Gaming

All my sculptures look like mashed potatoes.

See that guy down there on the path. Go on, squint, you can just make him out as he runs away to the right....

 

He's tried to attack me three times and can't get it into his head that I'm not one of the baddie NPCs.
I'm just another player in Tamriel doing the same thing you are.

Then again, maybe I'm not doing the same thing. It always amuses me how everyone in MMOs manically runs and jumps around everywhere attacking everything while I slowly walk around at normal pace exploring the landscape and taking screenshots of waterfalls...
 

Oh, and collecting stuff. I'm not over-encumbered yet but that seems to work a bit differently and more like Guild Wars too. I have 60 item slots and I've filled 35 so far. And I seem to be collecting an alarming amount of water from urns. Maybe it'll come in handy for potions or something.
And I did find an alchemy skill book so maybe I'll be able to do that soon.
Yes, I'm coming in a minute, Norianwe! Stop trying to rush me, I am reading ... a book.
 

EDIT: Also....

FROZ! 

 

Feels very cold and tiring dragging your feet through all this stuff. But at least it's not that nasty rain.
What's that?
Timefall snow?
Timefall.... s- snow??

Well this is surprisingly addictive. But I've managed to stop for the day.
But I've been fishing!
 

I would then have been cooking but I didn't catch anything so I'll just stir the empty pot...

 

Anyway, I'm in Bleakrock Island and this is obviously the most important thing that happened...
 

And after that bag-buying I went on a couple of quests.
In one I infiltrated a bandit-occupied mine by wearing a disguise. Got past the sentries then proceeded straight past some more guards. My sneaking was going pretty well until a load of other people charged in and decided to do their version of this quest by just attacking everyone and my cover was blown.
Get the daggers out!
May have to re-assess my tactics.

EDIT: And it's always fun when the character creator has a slider for gut size.

 

I didn't save this guy just yet but I have been playing around thinking about my next characters.

Aw now I want ESO too... Installed, I mean

One thing that I haven't done yet, and this may surprise you, is stealing stuff. No lockpicking either. I've had the opportunity but not being able to go back to an earlier save makes the possible consequences a bit scarier. So I'm suddenly a good person.
I did find a locked chest during the mine incident and that was probably my best chance to try it out (it seems more like Oblivion's locks with multiple "pins") but the baddies kept respawning during the big fight that everyone else was having and cos it's an MMO the game never pauses and you're always in danger even when you're trying to do something else.
So I ran away and left whatever loot was inside.

Well, I have learnt that I can indeed adjust modded nifs (meshes) further in blender with the aid of pynifly. (Though it helps if the file you start with isn't "dirty" or whatever it was that was wrong with the one I experimented with - it needed to be fixed in nifskope first.)

I was hoping to use it on some of the clothing mods I've seen as most aren't very good or well, just doesn't appeal to me for whatever reason, but unfortunately it seems they all require some mod or other that requires some mod or other that sooner or later requires some mod or other that I can't use due to being on GOG. That, or they replace all the vanilla clothes, which I'd like to keep thank you very much. 

Well, no more modding or learning or googling or haunting Nexusmods today. Bedtime.

I've not heard of "pynifly".
Will have to look that up.

Now, remember when I complained about that idiot who tried to attack me (three times!) during the tutorial without realising that I was just another player?
Well ...erm... I've just done that as well. 

I was trying to rescue someone (NPC) from one of those bandit camp things after committing a splendid bit of sabotage and I thought I'd try some more of that sneaking and creep up on the baddies from behind to use my increasing assassination skills. I isolated my victim, who was out of view of all the other baddies, crouched down and crept up with my daggers drawn. I was just about to attack when I saw this big sword come bursting through my chest from behind.
Noooo! One of the other bandits has seen me!
So I now have to fight two of them.
I turned and spun and started flurrying my blades around in panicked fury as the baddie dodged and hacked and dodged and dodged and... Of course it was another player just trying to kill the same bandits in their more aggressive way.
Sadly I ended up flailing at the poor fellow for at least 15 seconds before realising. I was soooo embarrassed that I ended up running away and hiding behind some rocks until they left the area..
Gonna have to find a quickslot for the "sorry" emote just in case it happens again.

I guess it's not a game to be sneaky with all these other people around. But I did better later on and helped someone kill a big flappy boss creature.
I tried my hand at enchanting too after collecting too many rune things but nothing seemed to work so I think I may have to "learn" something else somehow. Will have to research.
I did manage to do some cooking this time and brewed myself two lots of Nut Brown Ale which may boost my health when I get in trouble. Mmmm, taste that lovely stuff...

 

Oh, and I've experienced the Full Inventory problem already. You can still walk and run but can't pick up anything else. Thankfully I've found the bank where I can deposit a few things. Yes, a FEW things but it will do for now.

EDIT: I have enchanted. And made glyphs. And caught a fish. And filleted that fish. And dyed that outfit so that it's no longer that awful green colour. 

EDIT2: And I've just played about with pynifly and here's Brelyna's modded head.

 

There were no image textures added to shaders though. I guess you have to find the correct file yourself.

Is there no "show player names" function or something? That usually helps single them out (it does decrease immersion, though, I guess).

I hadn't heard of pynifly either; I had been googling and looking for stuff that could help importing and exporting nifs in Blender, and then found that the one most mentions could only import and then you had to jump through hoops and get some other programs, some of which seemed non-existent now, to get your export back to Skyrim friendly. And in a discussion thread somewhere, someone mentioned pynifly. Which is new rather than from 10 years ago, still developed/worked on/improved, simple to use and just imports and exports all on its own. I don't get why it's not more widely known.

It's supposed to be able to import/export animation files too, I think, but I haven't tried. Not sure that aspect of it was finished yet. Anyway, when I was experimenting, I didn't bother with textures, I just wanted to fix a mesh and relied on the old textures and stuff working afterwards, and they did. Still not sure how much I'll use it, but I like having the option

Speaking of cooking, I thought the other day. Why is a poisoned apple the ONE thing we can do in Skyrim? Why not poisoned ale? Imagine poisoning a whole barrel of nord mead and then sneaking in and placing it in a bandit cave.

I have no idea how those shaders work.

I managed to load in the dds textures, but it seems like Blender only recognises some of the different formats. Anyway I kept trying and when I set the Eeevee viewport to render view the light was illuminating the opposite side of the mesh. I tried flipping and recalculating normals but that didn't work. Also the mesh remains flat shaded even if you set it to smooth.

It's all very odd and I have no idea what's going on with them.

And in ESO the player names seem to appear only when the crosshair is over the character. Which I like for the most part but when you're frantically slashing about in third person view at a random figure I don't think any option would help.
Anyway I'm now off to create and save that large, fat guy character.