I can vouch that OBSE 18 is pretty stable. Using it for All natural.

I don't know what went wrong. Tail and wings are not even showing when I create a new character. I'm not totally sure if its just me missing something or if its the esp.

Edit: I think I may have found the problem. After loading up my saved game and un/re-equiping my items the dragon feet went missing after I did the drakedragonraceupdate quest. I could not get them to come back even with the doconfig to 1 script. I then tried creating a new dragon character. I could not get the wings and tail to appear no matter how many times i reloaded.

Come to find out I quit totally out of Oblivion and started it up again. This it seems fixed my problems all together. Everything shows up properly after quitting and starting a new char. BTW I am using an unmodified save at the end of the dungeon which does work.

http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/2825/wtfr.png


im pretty sure this isn't normal..............and its doing what it was to lordsoulstrike except its not fixing by restarting oblivion.


im just letting you know in the meantime ill revert cause your old one runs fine for me...lol

Hrmmm. As far as I can tell, everything works if you have OBSE 18 and start from a save that doesn't have the old scripts running. I'm not sure if it will work if you start from an older dragon save.

However, it can't be called problem free quite yet. First of all, It doesn't kill the scripts at startup if you only have OBSE 17. Me, being forgetful as I am, tried running the new ESP with only version 17. all of the config menus and whatnot went through.

So yeah, Fix the OBSE version check.

I'll test the new esp more throughoughly tonight.

Oh, and FYI: When I was trying to run the new esp on OBSE 17 the errors I was getting ingame are exactly the same as described by monkeybtm6. So you might want to check what version of OBSE you got, monkey.

ill try that.......obse updates more than i can keep up with so i have no clue when they do update

Uh, right, the OBSE check needs updating, totally forgot about that one! Thanks for reminding me.

Now, I already had the feeling these things would be caused by "migration" (using an older save with a newer plugin) and was actually going to ask for that, but then I read the last posts and the answer I searched was already given.
I don't think the tokens can cause any issues when updating the ESP, but I "know" for certain scripts of already-running "quests" will!
That's why I developed the habit to take off all clothes (ingame of course!), "stop" the DrakeDragonRaceQuest and set its "init" back to "0", before I go and replace the ESP.

However, due to the nature of my mod setting "init" back to "0" is something I can only strongly advise against! Big Warning!
Doing this when updating from a post-OBSE-arrays release (which all you could obtain are, from after I migrated from Pluggy arrays to OBSE arrays) will kill the arrays and thus leave you stuck with "permanently" occupied but inaccessible and unreusable BaseObject record entries... and you know how I feel about that.

As a consequence, changes to the inner section of the initialization block of the quest script can only safely take place when the arrays were never used before. All other changes can be taken over by stopping the quest before updating and then restarting it.
According to my own observations (let's call them "random encounters") Oblivion acts up really weird when you alter the script of a "running" quest. You can literally "throw a dice" for every line of code to determine if its changes will apply or will get ignored by the engine. I couldn't make out any "rules" to this, all I observed was "totally random" behavior.

...no, wait a sec... damn... this is not good... not good at all!... I just realized there are way too many too vital changes going on in exactly this part of the script with each future update!
Oh no... no, no, no... that's really bad... I badly need to find a way to do this elseway or I won't be able to add more dragon races in the future without disabling you from continuing to use your existing savegames!... That's not acceptable... This must change!
I think I'll need more than 1 initialization blocks... 1 which gets executed "really only once", only including declaration and construction of the item arrays... and 1 for all the other "1-time" initializations, which might actually change on a rather regular basis. The last block can then safely be executed several times again and the 1st one won't ever be touched and the arrays securely preserved.

Oh my, why didn't I get this idea right from the start?! :facepalm: Changes like this themselves are always highly unlikely to be applicable to existing savegames. :banghead:
Ah well... luckily the amount of adapted items is not yet that large that it could ever cause serious trouble to waste them all a few times... but still... it "can" sum up...


Oh, I really love those hilarious inconsistencies with saving and loading and restarting the game. Does this make any sense that in this game the outcome of a game load is determined not only by the contents of the savegame file but also by the current situation ingame when you issue the load?... No?... Then why is it this way?!
When not even loading a savegame is a "reproducable" task, then what is one? :confused:

monkeybtm6, I've never read the "token" error message in your picture nor do I know what it possibly could mean. I do know however that id xx022a15 is the reverter token script.
I guess this message is caused by the elements the token script is accessing not being consistent with the elements in the running quest script (see rather complex rant above).

Why some of you get erroneous behavior when starting a fresh new char though is beyond me... I can only hope this is all caused by insufficient OBSE versions or not actually "starting" a new game when making a new char!

Well, it's been a while and I apologize, but I was way too busy with my job.

Currently I'm in the process of redesigning the quest script, so future updates to this one will not affect your existing adapted items in their arrays, but still everything else can be changed...
But this process itself has its drawbacks when it comes to "migration" again.

At the moment, I take it, in your games the arrays are initialized and filled with some items' BaseIDs. "init" is "1" due to that and thus changes inside the "if init == 0" block won't ever be applied, even if you stop the quest before upgrading.

Now I can go and make it so "init" only protects the block the item arrays are initialized in. This would let these remain untouched in your games, as your "init" already is "1".
I would have to rewrite all the token scripts to check for another variable than "init" then though, but this possibly might not cause any issues.
The config windows then popping up a second time as soon as you load your game the first time after upgrading also should be something neglectable, as this is designed to be reissued anytime at will anyways. Then I'll make up another init-variable for this block of the initialization phase, and this one you'll always have to set back to "0" prior to stopping the quest and upgrading, so the changes done to this section will apply fine to your game.

Or I could leave "init" be "init" and make up a new one to protect the item arrays only. This however would render all your item arrays uninitialized once you load your game, as this new variable will be "0" and thus they will be re-initialized immediately.
If I even move the item arrays away into a totally new quest script of their own, they will be absolutely safe there, but of course you will again start clean next time you load your game, and your game will be cluttered with a bunch of already adapted but no longer accessible base items.
...I think the first solution is my personal favourite. Any objections?... Thought so. :angel:


Now, where were we at with the last release? Was everything working fine when starting a real fresh new game (restarting Oblivion itself included)? What about the stuttering? Did it reoccur? And did it still happen that the token scripts suddenly ceased working without any obvious cause?
In other words, is there anything else still to fix? Or are "migration issues" the only ones I need to take care of for the beta release?

Everything worked fine when I started a new character (as long as I did not use an existing save and decide to make a new char. If that was the case I would have to quit and restart oblivion for everything to work properly.)

With your latest patch esp there is no stuttering. I have stuttering due to the fact that I made a companion dragon and I think something makes the game slow down when I wait or enter a new cell for a brief second or two.

I have of yet to loose the tail/wings/feet/ect.... or even have items fail to convert.

As far as I know everything is working great!

And don't worry about being busy with your job. I understand myself, at the end of a long day all one wants to do is sleep. :goodjob:


Update:I've been thinking that the lag problem could be due to the fact when I remade my character I used Mopy to copy the face and stats of the previous character (dragon) I had been using.

Alright, I think I'm in the mood again to write here now...

As an explanation for why I was so quiet the last week or two... well, last sunday, 6.9., at around 10 PM in the night my father died in the age of only 58 in our hospital... after 2 days of unconsciousness and collapsing of multiple organs... it wasn't a nice thing to watch. He must have suffered a lot although he was unresponsive to anyone all the time.
I think the only thing that keeps me from going crazy is that now his suffers have an end and he doesn't have pain or even discomfort anymore...
Him finally dying while we were all in the room with him helped a little as well I guess... though I still don't really know what to make of it all.
I knew him only for less than 29 years! That's way too few in my eyes! ...but at least he's at a better place now... hell, this can't have really happened, can it?!


... I'm sorry... I don't know if such sad a topic belongs here... but I wanted you to know why I am so quiet lately.

Oh well... at least there's some good news (for you) coming along with the bad news (for me).
The last days, as you might imagine, I needed as much distraction as I could get.
I wasn't really up to complex scripting works yet... so I instead tried to keep me busy with modelling around in Blender every free minute I could get.
The result is almost-completed TFF support in meshes and textures. Kaira finally made her first appearance in dragon shape in Oblivion.

Some pics:
http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/4620/kairasbadmood1.jpg
http://img200.imageshack.us/img200/434/kairasbadmood2.jpg
http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/5739/kairasbadmood3.jpg
http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/1070/girlfriends1.jpg
http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/9033/girlfriends2.jpg

I like the colors the female AB textures gave it by layered blending.
That's the red-gold theme by the way. The original and the black are looking similarly nice.
There are a few things that need further improvements, but I think for the first time the results are not that bad.

As you can see I'm doing quite well considering what happened... I don't really know "why" but I know "that" I do.
Only those pics don't really resemble Kaira in my eyes... she's quite a beautiful juvenile dragoness, a young lady of sorts (ignoring her manners)...
The dragon in the pictures just doesn't look beautiful to me I guess... maybe the meshes need some more "beautification"... I just don't know what exactly I should do...
...maybe I'll try some other bodies while I'm at it?...

(Oh, and she really doesn't have any briasts... my dragons are reptiles... but fear not, as usual this will be optional.)

That svcks to hear. I hope you are doing ok.

As for dragons not having briasts. Thats normal for dragon lore and all that.

So how close are we to full release?

The female model is looking cool. The only thing I could ask for would be a pic of her standing instead of crouching and maybe one of the back, to show off the textures a bit better.

Painfully slow response about the latest scripts. Pretty much everything works fine, no stuttering or anything. The one thing that has gone wrong was again with a multi-slot item. When equipped, it would repeatedly swap back and forth between the normal and modified meshes. That said, I have been messing with the scripts a bit myself; going through and changing every instance of "dcpart" to "kcpart" so that if I ever finish my mod, both can run together without problems. As far as I'm aware, I didn't break anything when doing it, because everything else worked fine.

...

You know what, I have the dragon esp. I'm gonna go check if it works in scripts I haven't messed with.

...

Goddamnit. It works just fine in the scripts I haven't touched. Well, I have to go redo all of my changes.

EDIT; wooo, turns out I missed a 'dcpart' and that was buggering it. Your scripts are good.

Glad to see you're back. And nice pics.

I'm sorry to hear about your loss, Drake. I hope you'll be okay.

The female dragon is looking pretty nice. I like her body very much, to me it looked really well done. I'm still suffering from the after-effects that such a wonderful race is this close to getting into Oblivion. You've done loads of wonderful work here.

I had some ideas with the wings and tried out what it would look like with http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/4706/oblivion200909070215479.jpg and another test with http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/6646/oblivion200909080126577.jpg

Also just admiring what you done so far.

http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/2518/oblivion200909062342367.jpg
http://img44.imageshack.us/img44/9934/oblivion200909070001263.jpg
http://img44.imageshack.us/img44/1148/oblivion200909070002473.jpg


I'm Sorry to hear what happend Drake.

Hmm, on a second look it doesn't look that bad anymore actually... strange...

Gadar, I like the looks of the transparent or teared wings. I was playing around with this idea myself for some time already but didn't get any acceptable results yet, so I dropped it and concentrated on other parts of the project first.

RIF, your wish is my command!
http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/1764/tfforiginal.jpg
http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/5310/tffredgold.jpg ...also showing some of the anatomical differences between male and female dragons
http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/7746/tffblack.jpg ...now, that's something that didn't happen yet... Kaira as a Black Dragon!
Doesn't she have the looks that kill? :bolt:

First off, I would like to say that this mod looks absolutely amazing Drake. This is truly the work of a master :bowdown:
When I saw your latest screenshots I got this strange water sensation in my mouth :drool:

Keep up the excellent work. :foodndrink:

I will, don't worry.

This personal project is a dream of mine, so I will likely never abandon it.
It actually hurts not making much progress lately... but my job consumes most of the times, even the night ones.

Oh, but I have to correct you in one point. This is still the work of a "beginner", mind you.
After all, I started modding only a short time ago (let it be 1 year at most) and haven't finished many mods yet (if any at all).

I need to fix a few things with the female meshes, take a look at why the "controlled upperbody" situation does not work, fix up a few things in the main quest script so it will be upgradeable in the future, and last but not least implement some clever debugging mechanism which will take care potential dying tokens will get replaced and all that.

That would be the first beta release then. When this is done I could concentrate on the animation control system, make it token-based and all that, so even NPCs will use proper animations.
Then I could finally start playing around with my ideas for the dragon's flight capability, and the next upcoming release would have much more to show off.

Also as soon as the beta release is out I could recollect all offers for features such as voice-acting and the like I got from regular visitors of my thread and ask them if they're still interested.
With a beta release around we would at least have a common base for works such as this.

You see, I still have a bunch of plans for this project. Nothing ever got lost or was dropped.
The project progresses, and it will be done, stage by stage, sooner or later.
It's only the time what I'm lacking badly, unfortunately.

I`m very glad to hear that Drake :whisper: :celebration: , and you are absolutely not a beginner in my book :nono:
I have seen 100`s of mods and this one really stands out as a high quality prosject :wub:

And please take your time Drake, quality project like this one should not be rushed :read:
I'm sorry if this has been covered before, but have you considered to let your dragons have the ability to breathe fire :flame: like Akatosh by Saiden Storm?

Of course fire breathing was covered before already. What would be a dragon that can't breathe fire (or something along these lines)?
But don't worry, as I didn't decide on anything nor was anything actually started yet, it's never a bad thing to take up old topics another time...
...well, of course this stays true even after I decided on something... as long as there are suggestions or ideas around something will never be really "final".

Taking my time is something I always did. I'm not used to rushing any work.
But taking my time is one thing, having almost no time at all is something totally different.
It's not my concern that it takes ages to make progress... it's that even in ages it seems I don't make any at all.
Modding and not succeeding I could happily live with. I'd just keep trying until I eventually succeed.
That I don't get any time to even start trying, that's what's driving me crazy.
I "want" to mod, dammit, not just work all the time!
(Sorry, I drifted into ranting it seems.)

Long time no post it seems...

Well, I have some good news and some bad news (was it ever anything different?).

Now, the good news is, I again made a lot of progress.
Female textures, body meshes and replacer templates (cloth wraps, remember?) for TFF are all done.
Inspired by opinions, suggestions and general feedback from M1A2 ABRAMS in a regular PM exchange over the long period of silence in this thread I managed to improve meshes and textures of my dragons yet further and am actually even more pleased by the results now.
I was actually at the point of returning to work on my scripts again and fixing the most bothering bugs there are.

I can imagine some of you liked the bigger, mightier wingarms I incorporated first. So I hope you won't be disappointed too much about learning that I altered the wingarms towards a somewhat more "traditional" shape, further distinguishing their different anatomy to regular arms, and thus also changed the shape of the wings when spread. While I was at it though I also finally managed to fix most of the old rigging issues of the wings, which bothered me to no end but I was previously unable to fix them whatever I tried. So now the folding of the wings looks more fluid and smooth with less unwanted effects and visual disturbances than ever. (Might need new UV-unwrapping though!)
Overall it's looking closer to my own imagination now and the additional work on these meshes resulted in a double win for me. Their final shape is still undecided though and what you see here is likely bound to get further altered soon.
I have to thank whoever first came up with the idea of weight-painting meshes while affected by animations here, as it was an incredible ease to immediately see how a certain vertex was affected by changing its weight for a specific bone and create a folding of the wings with most of the previous unwanted distortions finally ruled out.

http://img188.imageshack.us/img188/7079/newdragonwings1.jpg
http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/1875/newdragonwings2.jpg
http://img44.imageshack.us/img44/651/newdragonwings3.jpg
http://img44.imageshack.us/img44/5043/newdragonwings4.jpg

Being reminded that reptiles actually "aren't" amphibians I reduced the glossyness of the normalmaps which resulted in far superior quality structure of the scales, especially when affected by magic shaders and the like.
http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/4858/lessglossynormalmaps.jpg

The female wings now also are no longer unproportional "man-wings" and the overall view of a pretty female dragon was really pleasing my eyes finally.

I was just about to take some nice pictures of Drake and Kaira finally in couple-scenes and loving-poses (no sixual content, mind you! They're too young for that.)... when along came the bad news.

My laptop suddenly started acting up yet again, giving me the same visual disturbances as last time before I sent it in for repairs, until it finally locked up.
First I was thinking overheating issues, but the case wasn't even warm on top of the graphics card's cooler and Oblivion was only running for 5 minutes until the bluescreen lockup.
It was telling me NV4DISP was the issue and halting the system the only solution, however, some intensive checks with the Dell utilities revealed the video memory is damaged which is causing those random pixels of different colors where there shouldn't be any. At least that's what I think will happen when the expected content of a certain address in video memory is "00000000" but instead you get a "10101010" (which is what the utilities told me).
Now either I have to wonder what actually was repaired by Dell, or how by The Nine it is possible that I receive a pretendedly "new" graphics card with exactly the same issue my last one had, just this time the issue doesn't only appear after 4 years of working reliably but instead already after 2-3 months!... Or could it be something on my side which is literally "frying" graphics cards? Why wasn't that diagnosed by the Dell technicians then? Can Oblivion "kill" NVidia cards after 5 minutes of usage?... And why does only the NV4DISP thing from Windows XP cause a lockup while an old driver in Win98 (which is what the Dell utilities are booting in and which I was running for over 10 hours that day) does display the disturbances but stays stable and reliable without any lockups for hours at end?
I can't even boot WinXP anymore now without a lockup right after 5-10 mins, and always it is this NV4DISP thing from the NVidia drivers causing it.
This being a laptop, and thus there being no way to use recent ForceWare drivers on it (as suggested by windows on many occasions) due to laptop manufacturers not allowing them to support laptop cards, of course doesn't help either.

Well, to make a long story short, I'm again stuck with this little netbook replacement to work on, unable to access my files or to continue work on anything... so unfortunately, as much as it hurts, the project is now "on hold" yet again... until this issue gets "again" sorted out.
Things are just getting better and better... aren't they? :shakehead:

This Is Definitely Not My Year! :lmao: :wacko: :blink: :flame: :banghead: :brokencomputer: (<-- but at least I still have those smilies)

Hey there Drake, long time no see.

I'm sorry to hear about your continuous computer problems. I hope you find a way to fix this once and for all. In the meantime, the new dragon pictures are as astonishing (probably even more so) than your first batch. The sheer level of Drake's metamorphosis never ceases to amaze me, and yet even more so was the fact that he was created by a novice modder (I mean this in the least offend-able way possible), and yet continues to look bigger and badder each time you post an update. Really though, kudos to you; you deserve them.

I hope you manage to find a solution to your dilemma.

Hey, finally someone got it! I indeed am a "novice modder". I'm always saying that, aren't I?
No offence taken, GangstaWolf, don't worry. I'm not offended by the truth... besides... it's very hard to offend me anyways.

Just take into account the number of mods I released till now... how many are there?... 1? 2?... nah, I think the 2nd doesn't even count!
Actually that's what makes it so interesting to me... I'm still new to all this, so mostly everything I do is something new... and really exciting it is!

It's now the second time in a row I'm without any ability to continue modding for several months and I'm always missing it right at the first day.
To be honest, modding Oblivion is just too addictive!

Ah well, it doesn't seem my issue will be fixed any time soon, so I again have to improvise somehow.
Alright, here's the latest state of the art (minus female stuff, that's still unaccessible on my drive). Just replace the latest version of the files (v0.0.5b with v0.0.6b installed over) with the new ones from this archive and you should be good to go.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=XHGFLP4S

I hope I didn't mess up the folder structure! I recreated it from memory, as the original upload I took those latest files from didn't have any folders at all.
There might be female stuff already in the ESP, but it's certainly missing all the resource files.


Now, if somebody could do me a favor and post all the "DrakeDragon..." scripts from this latest ESP here in "codebox" tags for me to read them up, I could again try and continue working on them even without the CS or anything. :rolleyes:

Good to see you back in the game Drake :nod:
The new pictures looks great, no scratch that, looks amazing :goodjob:

Sad to hear that you have more computer troubles :brokencomputer:

It's great to see that you're gonna keep trying despite computer problems.


I'll do this in as soon as I get the time to.

And yeah, I'm still up for testing out any script changes or whatever.

Out of curiosity, what might be different between these latest scripts and the ones we had before?

To be honest, I don't really remember anymore. I fixed a few bugs, I think, and improved some parts (or started to?). I removed that bothering "initial neutralizing animation" for the wings played once right after each game load, as it isn't needed anymore now that the skeletons themselves have the wings already in a folded-in pose anyways, and it was causing annoying issues when played in 1st-person, which I didn't keep in mind when creating this "temporary" animation control system, that is soon to vanish itself actually.

I just want to start from an as up-to-date as possible version of my scripts, and this upload actually "is" quite up-to-date.
The main cause for providing this upload here though are the altered and (in my eyes) "improved" resource files.