Gaming

Well... Picture cutting a tomato in half and photographing each half in different light and then trying to photoshop them back together to a complete tomato. It's like you said.... a sauce of frustration.

I took a break, to figure out where those other clothes came from and duh, I installed Common clothing and armour. Unfortunately for me the mod uses vanilla textures and still manages to look mostly very dark. Might be coincidence that everyone chooses to dress in black today, of course. Anyway, now I am also downloading a retexturing mod (for clothes), so that maybe I can lighten some textures if I still feel the need.

And I noticed, while in a tavern, that the carvings on the columns had the woodgrain facing the wrong way Not sure if it was always like that or if it's the smim mod which does change some textures.

Road building continues...



After many trips to the Craftsman it now goes all the way the the northern Distribution Centre for whatever large deliveries are to come.
With all that work done it's now time for a good sleep.

 

Well, I managed to get the tomato back to something almost tomato-ish. It's not shiny enough and it has a faint line but it's red and it doesn't look like it has one almost black and one almost white half... (it was kind of silvery for a while as I saw someone recommend to try out normal maps with a neutral diffuse colour.)

Then I actually played for a wee bit and... found a fort I never saw before. It's not a mod, it's a real, original thing that I just never discovered because I never explored the roads in that general direction. It seemed a bit big to take on all alone (didn't bring a follower, Lydia gets on my nerves more and more) so I saved and quit for the night.

Just before bed yesterday I ready that when you save dds files you should save them with mipmaps. And that's something Xnwhatsits that I got cannot do. (I'm not sure if it's the diffuse maps or normal maps or both, and all, though...)

I think NVidia had some freeware. Gueess I'll have to look into that, eventually.

Today I've been playing some while it's cloudy and the sun can't prevent me from seeing my screen... But I keep losing things. I went off on the eldergleam journey and took that guy with me, let's call him Jon. But we were just past Honningsmead Brewery when a dragon flew in. It killed Jon. I also found a dead orc (actually I think that was just before the dragon arrived - first time) with a horse nearby. So I tried taking that horse back to the stables (by using console and setting ownership as it seemed to have lost its owner anyway) but as soon as I got to the stables it walked back out again and my own horse never came back. Then I went off with Lydia instead and kind of lost her too, I guess she got stuck on a rock or something. So I reloaded the last save with my horse, which was before the dragon attack.

This time Jon survived the dragon attack but died at the stones where there's always a necromancer lurking. (That's where Lydia disappeared, though she definitely survived because I saw her up there before going back down to the road.) But at least I still have my horse. (I found the dead orc again but left the horse alone this time.) And I guess I could take Lydia with me again. Or just go a bit slower and level up and handle things on my own. (Yes this is one of the newer low-level characters.)

I decided to try to alter the mule texture a bit (yes, I have a mod that adds mules to caravans ) and thought I'd take a screenshot of the original mule before quitting and restarting to see my result, but.... I didn't have to restart! *thinks of all the restarts done with the tomato*

Presumably I do need to go through a door or something that makes the cell reload. But that would save time (although it'd probably also cause saves I don't actually want... but I guess they can always be removed.)

Edit: well it worked a couple of times... 
Edit2: and then suddenly the caravan was leaving! I had to load an earlier save so I could see the mules....  
I think I'll "leave well enough alone now". I also took a look at my horsey and suddenly thought "did it always have those weird pale patches in its face?" so I had to google an image, and yup. Messing with the mule mod did not mess up the in game horseys. :phew: 

 
It's funny how desaturating images seem to cause "double desaturation" in game.... Anyway, these are "my" mules (greyed out the muzzle and hooves, added a pale throat and belly)
and here are the mod originals:

Either Paint.NET or Gimp can save mipmaps. Maybe both do. I certainly remember getting that option from at least one of them.

The mules have a very muscle-y mesh, don't they?
You don't notice it as much with the darker ones but yours look softer to touch and less shiny.

I guess you haven't installed the horse mod that lets you own stolen ones and have a big herd of them. I vaguely remember "Jon", whatever his real name was. He died early for me too.

And at my current point of the game I'm wishing that followers would stay where they are when you leave them. Aela currently wants me to go on a quest with her but that means Borgakh will leave and go all the way back to that northern stronghold that was hard to get to.
I kind of like Borgakh's repetitive catchphrase. "You have a grim look!"

The mules have the horse mesh

and I don't have either GIMP or Paint.Net and GIMP is something I never understood how to use at all, while paint.net's very name makes me think of.... MS paint? Whatever crap program used to be included with the Windows OS. But then again, I don't have the Nvidia one either....

I considered the horse herd mod, but since I didn't get it it probably used dll's or something.

Can't you just ask them to wait for you in place? (For three days, at least?)
I think I saw a mod where followers would wait indefinitely but I figured, then you'd have to remember where the heck you left them and it might be easier to just fetch them at home....

Try Photopea in the browser. You don't even have to install anything and that has an export as dds and it seems to have the mipmap option too.

I'll look into that
(when I remember )

So I left Borgakh behind (after taking back all my stuff) and went off on this quest with Aela. She looked a bit sad trudging away in her own outfit with her own sword. She was probably thinking that I had a grim look.

But onwards with Aela.

*sees a bear and three wolves on the hilltop*

Aela: "A fight! ... I'm getting out of here."

Not long afterwards I also had to shout and dispose of a sabre cat. I turn around and Aela is.... miles away hiding behind a rock.
A minute later she arrives with her bow in hand.

Can Borgakh come back?
She usually kills things before I get to them.