Well for Morrowind and Oblivion the limitations of the construction sets were pretty much identical - I'm hopeful that with bethesda maintaining rights to this engine we'll see some great new ways for modders to change this game.

I had the feeling from the last two titles that Emergent (the company behind http://www.gamebryo.com/) had a lot to do with what we could or couldn't do to the game - for instance the god forsaken NIF format (the format of all the models in the game) that was proprietary, and other limitations of the construction set.

I really hope that modders have a finer grained control over how user input is captured. In Oblivion and Morrowind you mainly had ugly menus with buttons you had to click. I'm hoping that radial wheels and even temporary key rebinds are possible for mods (i.e. if you transform into a creature, different controls).

I think easier adding and changing of animations would be very exciting as well for most modders.

I really hope they will add "Cinematic" Tool or "machinima" tool or something so it will be easy to make machinimas

I don't know what to expect with the new CS. The new engine will either take too much of their time to provide detailed and powerful modding tools, or their complete control over it will allow for unparalleled moddability.

Skyrim modding ftw.

I think the Construction Set that they release is the same one that Bethesda themselves use to create the game.

Lol, I wish.

Um, it is. I don't know why people keep thinking it isn't what they use.

It is, why should the bother creating a separate one? However moders has no hotline and regular meetings with the ones who code the game engine so the designers who use the construction set does not need lots of the OBSE functionality

Where does it say they use the CS for anything other than tweaking? We can't even make animations or change what grass shows up where. We can't for 20% of what they do. They have the source code and a host of in-house programs. Oblivion's dungeons and world are filled with procedurally-generated content, full of randomization and complex algorithms. The only thing you can do in the CS is drag things around and then make painstaking adjustments by scrolling XYZ values. It's nowhere near as powerful as Source SDK for Valve games, and even that is limited.

Of course they don't use the CS to make animations; they use third party commercial animation tools just like everyone else. The only difference is they license a NetImmerse exporter and tools. There is no way they could give those to us. We have to resort to using things like NifTools.

If you go back and watch the Making of Oblivion videos (YouTube), you'll see that the dungeons are actually created and populated by hand using the CS. From past interviews, I seem to recall that all interiors are also created by hand. The only thing that I know was procedurally generated was the topography, even rocks outside are placed by hand.

I really want them to make some tutorials that will come with the KIT, mostly for how to use the scripting so that we can make our own effects more easily than was for CS.

aaah, seems you are a virgin to the Construction set now known as Creation Kit . am I incorrect?

Sorry this is just dead wrong you can actually procedurally place trees and other objects with the oblivion construction set. Bethesda has been very generous giving us access to the new tools they create - many of these things especially regarding the proprietary formats like NIF they were unable to give us access to because of licensing restrictions, which have now been removed.

I'm hoping that we get more fine tuning options in the new Creation Kit. Of course, a lot of that will depend on the engine. There were simply some things you couldn't do, even with the CS, due to hard coded parameters in the game engine.

I'm hoping for:
1) Radiant AI fully exposed in the CS - in case you are feeling lucky. It would be nice to really mod to the limit of the AI system's abilities.
2) More parameters for objects are exposed to scripting. Specifically, it would be nice to be able to set/clear flags on items through scripting.
3) The new NIF features are revealed, so the Blender NIF tools and NIFskope can be updated immediately.
4) Inherent ability of preview window to run in "game mode" - rather than having to launch the full game. A lot times, it's a pain to have to update the ini to get you close, and then tcl your way to where you want to check. I can live with the AI not running in this mode, but I would like the ability to walk around the level in preview mode. It would be truly awesome to find a floating tree or rock, walk up to it, and just fix it.
5) make working with water at different levels/waterfalls easier. I appreciated the ability in Oblivion to have real water above sea level, but it seems like you have to really work to create rivers that really flow down.

I hope they'll make dialogue editing a little more sensical - that is, able to be tied to an NPC instead of a quest made for encompassing all of the dialogue for say, a town. This has always seemed to me a little kludgey, and a proper tree like visualization of it, something like Obsidian started to do with New Vegas, seems like a more rational choice if you're going to be designing a lot of unique dialogue for individual actors and activators. Speaking of quests, it'll be really nice (for all involved) if "Radiant Story" leads to an easier, more centralized way to implement those, not necessarily involving scripts for everything.

But honestly, I'll just be happy that they have released a Construction Set with the same sort of power that we're used to.
And if they somehow add script-exposed functionality for catching keypresses and managing menus, as well as more finely controlling actor inventory, and add some really cool script effect spells to play with, that'll just be gravy.

Tasty, tasty gravy. :thumbsup:

I don't mind what it's like as long as there are very detailed tutorials: in the GECK, for example, the interior cell area is just empty, and on the tutorials it assumes you already know how to correct this.

they cant there will be so many lawsuits

I just hope that they will assign a different set of animations for each weapon

On of the things I'm hoping they include is the tool they wrote that precalculates where snow can accumulate on objects. It would svck if none of the stuff modders added in the snowy areas would accumulate snow in the same way as their objects.

What the hell happens to all the people who says that The Construction set is not the tool beth uses themselves??!?!? Yes we don't get the access to the source code and yes we do not get the third party programs to make models, but all quest programming, lvl-designing(not correct term) and so on is done in construction set, you even see some of the game designers work in it in some of the Oblivion "The making of" videos

I'm guessing people can't imagine that a studio would release the same tool they used to create the game. I can't imagine why, though - it's not exactly unprecedented. UnrealEd is released with pretty much every Unreal based game.

The trick is, you can really only go so far with the CS. After that, you start needing special tools like 3DSmax or blender, Photoshop, and nif import/export utilities. Then, if you want to fix hard coded things, you need the source - or the ability to wrap/redirect the API calls (ala MGE)

That said, you can do a lot in the CS - the Morrowind CS at least. You can even do a TC that only uses the game executable. That's a lot of power for a free tool.

I asked one of the devs and they said that they used 3ds max and zbrush to make the models

Having just started using the CS, I hope for some things to be a bit easier to do, such as making a character talk about a topic (it's so complicated and I can't get it to work!) and I hope there is no more of that glitch where I can't reapply textures to certain areas. Speaking of which, anyone know how to fix that?

Obviously you wouldn't make models in the CS =P

Putting it all together however, I've seen them use the CS for that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4JROwvfzSc&feature=player_detailpage#t=146s