DocClox

  The trouble is that anything other than breathless adoration seems to get labelled as hate. Not entirely enthusiastic about the new pallet? Haters gotta hate. Mildly skeptical about the new skill system? Haters gotta hate. I'd be nice to have somewhere  to bitch about those features we perceive as flaws without some doubtless well intentioned defender of the faith coming in and labeling us all as being defined entirely by one negative emotion. Not that you're necessarily doing that, obviously. But there have been plenty that have taken that position. Which is why this thread exists, really.

  Oddly enough:   Morrowind: Monk/Mage Oblivion: Mage/Rogue Skyrim: Pure mage (leaning heavily on invisibility) or light armour dual wield beserker.   Which isn't to say I haven't had fun with other builds (back when the game actually supported builds, that is) but those are the ones I've had most fun with.   Changing the subject entirely: half an hour in and you get power armour, a minigun, and a fight with a deathclaw. I mean seriously? Someone in marketing wanted to make sure all the brand recognition boxes got ticked for the E3 demo, didn't they?   See, this is to my mind is why it's wrong to characterise this as a hate thread. It's not that we hate the game. We love the franchise and the setting; this is more about venting frustration, Because grabbing Todd Howard by the lapels and shaking him until his teeth rattle while shouting "WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING" would probably get us arrested, and venting a little on an internet forum seems like a far more socially acceptable way to let off some steam.

  I don't generally find that to be true. In oblivion I must have tried half a dozen different character types and play styles just to see how they'd work out.  I had a good time with most of them. Morrowind too. Skyrim, not so much since the levelling system there tends to mean that all your chars end up the same, reflecting your play style, and FO4 I suspect will be less still since I can't really pick a character and a bacground and roleplay that, since Beth have thoughtfully saved me the trouble of thinking up something interesting.   But yeah, if all you ever do is one play through while waiting for mods to change the look completely, I can imagine that FO4 probably doesn't seem much worse than that. It's just that most of us seem to have enjoyed the earlier games more than you did.

  They do tend to bang on about the same old things, I admit. It doesn't generally bother me, although there are a couple of exceptions. (The Morrowind whistler and the "are you a wizard" kid spring to mind)

If you want say Beth have been in a slow decline since Morrowind, I certainly won't argue,   I do think you're being a little harsh in saying "all fetch and carry" though. Offhand, I'd cite the Oblivion DB quest where you have to kill the partygoers in Skingrad; in Fallout 3 rigging the election in the Republic Of Dave; and in Skyrim, investigating a murder in Blood On The Ice. All of those involved quite a bit more than simple fetch-and-carry. That's just off the top of my head - I'm sure I can think of others.   I'll grant that there are a lot of fetch-and-carry quests however. Still, aside from the Skyrim radiants it always seemed more like "here's an excuse to go explore this cool ruin" rather than "go to a and kill b because I can't be arsed to think of anything better".

    I think the main problem is that it's difficult to sync the player lines with the NPCs. You get a definite pause between your toon saying the line hinted at by the dialogue wheel and the response from the NPC

Well, I'll admit I've not really given it much of a chance yet. I'll try it again after I get my rig upgraded a bit.   I am surprised it's getting trashed so much on the user feedback though. I mean, I'm not surprised that I didn't like it, but I assumed Beth had at least done their market research. Oh well, it it reminds them of who their core audience is, it's got to be a good thing.   As far as modding goes, I worry about those player voices. It's bad enough with the NPCs being oddly silent during a scene. Outfit designers are going to have some fun as well I suspect with that body triangle. I'm guessing that means we'll need three versions for each outfit, rather than the two Skyrim needed. And of course, we need to wait for the CK to be released and see what needs reverse engineering this time. There are certainly mods I'd like to make given the Commonwealth as a setting.

Well, I wanted to like it, but ... it's missing something. I just don't feel any great compulsion to go and investigate.   OK, the frame-rate I'm getting isn't helping. I run into one of those mutant mosquito things and by the time I've wrestled my gun round to the right direction and engaged VATS, I'm suddenly dead. But I'm fairly certain I could work around that with a bit of effort. I just don't feel greatly motivated to make the effort.   As much as anything else, I think it's that I don't much care about my character. I didn't find the voice acting as annoying as I'd expected, the dialogue wheel is irritating, but livable with ... I just don't care about these people somehow. Which is weird, since seeing your spouse shot in front of you and your child abducted ought to produce a reaction but ... they just don't seem all that real.   I've got a long overdue upgrade planned. Once that's done and I have something a bit better specced I'll give it another shot, but right now, I'd sooner be playing Borderlands.    

Just checking in. Got myself locked out of LL somehow. The recent revamp seems to have reset my password (or something did, anyway) and I only just had time to sort it out.   I'll try and catch up on correspondence shortly.

Introduction   This is a tutorial about using Blender to project images onto body mesh. My usual approach has been to paste designs into a transparent layer on top of a skin texture then to drag, scale rotate them and hope for the best. The results have been mixed at best, with tats deforming as the body mesh curves and a lot of guess work being required to get the image correctly placed. I've also had to place them a little oddly at times to avoid seams in the UV map.   The approach I outline here results in precise placement and greatly reduced distortion. It also lets you map tattoos over seams without having to worry about lining them up, It isn't a perfect solution, but it's a lot better than paste-and-pray. I hope you find it useful too. What you will need: Blender 2.75 or better The latest nif importer scripts for Blender The Gimp The Gimp dds plugin Some sort of BSA unpacker - I used BSA Browser Getting Ready   Start by making sure that the body mesh(es) you want to tattoo have been unpacked unpacked. I used BSA browser. You're after femalebody_1 for the body itself. Make sure you're using the body mesh you use in game - if you use UUNP you want to use that mesh rather than the one from the Skyrim - Meshes bsa.   While you're at it get the textures too   One more thing - create an empty UV map image at the texture size you want. I tend to work at 1024x1024, but if you want 2048x2048 or bigger go for it. Just bear in mind that each tat is a new texture taking up VRAM. All you do is open the Gimp, create a new image of the desired size, delete the background so you have an empty transparent image and then export it as a png. It'll be useful later.   Set Up the Studio   I use a couple of tutorials to help figure this process out. One of them is from 3dcheapskate who recommends setting up a "Tattoo Studio" in Blender. What you do is this:Open Blender on the default scene Delete everything. The cube, lights, camera, the lot use shift-C to make sure the cursor is at the origin add a light (I used a sun) and transform it 2 units up the z axis add a camera and transform it one unit up the z-axis point the camera at the origin save the setup as tattoo_studio.blend This probably isn't as important with the latest Blender and Quick Projection as it was with 2.49b, but it's still good to have a setup where you know where everything is and where the lighting will be good.   Import and position the mesh   I'm going to assume you have the latest nif importer setup properly. Go to file->import in Blender and import the mesh part(s) you need. Set the scale adjustment really small - something like 0.02.   Once the import process is complete, move the model so the area you want to tattoo at the origin point and facing upwards. Zoom in so the target area fills the screen. You want to be looking down at it as squarely as possible.   Quick Projection   Go to texture edit mode. In the tool bar on the left there should be an section labelled "external". Expand that.   Set the image size to the size you want to use for your textures, then click "edit" **Check**   The gimp will open with a screenshot of the view in the 3D window. Any changes you make here will be reflected back in the 3D window.   Create a new transparent window over the screenshot and paste your tattoo design into that. Scale it and position it until it looks about right.   Once you're happy, hide the original layer so all you can see is the tattoo design on a transparent background. The export the image. Use the filename the Gimp suggests and overwrite.   Apply The Projection   Remember the transparent UV map you made earlier? Load that into the UV window. You want to see the grey-on-grey alpha checkerboard pattern overlaid with UV mesh. Once you have that, go back to the external tool tab and press the "apply" button. If all goes well you should be able to see the tattoo in the UV window. You may need to go back to object or edit mode and play around with the selection before it appears.   Assuming all goes well, save the UV image with a new filename. You can now exit Blender.   Set up the texture for SlaveTats   The texture file you just saved will be in .png format. You need it to be a dds. Open the file with the gimp and export it with the .dds suffix. Choose RGBA8, BC3/DTX5 and "Generate Mipmaps".   Make sure there's a slavetats folder for your mod. It should be in skyrim\textures\actor\character\slavetats\yourmodname. Create the folder if it doesn't exist, then copy your new dds file into it.   Now edit skyrim\textures\actor\character\slavetats\yourmodname.json and add an entry for the texture. By way of example, this is the entry that adds Lady M.'s spider mark. [ { "section": "Young Mephalians", "name": "Castemark", "texture": "young_mephalians\\wide_grey.dds", "area": "Face", "credit":"DocClox" },]Test The Result   Start Skyrim, go to the SlaveTats MCM and apply the tattoo to your character (or whoever). Make sure it looks as you expected.   Post Processing   The technique is not perfect and there are still a lot of reasons why your texture might look strange.   Elven forehead geometry, for isntance, is radically different from that of humans, so a tattoo that fits on a human forehead may well be all over the place on an elf. You may need to make a separate version for elves. (And probably again for argonians and khajiiti if that's something you want).   Areas with a high cell density can also cause problems. The pubic mound, for example, has a lot of small UV cells and not many pixels to share between them. Your texture gets sheared and scaled to make it fit and the effects can be brutal. In cases like this it's probably best to do a little post-processing. Open the texture, create a new blank layer, draw the texture again using the distorted texture as a guide so you get the poisition and proportions correct, and then hide the old texture layer and save the new one. It's a pain, but probably nothing you haven't been doing anyway.   Example   Hildy Half-Bright decides she in need of some protection in battle and asks Ragvar Bad-Apple to give her an enchanted tattoo. Ragvar agrees and recommends this as a suitable protective talisman.     Hildy agrees that it looks most potent, but is a little taken aback when Ragvar tells her it will only take effect if inscribed on her ass-cheek. Reluctantly she agrees to have her bum tattooed.   This is what Ragvar sees. (afer clicking in the 3D window and pressing shift-space anyway)     Now the ideal place to put this tat is right on top of the butt-to-leg seam. You can see the seam in the screenie there. (For some reason I can never get CBBE to work quite right with Mod Organizer). Anyway, this doesn't deter Ragvar who clickes the "Qucik Edit" button there at the side. Gimp opens showing the scene in the 3D window.     From there, the easiers thing is to pick "open as layers" from the file menu and open our "hurt me" design.     And there you see the image in the gimp. First thing to do is to rotate it and scale it so it looks about right     I left that at a bit of an angle so it would follow the curves of the body rather than being mechanically vertical. I have no idea if this will work or not, but that's what makes these things interesting. (Ragvar's excuse is he had too much Flinn before starting work. I like mine better...)   Now: there are two things you need to do. First, the tattoo image is too small. You can see that from the yellow dotted line around the edge. So right-click on the layer in the layers box and resize layer to image. Then hide the layer with the original screenshot. The result should be like this:     After that you can export the image. Use the name it suggests and say "yes" to overwrite.   I'll finish the screenshots off tomorrow.   Notes   If you can't see the section of mesh you want to tattoo, it's OK to delete sections of the model. It's not as though going to save the mesh, right?   This works best when the surface is fairly flat. Small curvatures are not a problem. Moderate ones can be fixed in gimp using perspective or cage transforms. More extreme cases may require you to apply the texture in settings, changing the view between projections and correcting any errors that creep in.   Summary   By now you should know how to use Blender to project a tattoo into a model and save as a texture scaled to the model's UV mesh. By doing this you can position the image precisely, automaticlly scale it to follow the UV map of the mesh and map over seams without problems. I hope you find it useful.   References   http://www.blendtuts.com/quick_projection   https://www.renderosity.com/mod/tutorial/?tutorial_id=2730

Hey all, another status update, if you can call it that. Long story short, work is a bit intense at the moment and likely to stay that way for a few weeks. I'm not getting back home with much appetite to sit in front of the computer, let alone do anything resembling development work. So I'm probably not going to be very active for the next month or so. @Maho: thanks for posting the Free Cities link. I meant to do it, but ... well, see above @ztnd13: nope, not conflict with Helpless. Instead the mod is designed to run alongside helpless, defeat or something of the sort. I don't do anything to change your attackers behavior. I just supply opportunity for other mods to take advantage. That said, there is a bug in the current Helpless, possibly resulting from a fix in PapyrusUtil's AI code. I've been looking at it and there's a partially fixed version on the DH support thread, but it still needs a little work. @afa: dirt and handprints are definitely in - check your slavetats MCM and make sure they work. I do have an idea which should help a lot where the cart is concerned. I just need a bit of time and energy to do it. @Rouge: do you still want a separate tats d/l? I thought you'd have lifted it from the mod archive. (The tats are far and away the biggest part of the download anyway). I can put one up if you want. @sexbeard: That is really weird. I shall have to look at that one. OK. Apologies to anyone who I forgot to answer. I'm going to go and let my brain cool off a little

The two pass approach seems to work best. Do a dark one and a light one on top, set the layer mode to lighten only and then up the layer transparency until it looks about right. I tried a bunch of other stuff as well, but that seems to work best in most cases.

What mod manager are you using? Mod Organizer and Wrye Bash should both be able to tell you which mod supplied the skeleton file actually in use.

Heya, all. I've not felt up to much in the way of coding so far this weekend, so I've been working on the pictures for the employee handbook. What the hell, anything that keeps the burnout at bay, right? There's also this game called "Free Cities" that's been eating into my time as well. Twine based slave training game; text only but it's horribly easy to click next and do one more turn. Hopefully tomorrow I'll get some stuff done. I'm hoping to get the current reconnect code replaced by a delete and respawn of a new cart. And after that I want to look at the turn in scene which is way overdue for a little attention. Oh yeah, and I want to make sure the drivers hand out copies of the handbook as well.

I am having to work very hard not to caption this one as This! Is! Sparta! Or possibly This! Is! Skyrim!

Damn. I really was hoping you meant "fuck around with" and not "add penises". Oh well, don't mind me. Not part of the target audience and all that

Just another image. The subtext I'm trying for is somewhere beteween "what is he doing with his other hand?" and "is she getting up or sitting down?" I'm not sure how well that carries over, but I like the shot, so I'll go with it

Seems like forever since I had a chance to work on this. This is what I meant when I said there were some assets yet to be released. Like the set of restraining rings mounted on the cart I took the ZAP xcross, deleted the wooden X and added a couple of stakes for the ankle cuffs. I had to jump through a couple of hoops to get the moon to render properly, but I think it was worth it This one sized to appear in the book

Interesting suggestion. Thanks!

Try this. coc to pyd_test and push the button. The place needs some lights, I'm not sure the colors work as intended and there's a dirty reference or two to aaaMarkers (not that that's likely to affect anything) but it works at this end pay_thy_debts.7z

No problem. I'll see if I can get something done tonight.

Cool. I'm not in any particular hurry, and I can probably hack it like you say, but it would make a useful addition to the API

Well ... all the packages are toggled by globals. All potential attackers go into a formlist and get popped out in turn to have a go and when everyone is done the package clocks on/   I think that, for whatever reason, the mod is running through those stages too soon, which meant that it was setting the enable flag for the Sandbox package before anyone had a chance to engage. Beyond that, I need to do some instrumenting and see what else is happening.   I didn't think it was anything from Sexlab to blame,. The packages are just working as sepecified, and from what you say about the previous behavior the fix probably wasn't the cause anyway. I suppose it's possible that there's something else in PapyrusUtil that changed its behavior, but I have no evidence of that at all.   I should get a chance to look at it this weekend, RL and Sheogorath allowing.. I'll post my findings

Does it work for you from MCM? I mean does slavetats work in your game and it's just the API that's causing problems? Or is non-functional on your Skyrim install in general?   I can knock you up a script to apply that fairly easily if you want.

Let me get it working with bandits first