Clockwork - Beta Test


This thread is for people helping me beta test http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1601982-wip-clockwork-thread-03/.


It is a SPOILERS ARE ALLOWED zone, so that testers are actually able to discuss the mod. Everyone is welcome, but hey... watch out for spoilers. You may want to instead head over to the WIP thread linked above if you want to avoid those.



For the testers:


Thank you very much. I've sent out PMs; let me know if I missed you. Also, here are some hopefully not-too-patronising tips to ideally help things go more smoothly:



Making a range of usefully-named saves is a good idea. To do that, use the console command:

save nameofsave

Like I mentioned in the WIP thread, make a named save before you install Clockwork and keep it as a backup. Sometimes you need to test changes from a clean save.


It would also be a good idea to make a named save after something significant happens in the mod. E.g. you just entered a new cell, or a scene just played out, or you just got a new quest objective - that sort of thing. Use whatever name will be most useful in helping you remember what happened and where you were up to. This is all to make it easier to go back and test specific areas or sequences, if necessary.



Hopefully none of that will be necessary and everything will work perfectly, though.


As for things I'm interested in hearing about; let me know if something breaks, or you get stuck, or you don't understand what's going on. Let me know the stuff you like, and the stuff you don't like. Just let me know what you think.


Actually I am interested in how long it takes people to play through the mod, roughly. Also - to pick a random thing - if you're able to move your spouse into the castle. (I think you can do that with Multiple Adoptions?) I've never had a character get married in Skyrim, if you can believe it, so I don't really know how all that works. I did quickly test moving an adopted child into the castle using Multiple Adoptions though; that seems to work fine. Even went out and played hide-and-seek in the castle grounds.



While you're all busy playing the mod, I'm going to take promo screenshots and make a trailer. That should be interesting; I haven't done that since Hoarfrost Castle, right at the start of 2008.


The idea is that once we're not getting mountains of horrible bugs and the screenshots and trailer are finished, Clockwork will be released to the public.

Downloading it as I'm writing this. Will check it with multiple characters to check if everything is in order.

Made an account here so I can post.

I'll write more as I check things out.

just an fyi, the save name should be in quotes

I just entered the Castle Grounds. So far this mod is great. Scared me [censored]less, since I'm not a fan of horror type quests. Wasn't hard and no bugs encountered so far.

Great; thanks.



It could be that this works too. I've never tried it that way as it's not necessary.

Oh: I just looked it up and you need quotation marks if you want spaces in the save name; otherwise it's not necessary.


Generally; I'm off to bed now. (I live in Australia, for future time-zone reference.)

Downloading now, takes a while as my speed isn't great. No 1gig speeds for me! Looking forward to testing this, will report as needed.

Well. I couldn't "put it down". Seriously. Husband brought me lunch at the computer (what a guy, huh?) so I could play it straight through.

Major impression overall? EXCELLENT. Everything.

Kudos to you - I did not have one bit of issue of any sort with this mod. It's squeaky-clean, I didn't have any bugs at all (not even your mentioned FPS issue in parts of Nurndural), and as far as I can tell, you didn't need beta testers at all!

So, now I'm off to play it on a level 24 girl, to see what's different. I haven't had this much fun with a mod since The Grey Cowl of Nocturnal. Thanks for letting me test it and play it!

SO. I went into the Velothi Tunnels, and I cam across a "Caravaner's Journal." First time, a messagebox popped up, and as soon as I hit "okay," the game crashed.

I started up the game and tried it a second time; this time, it worked as expected. I checked out the message display script and it's very straightforward, so it was probably a coincidence, but I thought I'd let you know in case any one else has similar crashes.

Hi Antistar,

WOW! Truly amazing. You really did some exceptional work here and I'm kinda blown away tbh. The size of the dungeons and the lighting and ambience are just fantastic. Great quest so far, [censored] myself in the dungeons, gawped at your glass floor and was kinda blown away when I opened the doors to narundal??? ... Anyway, don't wanna turn this into a gushing superlative kinda thing so here's some feedback.

Fixes:

In the mauseoleum, just as you enter, there is an archway mesh that was missing a wall - i.e. You can see it through it one way, and its solid the other.

The shadow caster bulbs (both) in the living quarters looked like they may need their bias? adjusted as I had a thin line of light around the walls. I have seen the fix in the Bethesda CK lighting tutorial.

During the travel machine introduction sequence/chat with the male servant dwemer there were no subtitles. He was telling me all sorts of important things about how to use the machine it and all I managed to pick up was something about a spell...lol. I may have just bugged it out though, as I had just asked him for the first time to show me that room, after having already completed steam powered.

Personal preferences:

Audio - The volume of the steam hissing coming from the pneumatic tube system is too loud, almost to the point of distraction. Same for the noise of the wind blowing whilst inside the castle. I will look at lowering both their volumes in your plugin or make reduced volume xwm files.

Apart from that, everything else was spot on and the attention to detail is first class. I also really liked that greenhouse (Im a gardener by trade) and now I finally have a proper glasshouse to grow stuff!!

Well done, great job and THANKYOU for doing all this work as it must have taken a few thousand hours.

Cheers

edit: and the clocks, man they are so cool! Had me confused until i remembered i was at settimescale 20, lol

Thanks very much for the reports so far, everyone. It's an amazing feeling to hear about people enjoying it after how much work it's taken.

For those of you who have finished a playthrough already, firstly; how long did it take you, do you think? Also, if you're going to be playing Skyrim more generally, it would be a big help if you used Clockwork Castle as a player home and let me know how that goes for you. No pressure there, though; that would take a lot of time if you weren't already going to be playing more of Skyrim itself.




Serethil: Isidor is set to find and attack the player, but yes, he is of course subject to whatever else may be going on at the time, so it may not play out that way. That's fine, too; I made the journal entries and whatnot ambiguous in case someone/something besides the player kills him.



The large multi-storey building in the Mortal Layer (which is what gives that area its name) was a bit of a gamble on a technical level; I'm not surprised gamesas didn't do anything quite like it. Layering rooms above others makes it more difficult to navigate using the (2D, top-down) map, and having rooms so closely packed together makes it difficult to light them. (Because the lighting system in Skyrim is awful.) I actually had to have several storeys primarily lit by a single omni light, from memory. So all in all I'm glad that area seemed to work out alright.



On the ballista lever; the note telling you where it is does say that it's in a "house at the other end of the Mortal Layer" (and there's a quest marker for it too of course), but was it not clear enough? I can always alter the wording a bit.




ishmaeltheforsaken: Yeah, this is the script on the book, for reference:

Scriptname CLWShowBookMsgScript extends ObjectReference  
{Pop up a message the first time an object is activated. Made for books as a complement to their description since that only shows up in the inventory.}

Message Property pCLWBookMessage Auto

auto STATE ready
    Event OnActivate(ObjectReference akActionRef)
        if akActionRef == Game.GetPlayer()
            pCLWBookMessage.Show()
            gotoState("Done")
        endif
    endEvent
endSTATE

STATE Done
endSTATE

There are scripts doing this sort of thing all the time in Skyrim, so that crash probably is just a coincidence. It's not a very important script at all though, so I can just remove it if it happens to a lot of people.




kojak747: That particular static in the mausoleum has been a problem, and I don't know why it's doing that. (Here are your http://imgur.com/a/5DMda from your PM.) I placed it, and it was fine. Much later I noticed that it was apparently missing, as in your screenshots. It had been rotated 90 degrees to be inside a nearby wall, from memory. I thought I'd maybe accidentally rotated it at some point, so I just put it back where it was supposed to be.



The thing is, it's still where it's supposed to be on my end, so it may be that one of us has a mod installed that's rotated the base mesh. It's a wall piece, and if it's only/mainly used in sets of four (to make the four walls of a room), that might be why whoever changed it didn't notice the problem. That's just a guess, though; I'll have a look through my installed mods to see if I can turn something up.



Judging from http://imgur.com/a/587Ch of that room in the Living Quarters, you've got ShadowCastersFix enabled in your ENB preset. The lighting in there is not intended to look like that at all. I'll quote this bit from the Clockwork readme:

The stuff Lahar was saying about the Travel Machine is what he says when you ask him to show you the machine, so you can just ask him to show it to you again to get him to repeat it. It's a scene rather than direct dialogue with the player (I did this with all the tour scenes so that the player is free to poke around in what Lahar is telling you about), so you'd need the "general subtitles" game setting enabled to get subtitles for those. The game also ducks the volume of things in the environment when you're in dialogue with someone - but doesn't duck it during scenes, sometimes making it harder to hear dialogue.



The steam sounds are coming from the steam objects themselves - I didn't specifically add sound objects in for those. It seemed okay during my earlier testing, but for the test run-through I did the other day, I had some sound overhaul mods installed, and I noticed that it made a lot of sounds much louder and travel further... including those for steam objects. So I found it hard to hear Lahar in the Travel Room after the steam was restored too. I'll give it some thought, but it's sort of a mod interaction thing.

Edit: vvvvvvvvvvvvvv meloncholyroar: Check your PMs. vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

Hey anti, long time supporter of the mod. Any chance I can get into your beta?

Antistar, I didn't mind at all not really getting that the quest marker was pointing outside that tower in Mortal Layer. In fact.... I LOVED going all the way up, clearing the mobs, and then realizing I wasn't where I needed to be! Stuff like that is just.... PERFECT. (For me.... because I'm an explorer....)

Time: I started at 8:35 am MDT (US), and finished at 3:45 pm MDT (US) - with no real breaks (husband did lunch and I ate while playing, and one bio break because I have an iron-clad bladder I guess). On future playthroughs, I probably won't push it - though I do tend to just go with the flow on something like this (not to mention that until you actually finish the main quest line, you can't go back to Skyrim without using the console - which I would do in an emergency but that's really pretty unlikely....)

Seriously, the best mod I've ever played. SERIOUS.

So far everything is amazing there's a few things that i came across

*Sometimes Larhar wont start moving he'll say follow me but just stand there,if i get behind him he'll start moving it might not be a bug but i thought i should mention it

*Picking up ludwigs journal in the travel room caused a ctd

Edit:found something,a courier showed up in the castle exterior and then justs stands around the big pipe in the courtyard

Serethil: Well shucks; thanks.

tlrd: Have you set the timescale to something relatively low? When I first started my test run I had it set to 6, and I was having similar problems. I bumped it up to 8 (the value recommended by IMCN), and those problems were much lessened. I didn't have any problems with this at all on my earlier tests (when the timescale was at its default value of 20).

Setting it to a low value is apparently http://forum.step-project.com/topic/4577-skyrim-timescale-what-is-safe/ in Skyrim in general with things like quest timing. I just did another quick test just now though - going through the bit where Lahar first lets you into the castle to take you up to Lamashtu a few times at different timescale values - and Lahar still paused a lot longer in front of the door leading to the stairwell in the castle hall than he did in any of my earlier testing, no matter the timescale. (Incidentally he stops there because I had to breadcrumb him specifically through the interior rather than just telling him to go up to the roof. Otherwise when you first follow him inside, his AI goes "hey, the quickest route to the roof is right back out the front door again, since it's outside", and then he effectively teleports up to the roof rather than leading you there.)

So I'm afraid I don't know what's going on in those instances, really.

On Ludwig's journal: did you try picking it up again and still have it crash? Was it the third journal of his that you'd found? (It advances the side quest when you find three of them.) I never had that crash on my end, and this quest was deceptively complex to make so I tested it a lot.

And you know what? This whole project I've been paranoid about the bloody courier somehow finding his way to Clockwork Castle. He's... really not supposed to be able to do that, but he seems to have a knack for finding his way to the strangest places. Anyway I didn't have it happen to me in my testing, but I also didn't do anything to try to keep him specifically out. I was hoping that the keywords I set (and more importantly the ones I didn't set) on the Clockwork locations would keep him out - since it's not defined as a town, or general wilderness, etc - but I guess not. I haven't had a close look at how the courier works before, but I should probably check it out.

it was the third journal that crashed i reloaded the save and it didn't crash the second time i pick it up,the other journals didn't cause a crash either,I haven't messed the time scale to my knowledge and i just checked mine its set to 20 so it might've been on my end.

Also i've found a very evil easter egg

I'm not to this forum itself so I don't know how to tag people so I hopefully tlrd will see this as well as Antistar.

About courier, while I don't know much about modding and scripts I do know one particular thing.

During the quest on Solstheim, where you are undigging the Kolbjorn Barrow, courier litterally comes anywhere to inform you of progress on digging. It was the first instance that courier actually came inside a dungeon to deliver me a message. So that quest might be issue.

Anyway mod itself is great. I'll write longer review later.

Although I had a bug on my second playthrough. I was supposed to discover entrance to Nundural?(correct spelling), through mausoleum. When I entered the Nundural it didn't register that I did, and now there is no single gilded inside of it, except for the first 3 when you enter, and couple of more when you fight shadow.

Now for my long review.

Quest isn't hard to start, location is easy to find. I assume it wouldn't take too long to start it through random encounter, but I have quests that add all kinds of creatures through random encounters so I took me a while to find Isindur. But that's on my side.

Quest is great. Especially the tunnel section until you find castle. It's easy to get through, but it still took me solid 30mins and creeped the hell out of me all the way long. The ambient and sound is really scary, even though there isn't any real threat. And the part where Shadow is actually chasing you and hurting you really scared me a lot. Even if you have OP character it's still scary, she couldn't kill me in an hour if I stood still, but I still did my best to get the hell away from her.

Glass lake segment is amazing, I constantly had a feeling that she would burst out of the ice and get me under it. She also can't be detected with Aura Whisper(since I don't like being scared I use that shout a lot to scout), so there is extra fear of the unknown.

Siren sound and place falling apart was something special, I was really relieved to leave that place, and glad that I don't have to go back.

Castle itself is also amazing, it's gonna be a great home for my "guild" since I like getting all followers together and giving them certain gear and jobs.

It's easy to navigate, it has everything it needs, yet it's done with style and nothing is over the top. Mistake I see lots of modders do. Storage is nice but I don't need 200 manequins stacked in one place.

Only two things I don't personally like is that Ludwig's room is basically another bedroom inside of a bedroom. Maybe that should have been used as a treasury room, or maybe personal armory(where you can actually store weapons you use, and use armory simple as a museum) or something else. Second thing is that I don't interact with kids in skyrim, so children bedrooms are redundant to me, but like I said that's personal issue. Lot more people would mind if you didn't put it in there.

Now Nurndural and quests in it are pretty good. I love the gilded and things they said, especially Amalgad, his voice is awesome. My only regret is that this is basically house mod with quest to get it. I'd love to see you actually make a quest mod. It would be amazing quest mod. This is great as it is, considering it's a quest to compliment the house, but I would really like to see it more expanded.

I never felt lost even though Nurndural is pretty big and complex dungeon, it felt like a second smaller Blackreach. Absence of Falmer is something I appreciate a lot since I hate them. Fixing pipe quest was great, considering you have to search for them, but you still get help with last 3.

On my first playthrough it took me solid 4-5 hours to complete it, and that's without exploring every bit of it. If I actually went to explore everything I believe there would be solid 15hours of playthrough.

All in all pretty great quests, really few things I would add or take away from quest or house itself. Only thing I believe will annoy people is the fact that you can't directly fast travel, but there is great alternative for that, both in travel machine and recall spell. And quest will probably be annoying for people who like to have multiple characters and use this house for everyone. But for single char this castle is one the best player houses there is.

All in all objectively speaking, this house is 10/10. Quest 9/10 simply because I believe there are couple of plotholes in it.

tlrd: 20 is the default timescale value I believe, so that shouldn't be a problem.

And I think you know the easter egg you mean. Clockwork actually contains a lot of references (it comes with spending a long time on a project, I suppose), though they're mostly a lot more subtle than that one.

Ixs234: Now that's an odd one. I have no idea what could cause that. The Gilded you mention as still being there are all related to scripted sequences while the others are just standard, placed enemies - so if anything I'd expect the scripted sequence enemies to be the ones that something would go wrong with.

Did anything change between playthroughs? Mods added or removed, load order changed, a different character, configuration changed for some mod or other, etc?

Edit: Oh, we posted at the same time. Thanks for the big report; glad you liked it.

With Isidor, do you mean that it took a while for him to show up, or that it took a while to find his body?

Ludwig's secret room is closely related to his story, and it's also sort of intended as a safe sleeping places for vampire characters (safe in a role-playing way). For other characters you get extra storage and the extra bed in there of course, but yes, it's mainly there for story reasons.

An "actual quest mod"? This is definitely a quest mod. It's also definitely a player home mod, though. And I don't think I want to do another big quest mod again. Clockwork took far too long.

At various points in development I wondered about adding a kind of "new game plus" function to Clockwork's MCM menu that basically unlocked the castle and bypassed the quests - for people who have already played through it with a previous character and just want to use it as a player home. I... don't think so, though; the castle is so intricately tied into the quests that doing something like that would be an incredible pain.

Also; what plot-holes do you mean? Depending on what it is, it may not be too late to fix.

If you're too close to Lahar when he tells you to follow he doesn't want to move. Back away a few paces and see if that helps. I use timescale = 8, and had zero issues. I decided about Ludwig's room that I'd use Jaxonz Positioner and some of the mod resources out there to make it into a big closet, or reading room, or special treasury depending on character. I'd like a portrait of Ludwig - is there one? Lots of portraits but not sure if one's supposed to be him for sure.

[Oh, and one thing I totally spaced mentioning, Antistar: the skulls that all head-track.... talk about creeping me out! GREAT touch!]

Well I'll answer in same sequence you wrote yourself.

I've used different character for playthrough, and the might have been some changes in load order but I don't remember adding or removing quests. Now that I thought about it, I also remember Shadow not moving from the balcony when you first enter the tunnel. I just ran to here and she was standing there. Since place creeped me out I didn't think about it and kept running throught the place, and now I remember that I didn't seen her in "dwemer" tunnel. She wasn't even following me in Glass Lake like she did the first time. There were no skeletons either. I just assumed it was because I basically run through whole place. There wasn't even tunnel crashing event that happened just before you leave. I though that scripts were late or something so I just used TCL command to leave the place. But there was definitely something I did wrong or differently since that started all at the beggining.

To note again, I haven't seen Shadow anywhere except at the entrance.

And with Isidor, it took him a while to show up, ALIVE. I assume that it's intended for him to show up and attack me. I didn't took him that long, but I did had to wander Skyrim for maybe 15mins until he showed up.

I grew up to like Ludwig's extra room, I use it for that exact purpose and keep my favorite armors and weapons in closet inside that room.

About quest mod. What I meant is that you're talented. Story is great, idea is great, lore is great. Scripts, events, everything. It just felt short and while I understand that making mod is not even one bit easy, I think that you have capability to make the quest to match DLC ones.

Regarding "new game plus", yeah it would be good idea, but I do understand that you would basically have to redo the whole thing.

Plot holes are related to the story. Amalgand(correct name? centurion gilded), said he took what he needed from the Shadow, yet Shadow can't speak and why would she interact with him anyway, she was part of Lamashtu and couldn't even communicate with her.

Other thing that I wondered is why is there "dungeon" inside of tunnels. Dwemer tunnels make sense but ancient halways filled with skeletons not that much. Also caravans traveled through that tunnels, horses as well. And now it doesn't seem pasable. There isn't really an access through frozen lake. (now that I thought about it while I wrote it kinda makes sense. They found Dwemer tunnels and workers expanded on them and created the rest. Lot's of tremors explain damage, and there ever are dwemer ruins underneath the lake).

Also how come Shadow is so powerful. Lamashtu wasn't necromancer in life, so how could Shadow raise all those dead, and create master level illusions(since she basically played with our mind the whole time).

Also, I missed out on all easter eggs. At least I think. .

To say it again. I don't want to sound pretentious. You did amazing job, and I have no right to complain about things and suggest stuff(especially room related like I mentioned Ludwig), but I honestly hope that I can do something to help you out at least one small bit. I really believe that this is gonna be a succesful mod.

My first run through took me about six hours with a little exploration,very fun and absolutely amazing.

Antistar, the one thing I'd like (well.... I'd LIKE to have the "plus" option, but I get why you don't want to do that) would be to have Amalgam's music in the house....

Thanks again for the reports, everyone.

Serethil: The character of Ludwig wasn't directly inspired by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_II_of_Bavaria, but when I noticed some similarities between them - not to mention similarities between https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuschwanstein_Castle and Clockwork Castle - I did decide to name him after Ludwig II. So there are certainly https://www.google.com.au/search?q=ludwig+ii&client=firefox-b&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj-yNeLpYjOAhXFrJQKHaAsA0cQ_AUICCgB&biw=1920&bih=997#tbm=isch&q=ludwig+ii+portrait to choose from.

I was very happy that the head-tracking skulls worked out. They, the moving lights and the floating instances of Shadow all use similar scripts, and they were pretty fiddly to get right. I'm happy that they all worked out; they're a big part of the Velothi Tunnels dungeon.

Oh and I was considering adding a music box object to the castle; it could play that music. Maybe one day, if I get time.


Ixs234: Those are some pretty significant problems; it's like a whole bunch of triggers and entities (like levelled enemies) are just not showing up. I didn't do anything tricky with those, though; they're just placed in the cells, same as everything else. With such a raft of problems across the whole thing - that didn't happen the first time - there must be something else going on there. Do you have a lot of active plugins? I know FNV for example has a limit on the number of active plugins you can have; once you go over it, lots of random strange things start happening. Presumably it's the same with Skyrim.

Amalgam's line about "taking what he could from the shadow and then leaving her alone" is sort of oblique. It's hinting that he stole soul gem hearts and other parts from the Animoculotory - a place Shadow stays around most of the time and is protective of. It's also hinting at Shadow's existence/name - and that she's from Nurndural - before you hear more about her from Lamashtu later on. It's foreshadowing.


Shadow is powerful because she's not a normal ghost. There was godly power involved in her creation - Lorkhan's Heart. In a more meta sense it's because she's much more in the mould of J-Horror ghosts than the sort of hammy glowing blue ghosts in the base game; she's capable of whatever the story requires. (As a side-note though, the Dwemer spirits in Morrowind were also desaturated, rather than glowing blue like the ghosts in Oblivion/Skyrim. She is a Dwemer spirit, of a sort.)


As for the all the bones in the Velothi Tunnels, if you notice when they start appearing (sometimes literally appearing)... well, maybe not everything is quite as it seems. Shadow does manipulate you, as you say. That's actually one of the reasons for the notes Camilla leaves behind; reinforcing that something strange is happening to people that enter the tunnels.


The route the caravan took through the Velothi Tunnels diverges from the route the player takes right after that first big cavern; through tunnels that are now collapsed due to the tremors, as you mentioned. You rejoin their route right at the end, in the section where everything is collapsing behind you. They definitely were not leading horses and carts down rickety spiral staircases and across the frozen lake.


These are all things I always expected people to wonder about - a lot of it is relatively subtle - but it is all supposed to be that way.

And hey, don't worry about criticism; I appreciate the feedback. That's what the beta is for, after all.

I got the Ludwig/Neuschwanstein connection (and I was lucky enough to actually tour Neuschwanstein a long time back - just don't have words to express what I felt....) I just want to put a portrait of him inside the room where he died.

I enjoyed the interaction with Amalgam, including his obscure remarks about things. Again, I'd love to have "his" music in the house.... as perhaps a tribute to him giving up his "life" and heart to Lamashtu.

I'm not at all surprised that you had to fiddle scripts to get all that working! Marvelous, just simply wonderful.... the whole thing, beginning to end.... I ran it again today on my level 24 girl - the balance in combat with the Gilded was just about perfect. All told, this is a simply outstanding quest and house mod.

Serethil: Nice; it's good to hear it works well with characters at different levels.

I was happy with how Amalgam turned out. (Incidentally, his name has a double meaning that I didn't realise until after I named him, but it's just perfect; it's a kind of gilding process.) Anyone who was a kid in the eighties will probably recognise the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOu3hYXE_tM for his voice. It took ages to find a way to process his voice that way. He actually uses the same base TTS voice as the rest of the Gilded.

And I don't think you need to worry about Amalgam's welfare. If you return to where you left him after restoring Lamashtu, you should see why.

kojak747: On that static mesh in the mausoleum, I checked and none of my currently installed mods are replacing it, as far as I can tell. I even looked inside all the bsa files in my data directory to be sure. It's this file:

\Architecture\Solitude\Interiors\SLGDWallSol03.nif

Do you know if you've got a mod installed that edits that file? I'm wondering if it could be a mod that I used to have installed.