I've Moved!

     I've always felt rather constrained by this blog; that's a part of why I didn't update it as often as I wanted to. I thought about making it into a more general blog for my interests, but that didn't feel right, and seemed like it would be a pain to navigate. 

    Sooo I've moved my web presence over to a personal site for all my interests, including modded video games. You can find me at https://lavender-black.neocities.org/. Come for the modding ramblings, stay for the oughts-web nostalgia.

General Update on Stuff and Things

So! Here's a rundown:

    Yesterday, I released my Arcane Market mod, at long last. It's got most of what I wanted, and I learned a few things making it, including just a little about scripting--begrudgingly, unwillingly. I'm glad it's out and done, at least the releasable version, so I can work on some of my other mod projects.

    I mentioned I wanted to do a new modded Stardew Valley playthrough. Well, the 1.5 update ended up dropping in the middle of it, lol. I kept going for a while, but since not every mod updated right away, I had to keep my run on 1.4.5. Eventually the momentum just petered out. I have yet to have a save that lasts the whole two years until Grandpa's evaluation (though I was cruising for an easy four candles anyway). Oh well, it was still fun while it lasted. You can see my forevially in-progress farm below. Notable mods include Vibrant Pastoral Recolor, Seasonal Japanese Buildings, Lungs, Mermaids, and Element Spirits.

    The 2021 Fantasy Faire in Second Life ended just a bit ago. Was fun as always. Shopped, explored, caught some performances, did the quest. The usual. There's some other events going on now that I want to check out, including the Raglan Shire Artwalk.

    Fun stuff. 

Oblivion Update and You Tubes

     So, an update. I have my Oblivion install up and running with what I consider essentials. I also decided to do a more relaxed playthrough with Haela Long-Strider to test things out. As a bonus I decided to roll with some mods I rarely use or wanted to try for the first time, that I don't see fitting in any of the characters I want to play for the near future.

    Game looks super pretty. I actually ended up making a video doing a before/after from a vanilla installation. Was mostly an experiment to see if I enjoyed making videos, maybe I'll do more in the future idk. As if I need another social media void to scream into about breaking video games.

    Performance was actually pretty solid with all the graphics mods... buuuut I couldn't stop there, obviously. I threw in a bunch of heavy mods like Better Cities, which I haven't used in years, and FOMO Imperial Isles, which I'd never used at all. Lots of very pretty scenery, but my fps gets pretty rough in places, especially in areas like Weye and the Waterfront. And I get the expected out-of-memory crashes occasionally. Not a huge deal, as I said this is a more laid-back testing run anyway, so unlike a normal playthrough of mine I'm not really RPing or avoiding fast travel.(Yeah, I know, neeerrrrrrd)

    But in typical fashion, by the time I've gotten everything set up and can just play the game, I'm feeling the urge to play something else. Oh well, at least I've got the modlist ready and waiting when I come back. Maybe I'll mod Stardew Valley next! 

   My brain is absolutely, irredeemably broken.

Adventures In Re-Installing Oblivion

     I'd been putting it off for years, but recently I was finally forced to upgrade to Windows 10. I decided to take the opportunity to do a full re-install of Oblivion- though I had all of my previous files, my old install was held together with dark magic and tape, and thus prone to crashing if I changed anything.

    After creating a clean vanilla slate, I decided to run around ingame to check that everything was in working order... and ended up doing whole playthrough. Including finally, after 1500+ hours of game time in Oblivion, playing the main questline to completion.

    Anything I could say about the main quest was said years ago. Suffice to say I enjoyed my time with it, but am not eager to play through it again any time soon. (Okay, but for real, Oblivion Gates get real tedious, real fast.) That being said, I found myself surprised by how much I enjoyed playing vanilla. Don't get me wrong, I miss modded- sooo many times I caught myself trying to use my UI hotkeys- but it was nice recapturing what I loved about this game in the first place. The world, the quests, the core experience of Oblivion is just fun for me. I also realized a few things I didn't need to mod; For example, I actually enjoyed playing with the vanilla timescale of 30 and remembered that I'd originally modded it lower to work with basic needs mods I no longer use. 

    Other games, like Minecraft, don't hold my attention unless modded. But when it comes down to it, I really like Oblivion for itself. (In spite of the bugs, holy crap I forgot how buggy this game is. It makes my creaky old modded install look pretty stable by comparison, lol.)

    All that being said, I am going to be once more modding the shit out of Oblivion. It's been ages since I did a full re-install, and I've learned a lot since then. There's been more work by the community to compile modern Oblivion modding guides, too, such as bevilex's popular one. It's going to be a bit of an ordeal to get back to where I was, and I don't even know how much I'll be able to save of my personal mod projects, but it'll be fun, too. 

    After all, as they say with Skyrim, modding the game IS the game.

Dungeon-Making In Oblivion

In my last post, I mentioned my project to add a wizard-themed marketplace to Oblivion with vendors and attractions. An idea I had for one of said attractions was a dungeon run with random loot including some of the fancier wizard swag in my mod collection. Thing is, I'd never made a dungeon before, and I didn't want this to be my first effort, especially considering that I'd want it to be interesting enough to run multiple times.

So now I'm making a "practice" dungeon, loosely following the official My First Dungeon tutorial put out by the CS devs. I've got one cell completed with lighting, clutter, enemies, pathing etc. Now that I've gone through all the steps for one cell, I want to add at least one more with a boss room, then create the exterior worldspace linkage to integrate it into the game properly. 

yep, that there is a dungeon alright

It's been an interesting process, and I've expanded my knowledge of the CS a bit. Level design is its own skillset and I'm definitely a rank amateur. Lighting has been one of the trickiest things to get right, even more so than normal interiors as there are more considerations for gameplay. Since I'm deliberately copying the vanilla devs' style closely, the dungeon itself is going to be pretty generic and not worth a mod release. But I'll have some experience I can put into making a really cool dungeon for the market! It's a useless hobby, but I'm enjoying myself.

Catching Up On My Oblivion Adventures

It's been a while since I mentioned Oblivion on this blog, but that doesn't mean I haven't been modding or playing. Thought while I was here I might as well post an update on my adventures.

First off, my Khajiit thief Kzhirra, after many adventures in Cyrodiil and Elsweyr, eventually managed to complete the Thieves' Guild questline and inherited the title of Gray Fox. She immediately decided to shirk any and all responsibilities as Guildmaster and retired to the desert with the Cowl and all her ill-gotten gains. It was refreshing to have a character come to the end of their story naturally rather than have the playthrough end prematurely due to boredom or bugs.

gg skooma kitty

The same could not be said for my subsequent character, an Imperial whose goal was to make his riches through crafting and business mods, and who largely relied on companions to stay alive. Sadly one of said companions broke in a big way and I stupidly did not keep backup saves from far enough back. RIP Vilja, never came back from shopping in Skingrad :(

So I decided to take a break from playthroughs for a while and focus on modding. One of my quarantine projects was to learn how to convert clothing to new body types. My preferred body mod is Luchaire's TGND2; I feel it manages to be both naturalistic and attractive. It also has conversions available for most of the big overhaul mods I use. 

I'd been "converting" various mods' clothing that was simply retextured vanilla meshes by taking an already-converted model and pointing it to the mod's retexture, then saving over the mod's mesh. In other cases I used outfits that covered the whole body, as in the above picture of Kzhirra, and didn't care if that meant the character went up a couple cup sizes because I am very lazy.

But there are other modded clothes I want to use where that simply won't work. While TGND2 is based off the HGEC body and uses the same UV maps, the wrists and hands as well as feet and ankles are smaller. This creates a noticeable gap in those areas when you wear a HGEC outfit in a game with TGND installed. (The mod attempts to circumvent this with equippable "HGEC" hands and feet, but they never made a difference for me). Now, there is an automated tool called the Clothing Converter that can attempt to make the appropriate edits to meshes based on a configured "lattice", but even in the best of times the results are imperfect. 

Eventually, I realized there was no other option. I'd have to learn some Blender.

I'd been brainstorming an Argonian mage character for my next playthrough, so some cool mage robes seemed a good place to start. My first project was to convert the vanilla robe remodels by yuravica aka Fly. These remodels vary, some are skimpy, some are just odd, but there's some that I could totally see fitting into my game. Once I converted a mesh, I could have a huge variety of robes by pointing the models at various robe textures, as done in this mod.

some are very odd

The process has left me a broken shell of a human being. First, all the Oblivion tools for Blender are based on the ancient 2.49b version (though at least there is a handy compilation of said tools available here from Room207). This makes general Blender tutorials hard to follow as so many are meant for later versions of the software that made significant changes in the UI.

Then there's the models themselves: I may have chosen a rather poor place to start as the remodels already suffer from clipping issues and the like before I bumble in with my poorly-done conversions. I can't really blame Fly, as they're deliberately doing weird and experimental things with these meshes while keeping the UV maps the same. But after converting 8 of the 15 or so unique models, I decided it was time to take a break. Perhaps permanently. I may try and see if I have an easier time on other conversion projects before going back to this one. I definitely have a newfound respect to the effort that goes into converting dozens of meshes from the big overhaul mods and the like!

After putting that effort on hold, I turned to other projects. I scoped out various house mods for my next playthrough, and really liked the look of one from Trollf called Alchemists Cave. It had a few issues that needed fixing, and after cleaning it up I decided I might as well chuck it up on Nexus in the rare case that someone else found themselves in the same situation as me. Most of the modding I do isn't shareable, as I mostly tweak, compile, or build on the contributions of others to make my own perfect game world. I might as well put up what I can without running afoul of permissions issues.

My new project is a marketplace to house vendors selling the robes, staves, and other magical swag from various mods I've collected over the years. The original mods usually dump their wares in a chest somewhere or into the inventory of a vanilla shopkeeper. My vision is a sort of weekend wizard farmer's market with various vendors and activities, that also serves as a handy way to compile all these resources into one .esp. I may put up the marketplace itself as a modder's resource, sans actual modded content, then add what I want to my local version. Don't know if anyone would actually care or have a use for it, but hey, that's modding for you!

Fantasy Faire Trip Report in Second Life

Yesterday was the final day of Second Life's Fantasy Faire, a charity event benefit for the American Cancer Society's Relay For Life. For two weeks, a special group of fantasy-themed sims host shopping, concerts, performances, literary and roleplay events, a special quest, and probably even more things I'm forgetting about. Point is, there's a lot going on.

I always enjoy visiting the Faire. This year, I did the Quest, caught a fun performance from the Misfit Follies, shopped a little, and found lots of new designers to follow and people to watch on Flickr. Of course, there's also the sims themselves, which are always beautiful and creative. On the one hand, it feels a shame they're only around for two weeks, but on the other, the limited availability motivates me to take it all in when I can.

The standout this year had to be Queensgarden, a lovingly detailed sim gorgeous at practically any angle.

Like most Second Life events, this one is organized and put on by the users, which makes it doubly impressive to me. You can see a lot of passion for the cause- after all, who doesn't know someone who has struggled with cancer? I found it impressive that even in the midst of a pandemic, people ended up giving the equivalent of ~$73,000 to RFL, according to the website.

This hot take has been expressed many a time already, but in the middle of a quarantine, I can really feel the power of Second Life as a platform. I don't think Corona is some opportunity for a new golden age of renewed interest in SL as some have suggested, but it does make me value the scraps of social gathering I can have there more highly. The fairies and fantasy landscapes are a nice bonus.