A list of the Skyrim mods I am currently using, I will periodically update this as mods get added/removed.

Balancing/Tweaks

Crafting/Related

Graphics

Other

Update (2012-08-07): Fixed link for More Enchants/Item

So the masterminds at Bethesda managed to break more than they fixed in 1.2, now I love them for making these games but fixing bugs is obviously not their strongest point.

Anyway, as I’ve been searching for a way to revert to 1.1 without having the files myself and having finally found these files I wanted to share them, and thank the people that uploaded them, so without further ado:

• Instructions + files
• Direct link to the files
• Mirror

I’ve played Skyrim (PC) for 7 hours, so now it’s time for a first impressions post (Basically a review).

Installation

Installation went quite smoothly, I extracted all the files into the Skyrim folder with Phoenix  (Probably not the proper way but it worked). Running the Steam pre-load after this only took about 10-20 minutes, verifying data and downloading anything missing.

Graphics & Animation

I can’t say anything other than that the graphics simply look great, they aren’t the pinnacle of textures/graphics quality, but the style is consistent and it’s up to par with today’s standard.

The feel/style has changed quite a lot since Oblivion. Skyrim feels more like Morrowind to me, everything is a darker and more serious compared to Oblivion. This isn’t bothersome though, for me it makes Skyrim more immersive and I prefer it over the “happy happy” graphics in Oblivion.

However the animations are still behind compared to other games, Bethesda has been known to not always be up to par with other games and this game is no exception. The most bothersome thing is that the facial expressions (Well the lack thereof). Next to that there are some small clipping issues but those aren’t that bothersome.

Sound/Music

I can’t say much about this, the music is solid (produced by Jeremy Soule so no surprise there), and the sounds, well I can’t really judge them, they fit.

Combat

The combat system has been changed compared to Oblivion, you can now equip an item/spell per hand and attack with either using the left or right mouse-button. And when you dual-wield spells (needs a perk in the specified tree) the resulting cast is more powerful.

There are also satisfying finishing moves, kind of similar to some of the Deadly Reflex finishing moves in Oblivion, however without any limbs actually being separated.

Controls/UI

The controls work good, not many complaints, though not all key bindings are properly configurable.

There’s some small annoyances with the UI, if you change a keyboard shortcut the old key will still show in the UI, and if you want to hotkey things you need to add them to a favourites list first, then open that list, and use that to assign hotkeys to them.

Levelling System

The levelling system has been changed again from Oblivion, and they’ve simplified it. You don’t pick a class in the beginning, so no minor/major skills, and no birth-signs either. The total amount of skills has also been reduced to 18.

Instead of having major/minor skills help you level up, all skills will help you. And instead of the old attribute system you now choose whether you want to improve your magicka, health or fatigue, and you get a point to put into a perk for a skill (Which gives you all kinds of bonuses for that skill).

Quests

I’ve only played a handful of quests, so I can’t speak for the quests as a whole, but the ones I did complete play I enjoyed. The quests on average feel more interesting than the ones in Oblivion. There’s the “Radiant quest” system they implemented that is supposed to make quests more dynamic but as this is my first playthrough I can’t judge how that works.

Other Changes

A list of some other changes:

• Lockpicking now uses the system that was also used in Fallout 3
• No barter when trading (discounts depend on speech level/perks)
• Persuade/intimidate/bribe/brawl dialogue options like in Fallout 3 (The Oblivion disposition system is gone)

Conclusion

Even though the animations could use some improvements, and even though they simplified the levelling system I am still very much impressed by this game, and at the moment I consider it just as good as, and perhaps even better than Oblivion. So if you enjoyed Oblivion and/or Morrowind I can definitely recommend this.

Just after work I get a text “You can now pick-up your pre-order for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim” so I race to the games retailer and pick it up. I arrive home and eagerly insert the disk into my computer. But not before unplugging the internet and setting the date to 11-11-11 (Risk reduction and all).

So insert the disk, fire up the installer, click “Install”…

Steam pops-up “Cannot connect to Steam servers”, FUCK! Set my date back to normal, and enabled the nets again, connect to Steam enter serial “Game activated” it says, “Click next to download”, so I press buttan…

“ERROR: Can’t install, not released yet” great, okay, unplug internet, kill ALL the steam processes, punch date forward to 11-11-11 again. Relaunch Steam, fire up the installer again, well FUCK! again, seems it isn’t fooled this easily.

So yeah I now have the physical disk, I can see the fucking files on the disk god damned, yet I can’t play.

Yes yes I know today is not the release date, but if I have a physical disk I want to fucking use it, even though the retailer shouldn’t even have started handing them out yet.

So now we wait, well we won’t wait, well be kicking Mehrunes Dagon’s ass for the coming 2 days, after that, dragons beware.

Installing From DVD

As Dragoon48 pointed out in the comments, this is how you can install it from DVD

Updates

Update (10/Nov/11 22:44): the game is now pre-loaded, the waiting game begins…

Update (11/Nov/11 0:22): ”Approx. 1 hour remaining”

Update (11/Nov/11 1:03): Decrypting…

Update (11/Nov/11 1:04): Installing pre-reqs…

Update (11/Nov/11 1:08): Aaaaand we’re in!

I finally have Battlefield 3 Beta working, it turned out to be a bug with folder names containing an è, apparently characters with accents aren’t well liked.

Regardless, the fix:

1. Go to the folder where Origin installed BF3 Beta, this is usually:
   32bit: C:\Program Files\Origin Games
   64bit: C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin Games
2. Rename the Bèta Battlefield 3 folder to Beta Battlefield 3
3. Start regedit , browse to the following key:
   32bit: HKEY LOCAL MACHINE\SOFTWARE\EA Games
64bit: HKEY LOCAL MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WoW6432Node\EA Games
4. Change the InstallDir path to:
   C:\Program Files\Origin Games\Beta Battlefield 3
5. Change the GDFBinary path to the following, while keeping the stuff after the last \ intact (the last bit starts with GDFBinary and ends with .dll):
   C:\Program Files\Origin Games\Beta Battlefield 3
So in my case that would be
   C:\Program Files\Origin Games\Beta Battlefield 3\GDFBinary_en_US.dll


Source: http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/battlefield-3/1432752-win7-x64-bf3-exe-crash-fix.html

NOTE: I have not been able to verify the 32bit values so they might be incorrect, a solution if you can’t find the registry key is to search for “Battlefield 3” and check if the location is similar to the above ones.

Lemme know if it works

As I’ve lately got a preference for Battlefield over Call of Duty I was quite excited when I heard that there was an open beta for Battlefield 3.

So after downloading Origin and letting it install Battlefield 3 I fired it up, and it opened a website, okay not what I prefer for finding a match but it’ll do.

So I go find a random server with room and hit the join button, okay my mouse shows the loading graphic. Ok good origin says it’s starting Battlefield 3. Okay bf3.exe in task manager… poof, gone.

It seems in my case Battlefield decided that it will just crash during start-up, doesn’t even go beyond 30MB of RAM usage so it’s crashing really early in its start-up phase.

I updated my drivers, reinstalled it and rebooted my computer, nothing, and considering this is really a minimal windows install (Only games + game related software) it seems highly unlikely my OS install is the problem.

This is a shame as I was quite excited for it after watching some gameplay footage and commentaries.

Well guess I’ll try again sometime soon when it’s fixed, hopefully this is before the beta ends.

~Xeross

Update: fixed it!

What is Schemaverse?

Schemaverse is a space-based strategy game (SPAECSHIPZ!!) that runs completely in a PostgreSQL database. So when you create an account it gets created on the PostgreSQL server and you connect to that server to play.

Currently the actual gameplay is (in my opinion) quite limited, but still interesting enough and it gives you a chance to improve your SQL skills.

Tics

Schemaverse’s universe works on tics, each tic is roughly 60 seconds long and every tick the following things happen:

• Every ship moves based on the ships direction, speed and destination coordinates.
• All fleets run their fleetscript#() function if they have it enabled and have a runtime of at least 1 minute.
• Mining happens for all ships who ran the mine() command this tic.
• Some planets randomly have their fuel increased.
• Any damage/repair that occurred during the tic is committed to the ship table.
• Any ships that have been reduced to 0 health for the same amount of tics as the EXPLODED variable (currently 60 tics or approximately 1 hour) are set to destroyed.

Scripting

What makes this game (even more) interesting is that it actually allows and encourages you to write AI for fleets using PL/pgSQL code.

This allows you to for example write a script that automatically creates new ships, upgrades their mining capability and assigns them to a planet, repeating this every tick.

Open-source

Yep, Schemaverse is open source, and the entire source code is available on GitHub.

Security

Of course when you are running an entire game in an SQL server there’s the tricky task of preventing SQL injection.

A previous exploit for example was that you could execute any SQL query as a privileged user by injecting the SQL into the ship name, and then triggering a notification to be generated for that ship. Finding new exploits is encouraged, as there’s a trophy for SQL injections that you can only get by using such an exploit to add it to your list of trophies.

Okay where do I start?

You start by creating an account on schemaverse.com and then you can either use the basic webinterface to get you started, or you can use the command line PostgreSQL client and/or your favourite PostgreSQL utility (Navicat, etc.)

For more info on how to play currently the most up-to-date and complete guide is this PDF next to that there’s also the Schemaverse Wiki on GitHub.

NOTE: One small correction with regards to above guides, the event query should use READ_EVENT(id) not READ_EVENT(event_id).

This is a diary I started on a single-player world quite some time ago, but eventually lost motivation for. Regardless, I hope you enjoy reading it.

Day 1

I woke up in this strange unknown world, not sure how I got here, but the thing I did know was I was gonna be here for a while.

I started gathering some wood as I needed some tools, while walking around I saw some burning trees a bit further away. I decided to investigate and as I suspected the trees grew too closely to lava setting them ablaze

After gathering some materials I decided to find a place were to start building shelter, or at least some storage. After walking a while I encountered a cave that was very steeply going downwards, so I decided to mark it with a big pile of dirt for later investigation.

After finding a nice spot on an open plane to put down a working bench I quickly crafted some basic wooden tools, and went on to get some stone after that to get some decent tools to work with.

I spotted what looked like a small cavern not too far away and decided to get some stone there. However upon investigation it turned out to be a rather large open cave of which most was hidden under ground level. I gathered some stone, and also some coal I found and decided to head back to make new tools.

After creating some stone tools I decided to gather some more stone from my now designated mine, however as I got there night was setting in.

Night

I was stupid to decide to just make a lighted area around my workbench and that I would be fine that way, before I knew it a skeleton was attacking me, eventually knocking me out.

Strangely I woke up again at the place I woke up when I got here, devoid of all my gear, luckily I made a small wooden tower at the location of my workbench so I could easily find it back.

I managed to kill the skeleton this time and quickly decided to craft a stone sword, just in time as suddenly multiple skeletons and zombies started approaching, luckily I managed to kill most of ‘em, before being knocked out yet again.

The night continued on like this, I’ve been knocked out for 3 times now, luckily when dawn finally struck it seemed our neighbourhood skeletons, zombies and spiders left a good amount of resources, so I can now make a bow and have some arrows for it.

Now time to start building an actual shelter…

Day 2

I’ve survived the night, well sort of, now day has dawned I saw the landscape was damaged thanks to these exploding green creatures, I’ll have to restore that sometime soon.

There were still a few spiders left so I took care of them swiftly with my sword, and then went to gather resources for the house.

Spent the entire day collecting resources for the house, finished it just as darkness hit.

Night

Safely inside the house, I’ve constructed a furnace and used the little coal I had left to cook some meat and smelt some iron. Finally a good meal.

Now we wait until dawn comes…

I’m hearing plenty of zombies and skeletons outside, I hope dawn comes soon, I don’t like this. Well at least I now have a safe shelter, but I should get some glass tomorrow for windows, as this hole I look out through doesn’t protect me very well from arrows.

The sun is finally starting to rise, soon the zombies and skeletons will meet a fiery death, though it seems that these green exploding things (Or creepers as I now call them) are resistant to sunlight, so I’ll have to get rid of them the old fashioned way.

Day 3

A zombie suddenly appeared in my house, but there’s no way he could’ve gotten in here, hmm this strange land sure has its quirks.

As soon as dawn struck I decided to go gather sand for the windows, and on the way back I gathered some coal, and coincidentally found some iron. After having mined this I headed back to my house to start smelting the sand.

While the sand was smelting I headed out to gather more wood to expand the house a bit, as it was quite small and I had enough of sleeping on the floor.

When I came back I started expanding the house and placed the windows, I also smelted the iron and created some iron tools from it.

Night

I continued building the expansion in the evening but found myself out of cobblestone quickly, I figured not having a roof wouldn’t be a problem as long as the walls were up.

Fuck, I completely forgot spiders can climb walls, I have quickly lined the ceiling with dirt and will replace it with stone the following morning.

Now sleep and wait ’till dawn…

Day 4

Feeling quite hungry, so my first priority was to find myself some food, luckily some pigs had somehow formed a group so I butchered them and took the meat.

After cooking it all, eating part of it and storing the rest I headed on out to the mine to get some more stone to finish the roof.

After finishing the roof it already started to become night again, luckily due to random annoying sheep I had enough wool to make a bed, so now I finally have a bed woo, anyway, off to bed.

Night

Zzz…

Day 5

Today I decided the house needed some decent flooring instead of fucking grass, I set out to the forest to gather some wood, replanting every tree I chopped down.

After laying the floors for the house I decided to start working on the roof a bit, I managed to finish the outlines of the sloped roof before running out of wood.

After this I filled up some of the holes the explosions of the creepers left with the sand I had now gathered, and then night fell.

Night

Zzz…

Day 6

Started working on a pathway to the mine, so I can get there in the night too, even though the pathway won’t be safe for spiders everything else can’t get on it, though I’m gonna need a lot of stone/wood for this project.

Well more work tomorrow…

Night

Zzz…

Uwu, for some reason I keep getting woken up by skeletons and zombies somehow being inside my house, this doesn’t make sense at all.

Day 7

More work on the walkway to the mine, so far the actual path is done, now for the fencing and lighting posts tomorrow.

Night

Somehow the zombies/skeletons are still able to get into my house, this is seriously impacting my night’s rest.

Day 8

Spent the entire day working on the walkway to the mine again

Night

Waited too long before heading home, had to fend off quite a lot of monsters in result, anyway back home now, time for sleep.

Day 9

Pretty uneventful, finished the lighting next to the walkway, and started working on sealing off the entire mine.

Due to sealing off the mine it became somewhat darker so I had to add some lighting, and a zombie managed to scare me shitless, better look more carefully next time.

Night

Seems moving my bed has solved the problem with the monsters finding their way in, odd.

Zzz…

Day 10

Worked on the mine the entire day again, sealed off most of it now, still need to add windows.

Night

Part of the fence is now finished, need some more wood, spent the entire night mining, sealing off the mine and working on the pathway

After not having checked on Haven & Hearth for quite a while I decided to check back, downloaded the client and checked the community I used to play with.

To my surprise though we had now arrived at world 5 (Aka the 5th reset), and not only that, but some quite drastic changes have been made to the experience (LP) system.

Instead of the more generic “Do action, get XP” approach they’ve now taken a more EVE Online like approach. There are now apparently these curiosities (Some kind of item) that you need to study, this basically means putting them in a special inventory and waiting, and it even continues when offline. When done studying these curiosities you will gain LP which you can use as always.

Now I kind of liked the XP per action approach with H&H because you got rewarded for building a house, creating a wall, etc. so I guess a change of mentality is needed (As was needed with EVE Online for me) to be able to keep enjoying this game.

Another thing that has changed is that you now need to have both the skill for a certain crafting recipe, and you have to have seen all the items needed in the recipe to be able to craft it. Seen in this case means gathered from their original source, not traded, picked up from the ground, etc.

They do seem to however have increased player counts now, last time I checked 400 people were online, now 1000 are playing, so at least it’s still gaining momentum.

Only time will tell if these changes will prevent me from playing again, now I just need to find some people to play with.

~Xeross

So with a lot of the modern MMO’s sharding (The use of multiple separate realms to be able to handle more players) seems inevitable, well it’s probably possible to run without sharding but that would require far bigger cities in WoW for example.

Now almost all MMO’s implement the sharding in a way that certain characters are tied to a certain server, so those characters can only be played on that server.

This results in all kinds of annoyances for the players, friends that find themselves on different servers than each other, etc.

However there was 1 company (Well I only know of one) that had a better plan for the shards, why not make the characters usable across shards.

So now, instead of having your characters tied to a specific server both you and your friends can just log onto the same server and play together. While still having the performance and scalability benefits of sharding.

I don’t expect any of the current MMO’s to actually implement this, but for something like for example WoW this would’ve kept me playing a lot longer.

There’s probably some performance issues tied to using such a system, but those shouldn’t be too hard to overcome for a developer with a decent budget.

Well that’s it, leave a comment with your thoughts, ideas, etc. if you want.

~Xeross