I actually did a virtual high five with a fellow modder after hearing about keeping the NIF file format! :celebration:

Um... I'm pretty sure they said their tree system is new and developed in-house. What that means for their file times, who knows?

This is such great news, all those beautiful models made for Oblivion by amazing modders can be tweaked and put in-game almost right away!

Granted this means we'll get a bunch of anime/six/furry models too, but the beauty about that is I don't have to download that moronic crap.

Hopefully we'll at least have an Armamentarium pretty fast, as long as the modders get together sooner rather than later and work as a team.

I would like to take this moment to say I told you so.

Gregasaurus's point was the ONLY bad point to this news! NifScope has been developed for years and the scripts are awesome (although I really only used NifScope for materials/texturing) and are compatible with Blender. I am super excited.

I am a bit worried that, at first, the Skyrim modding community will be mostly stuff converted from Oblivion. There's some good stuff, but lets add new things too! On the bright side, though, I can design the armor I want my character to wear right now!

That may be, but I really don't want them to base which tools they use off of something so trivial.

Fact is this is also going to make getting good models into the game just as quick. So just keep avoiding those mods just like we've been doing with Oblivion.

Fixed that for you. This is a huge plus. :goodjob:

Sorry OP, but I can't relate in the least. I'm fine with NifSkope, and lacking all but the most basic programming skills, wouldn't want to take its development and availability for granted.

Indeed, but one must publicly despise such mods despite using them anyway

I am not a modder, but this is good news as it doesn't require Oblivion/Fallout modders to learn new things to get things started. It gets us stuff earlier

Well for first Gamebryo just render engine,
For second I disagree with

Nifscope really awesome tool thats expand modding possibilities greatly, its necessarily complex to do most of frequently recurring modeling work, without need of launch 3d editor like Blender and Max.
Did you make mods for Morrowind?
When Morrowind was released we receive TES Exporter 4.0 but thats was hard to make simple changes in model without using 3d max thats why most of mods in Morrowind is retextures of same meshes, thats was hard for beginners make completely new meshes.

When Oblivion was released we doesn't even receive official TES Exporter, If I remember well developers didn't have rights to distribute such tools to modders,
so modders start looking different way to model meshes, I remember how I use CivFanatics NIF pluggin for 3dMAX, I remember hex editing of meshes with tazpn's kf updater, but most of hard work was changed when Nifscripts become better then CivFanatics NIF pluggin for 3dMAX and Nifscope evolve from simple NIF viewer utility into such great tool thats we can use now, complex isn't problem here since its possibilities for experienced modders while beginners can use simple edits like change texture, copy/paste blocks, simple dimensions edits in mesh.
Another thing on UI, its good at last for me, but if you think it isn't make your own, Nifscope is open source utility.

Edit: Crap first day of April, thats was an joke?

I'm delighted to hear this. Not because I'm a NifSkope wizard, it drives me nuts and I often utterly fail to achieve my aims; but so many other people understand it and at least I know it a bit. So there's another worry crossed off my list.

I hope there are snow leopards in the game like yours, but I'm planning on learning it for oblivion fallout 3 new vegas and skyrim.

This.

I'm hardly a modder, but I get a lot of mods and this will help modders.

I have no doubt that Skyrim will have an even higher NIF version over Fallout 3/NV, and we'll be without functioning NIF tools for a while until the NIFTools dev team gets arsed to update things.

So having modeling tools won't be immediate. And there will likely be trips and hangups as they get acclimated with whatever new functions the new NIF version has.

Remember how long it took for them to figure out the dismemberment partitions with FO3? They still haven't fixed the mis-labeled shader flags in the BSShader properties.



Snow leopards that taunt you by sticking their tongues out at you?

I don't know. That also could mean that no detail is gained from Oblivion to Skyrim due to lazyness or people getting profit of others' work.

Err.. what? "No detail gained"?

And profit off of mods is strictly forbidden for most game mods.

I didn't wanted to mean that. I was talking about detail and polycount.

I think Benrahir is referring to simple ports, and then people taking credit for mods they didn't actually create.

erhmmmm...basically... :hubbahubba: shwooping ports is bad.

Er, why? I can understand "porting mods without giving credit to the original creator is bad," but I don't see how getting more items to play with can be seen as a bad thing. Porting also isn't really dependent on format. As long as you have an importer and an exporter you can port meshes with relative ease.

It's not about having more items. It's about those items being Oblivion-quality, not Skyrim-quality.

This really depends more on the model than the game it was made for. I haven't seen a huge jump in the quality of the meshes for SK, so most OB meshes (which were often higher quality than vanilla), ought to look just fine.

That's what I initially thought. But still, don't you think that a mesh pushing Skyrim to the edge will look better than any mesh that put Oblivion to the edge?

Or it has nothing to do with it?

It being the same generation, I don't think you'll notice much. When people complain about Oblivion's graphics, the general models are not among the complaints. It really came down to poor texturing, poor graphics, poor distant land, and poor characters. Skyrim has (most of) these fixed, so it really doesn't make a difference.

I am against NIF simply because I'd prefer something that's natively supported by most modeling programs. I hate relying on others to make importers and exporters which, for the most part, aren't that good. As if I could do any better (which I really can't), but you really can't beat native support. I have yet to see an importer and exporter supported by 64 bit 3DS Max.

Like what?


Its new, rare, and the nifskope team hasn't been working on much of anything recently.


Oblivion can handle a lot, but I suppose yes, a mesh made to kill Skyrim will look better. Past a certain point the eye actually automatically smoothes polygons, so I don't think an increased polycount limit will benefit us much beyond the amount of items we can place in a cell and the amount of detail we can put into very large items. I doubt you'll be able to see a difference between a well ported, well made model for Oblivion and a standard Skyrim one. Most of the graphical increases are on the engine scale, I'd wager.

This

Its going to take some time to update to the new formats -> decoding new data structures, block types, its going to take a very long time to update the exporters before anyone can even start doing anything, just look at the time frames between:
Morrowind to Oblivion (nearly a full year just to get animation data decoded along with most of the basic data structures -> not exactly a quick process)
and
Oblivion to FO3 (Took about 8-9 Months for most of the basic stuff, but the change was not that great from Ob to FO3/FONV)

for an idea of the time scales that it will take before anyone is able to start to do any real alteration of the Skyrim assets, there is also the fact that there are quite alot of the entries that no one took the time to decode or some of the more annoying decodes that never made any sense so they got left as unknowns.

Well look at some modders work like work of
Waalx
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/13370-1191444096.jpg
http://waalx.com/RealSwordsForum/index.php
jojjo
http://tesnexus.com/downloads/images/36592-1-1294837100.jpg
http://tesnexus.com/modules/members/index.php?id=545784
Or
the_devils_avarcardo
http://tesnexus.com/downloads/images/19468-3-1219958678.jpg
http://tesnexus.com/modules/members/index.php?id=108468
What level of quality you compare?