova.

 

NPC’s

Creating NPC’s is a lot of fun and actually one of my favourite parts. Here’s one of the city guards in Anvil Nova already. Fully uniformed and ready to serve and protect.

I might release an addition to the alpha later on when I’ve created all the NPC’s in the capital and in its surrounding areas so you’ll get to see how they really affect the atmosphere of the place.

Move along, Outlander!

Revisiting Old Locations

In 2005 I published my first mod for The Elder Scrolls. It was called The Alcoholics Guild, and simply added a small house in Seyda Neen in Morrowind. There were three NPC’s living there; a Wood Elf, an Argonian and a Nord. The Nord was simply named “Passed Out” and was just lying on the floor.

Morrowind Alcoholics Guild 2005

When I created my Dibella’s Watch in 2011, I revisited these gentlemen by adding an Oblivion version of the guild on my new continent. The house I added pretty much contained the same characters and there was even a questline where the Argonian member supplied the player with some meaningless small quests; such as get me a couple of wine bottles and so on. I planned to make the quest longer, but never got to it.

Dibella’s Watch 2011

Today, I’ve added the first NPC in the Skyrim version of the Alcoholics Guild, and at the same time, I went in-game to take screenshots of the previous incarnations of the Alcoholics Guild in both Morrowind and Oblivion. The Skyrim version is situated near the harbour in Anvil Nova on the Frontier and it may have quests in the future too!

The Alcoholics Guild in Anvil Nova, Frontier, Skyrim 2013