I am quickly reaching the conclusion that Skyrim is too big for its boots and the CK is too complex to do what the CS generally does flawlessly. I suspect there may be a gradual move back to Oblivion.

Thoughts?

After looking at the CK, I can say I'm glad I decided to get Skyrim on console rather than PC with thoughts of modding it. My first reaction was pretty much this
Good luck to everyone who does though. When the "newness" wears off, yeah I think we'll see returns to Oblivion or Fallout or even back to Morrowind.

I am now into the second month of wrestling with the CK, trying to get it to do what the CS does is like pulling my own teeth out. LOD broken, heightmap editor broken, even loading an esm is now mucked up after the last patch. Last night I reproduced the new heightmap Ive been working on for a couple of months and got it ready for Oblivion. Skyrim has served so far only as a game not a modding platform. I will still work on it, thankfully the community as usual proves itself fantastic, resilient and able to overcome most problems, but its the constant struggle thats tiring.

I've already moved back to Oblivion to continue work on my http://www.sandsofdestiny.net project. Aside the fact that we have no proper exporters for 3DS Max, the CK is bug ridden and overcomplicated for simple tasks. Granted, it has some nice features I missed in the CS, but Oblivion is still a beautiful game and easy to mod once you understand how things work. Not that I couldn't wrap my head around the new CK concepts, but I simply can't be bothered to learn how to work around bugs instead of digging into the "improved" toolset Bethesda provided.

I'll probably look back in to modding for Skyrim again once we get some decent NIF exporters for Max. I've got my heightmap and craploads of models ready, which I'll use for my Oblivion project for now.

~DE

I am in absolutely the same boat. The heightmap bug is now sorted and I can get a full LOD Mesogea into Skyrim, but the lack of a max/blender exporter is hamstringing me. I have so many models to transfer into Skyrim that to do it now with the current exporters is beyond the pale. I am going to give a few basic ones a try, but there's also a lot of third party mods amalgamated into Mesogea (with permissions/credits of course) that to try to get those across would be a nightmare, even tracing some of the original mod-makers. Also the environments are awful, pines or pines, or some more pines. Not much of a jungle or desert then.

Having invested money and time into a third party map making kit has really helped though. I want to port that map into my Oblivion Mesogea which will mean a few months of re-jigging the whole thing, but thats good because I can now clean up the files and folders and make it easier to mod.

I will continue with Skyrim, but slowly owing to limited ability and third party tool capability.