Oblivion CS is a great tool. The G.E.C.K. is even better.
Would be nice to see some batch-editing options.
Other than that I'm mostly just interested to see what they've done to the scripting system - Todd's comments suggest they've overhauled it significantly this time around.

With some inspiration from OBSE, hopefully

A very easier tool so that anyone could try and make mods. I always wanted to make something but the tools are too hard to understand!

Support for multiple textures for creatures, with the skin being chosen randomly between those available.

Bethesda doesn't even need to provide the alternate skins, just a system for implementing them when modders create them. Creature variety is always nice.

And the entire game shipped early to the SKSE (scuzzy? that's gonna be weird) team so that people can start porting the important mods right away on release (enhanced economy, map marker overhaul, et al).

It'd probably be SRSE and oh, yes, mod porting is essential... It's going to be somewhat more complex though, with the new engine and all... No more code-tweaking But it'll get done.

And agreed on the creature variety. Genericism is a realism killer...

In that case, the first mod made with it should be Polymorph Male on Target. (Circe)

A system similar to Cry Engine 2+ for painting textures on Heightmaps whereby it would automatically paint different textures depending on the designers settings attributes for Steepness of Heightmaps, Height of the part of the heightmap you are painting, etc

Ahahaha, I can see us getting a lot of requests to join the team if that were to happen. But it won't.

Not sure if this has been posted yet, but MORE SKELETON CONTROL. I always loved editing skeletons and I would like a better way to incorporate new playable ones without a ton of scripting. And please, don't remove the no-setting-npc-skeleton thing that GECK did, just please...
And also, those this is most likely never going to happen but I can dream, is importing .mdl0 files into the game, but again, that is just about impossible, and Nintendo owns the file...

The CSs they have released have always been the tools they use to create the game. Of course the level designers are working with the Creation Kit.

We get a stripped down version but yes it's the same one they use.

Source?

Ah hell, who knows? It's been years but I would think that at least one person besides myself will have remembered Beth saying that they removed some features from the CS before releasing it. Oh wait I remember It was when they were explaining why the GECK was released so late. Can't remember where I heard it though, it might have been "The Making Of" DVD from the Collectors Edition in which case not everyone would have seen it. Let me do some digging and see if i can come up with a quote and hopefully a link.

Their construction set probably contains features for licensed products that they can use in game, but can't offer to the modding community due to license restrictions.

They have said it in the past and it is just plain obvious. Look at Oblivion, we were first given the CS with lip sync support, then the next version that came out as missing the feature. Even Fallout: New Vegas was a stripped down version. The script compiler didn't issue any errors; I guarantee you they don't work with it that way.

I thought the NV GECK was badly packed. IT lacked some key files to work correctly.

It's true that we don't get the full version of the tools. I remember Beth mentioning it and it's logical. When you're working with the CS you're the only one working on said file I think. Beth's real CS is capable of handling multiple users working on the same file remotely with the file probably hosted on a server of theirs. If you look at the DAO Toolkit you'll see more or less how dev tools are set up: they use data bases and remote access to edit the files because it's better this way when you have a team working on it.

@ scruggsywuggsy the ferret
I'm going to be a complete a**hole and say I hope they don't hire you guys... because the community would be missing out on the awesomeness which is the script extender

Unless they let you work on a SE on the side in which case working for Beth would be beneficial since you have access to the source-code and see how things are set up (I'm not talking about using their source code in your SE though, that would be illegal).

Better support to add custom animations, and official exporter plugin for 3ds Max.

And again, I'd like to see a simplified version of it for the console versions. (Mostly just changing stats of things to tailor my own custom difficulty mode that I feel comfortable with.)

I want to work on game items as an object oriented hierarchy of items, and scripts and other systems in the game, can recognize items an object oriented entity, so when I want a daedra trigger an event, I just check for the daedra class, and all the daedra monsters could fall under it, or I could check to see if the NPC is from one of the "Outlaw" factions and automatically "Bandit" and "Marauder" and the like would fall under that faction class, and so on...

You could script the class of fish and all the fish in the world would inherit that script, but you could also script the "slaughter fish" and those types of fish would have the additional script running for them, or you could change their inherited script as you like.

I want to be able to script the events for each object class differently, so that I could change the script of "slaughter fish" for the event of "On Sight" separately from the script for the event "On Death" and the like, thus script inheritance would be more meaningful.

I want to check in the dialogs, quests, perks and anywhere that one can have conditional checks to see if the target is from a class of objects and that class and all of its sub-classes would trigger that condition.

This already exists;



This applies to both objects and textures.

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Regions#Objects_Tab



This is also in the CS. Just no-one bothers to use it. You need to edit your CS .ini, but the option is there, and all it would take is for a modding group to have their own server set up correctly.

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Version_Control

Some of the stuff http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?app=forums&module=forums§ion=findpost&pid=16976497 adds to the TES4 CS.

lipsynch was broken, but it wasn't missing. There were a few other features that seemingly didn't work. However, I highly doubt that Bethesda specifically re-codes part of their CS to give fans an inferior version. They might release slightly broken versions, but the program is still what they use.

I want less hardcoding. For instance, the spell effects in Oblivion were all hard coded. You could edit them, but not add new ones.
I want more flexibility, more options, more scripting options, and more options...

Thanks for the info