I am working on a mod and right now its for personal use but I am wondering if it is permissible to share it on Nexus. It's just a simple mod to undo USLEEP's changes to the Black Star and black soul gems to make them function like they did in Oblivion and vanilla Skyrim. That way you can enjoy all the benefits of USLEEP and still have black soul gems/black star be able to capture both black and white souls.

In order to do that I needed to extract the vanilla script (.pex file) from Skyrim Misc bsa and install it after USLEEP to replace the modified USLEEP script.

I am assuming that there is no problem uploading the vanilla .pex file to Nexus, since SkyAway basically does this with the vanilla map .swf files, but I wanted to check here to make sure its okay before I did such a thing.

Uploading unaltered vanilla files is a violation of the EULA, so no, it would not be permitted.

That's what I thought but how does SkyAway get away with it? Sky Away includes unaltered vanilla .swf files.


I suppose I could just make a change to the script files by adding a comment that would not actually do anything but would still alter the file and then recompile the script to be safe. Then it would not be an unaltered vanilla file.

I think it comes to what extension a script have and it is like this.

swf - not compiled source file (I'm not sure what swf stands for)

pex - Papyrus Executeable

.swf stands for shockwave flash. It not a script file, it's a UI file. SkyUI edits these files to alter the UI. SkyAway is simply the vanilla .swf files that have been extracted from the Skyrim Interface bsa and uploaded to Nexus to allow users of SkyUI to revert to the vanilla UI while keeping SkyUI's MCM.


If you are not familiar with SkyAway, here is a link. http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/29440/?


Bethesda's .swf files are just as much of a vanilla asset subject to the EULA as the .pex files. It doesn't make sense that SkyAway would be allowed to upload unaltered vanilla assets but other mods are not allowed to upload assets for the same purpose of allowing users to choose not to use certain features of a popular/essential mod.

I agree with this. I'm certainly no expert on Papyrus but based on what I've read in this thread I think one of two things ought to apply: 1) they should be prevented from uploading their files or, 2) you should be allowed to upload your files.

I love SkyAway and hope it will someday be ported to Skyrim Remastered, so I have a vested interest in hoping that you're allowed to upload your files.

This is due to the fact that Nexus do not pre-emptively moderate material thats uploaded, they rely on reports from users to state x,y,z is in contravention of its rules. There are simply too many files and not enough years left in the moderator's lives to sift through all the material. Or to put it another way it'll remain where it is until someone reports it. That doesn't mean its allowed though just that its flying under the radar, for now.

What you could do however is modify the script in some way but without compromising its functionality and then upload it because that is allowed under Nexus and Bethesda's rules. Modified assets are allowed, unmodified are not.

See Gstaff''s post here: http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1481184-is-it-legal-to-edit-bsas-nifs-etc-and-use-it-in-modding/#entry23749040

Could be, although it's a pretty popular mod to be flying under the radar. Over 150,000 downloads.




yeah, that's what I will probably do. Just add a comment to the script explaining the purpose and then recompile it.

Thanks. Hopefully SkyUI will get updated for SSE so SkyAway will be necessary.


I'm not going to file any complaints against SkyAway, so I think it's safe. Since SkyAway is just vanilla .swf files, there probably won't be anything to update for port for SSE, unless Beth tinkers with the UI as part of SSE. But if that happens, it is pretty easy to extract the vanilla files from the .bsa, so even if SkyAway needs to be updated for SSE but isn't available for whatever reason, it's not too hard to do it yourself. If it comes to that and you need help with it just let me know.