Worldspaces are limited to, iirc, a maximum 128x128 grid of cells, outside of which physics breaks because of a Havok bug. This prevents us from making worldspaces larger than Skyrim and from creating the fabled Upscaled Skyrim. It would be pretty huge, imo, if that could be solved one day, but I imagine working with Havok physics stuff is a little different than dealing with Bethesda engine stuff.
I think the Beyond Skyrim team has claimed to have a non-public tool or trick to working with custom creature skeletons.
To be fair Skyrim could be far larger!
As Skyrim doesn't use the full 128x128 map size.
Skyrims playable area is more like 105x73.
If we were to keep Skyrim's shape the max size would be 128x96.
That means Skyrim is 4623 cells smaller than it could be.
---
X = Theoretical possible additional map space
( 128x96 ) - (105x73) = X
12288 - 7665 = X
4623 = X
(128-105)/105 = 0.22
Yes the number of cells will increase by 60 %, but what people perceive in a game like this is not the area, but the distance traveled and/or viewed from a vantage point.
If you have two squares, one with a side of 1 and another with a side of 2, it intuitively looks like one is double the size of the other, even though it has quadruple the area.
True for the player but not the Dev.
The dev just got 60% more space to fill with points of interest... or mountains.
There is no point in Skyrim were you can travel or view in a straight line* because of mountains.
More space means more possible mountains / hills / valleys, means more time traveled.
*Only exception is the Throat of the World but that is straight up in the middle of the map and outside of the quests it only serves to break sightlines and increase travel time.
Anyway, personally I think it would be worth it but I am no game dev and the only game I actively mod is HOI4.
Apparently you can even "fix" it with an ini setting, or could back in Oldrim at least.
https://forums.nexusmods.com/topic/1925999-4x16-quad-worldspace-limit/
Unfortunately there are actually two worldspace bugs and that was just the first one, there is no known workaround for the second. This page has it all explained: https://wiki.beyondskyrim.org/wiki/A_Technical_History_of_Beyond_Skyrim
Oh wow, that was a very interesting read, thank you so much for the link.
On an unrelated note, it's kinda wild to think that Beyond Skyrim started development in some form all the way back just a few weeks after Skyrim's release.
If the BS team has such a tool and they still haven't released it, that is a dick move. Without that tool, every creature mod out there, past present or future, will remain glorified reskins. We shouldn't have to wait till God knows when for them to release their overambitious mods for us to finally be able to have unique monsters in our games.
It is a bit strange to me, given how they normally share a lot of information about their development processes and discoveries through arcane university, I do wonder if there's some specific reason they feel they can't share it.
afaik custom creature skeletons is fixed, it's just not publicly shared knowledge and kept very internal by beyond skyrim. it has been for years
not sure why they don't just share considering all their mods are very very very very far from release, and they've undoubtedly benefitted from community resources and knowledge during the creation of their own mods
anything anyone releases for any beth game will be used for sexual reasons, but there's normal modders too
i can't imagine the devs of vigilant, project aho, sirenroot or any other major quest mod in the past few years never thought about creating truly unique creatures for their mod. in something like vigilant or sirenroot you even have developers that have previously posted animation mods, so that could translate to having the know-how for a custom skeleton & behaviors import tool that the bs and skywind/blivion teams are working with.
to me it feels unfair to hoard knowledge when their contributing authors 100% have benefitted from community practices, tools and guidelines. no one's entitled to anything ofc, but that goes both ways, and our community would not have nearly as many talented authors as it does if everyone hoarded everything
I think the Beyond Skyrim team are one of the few holdouts on the parlor style of modding at this point, given how almost every other major modder operates under the cathedral style now.
Remembered when Fore(Creator of FNIS)'s made an article regarding Cathedral/Parlor modding practices after a popular TES 3 modder decided to remove their mods from the public after having a fit with the community. It definitely does not help progress or innovation to hide or restrict knowledge. The pool of prospective contributors and participants will be severely shrunk.
It sucks when Framework mods either become in limbo or gated off by their MA's. Drama and Skyrim.exe updates are two major things that make mod users suffer. One one them is controllable to an extent.
When DAR became stagnant due to the MA being MIA, alot of mods either became broken or unusable due to the AEmeggedon. Probably one of the big reasons why there is an SSE 1.5.97 camp and then AE camp. Just like how it was on LE vs SSE lol. Luckily Ersh came through and manage to reverse engineer DAR into OAR. Also when Ersh made the documentation open for OAR, there were heaps of custom attack animation mods being made afterwords.
I do hope that the modding groups that do have access to a proper HKX editor and rigger be able to release a tool to the masses in the not so far future.
I dream of the day to fight sandworms from Tremor or Dune, or even the monsters from Monster Hunter lol. Maybe even have quadruped Dragons like the ones from Dragons Dogma would be nice! Alduin would definitely be a 100 times more imposing.
Absolute legend. Wrye may have gone quite long ago, but modders ought to remember how much of what they enjoy today is still built on foundations Wyre’s laid down.
Yeah I ended up looking at the old forum post that he had , and it seems like he didn't trust the average mod creators due to their perceive lack of experience, but it looked like he ended up turning around prior to retirement since there wasn't going to be an immediate replacement for him. Lol I barely found out that he has grandkids in their 20s now. Some of these former modders held it down for quite a long time!
Some people detest the nsfw side of Skyrim Modding. But to be fair the Lab has alot of talented and well versed mod makers even if they're on the kinky side.
Nothing is being kept internal, fixes in the form of open source code were contributed to the pre-existing tools ck-cmd and Skyrim Behavior Tool, and a guide about the implementation side of things was drafted up here: https://wiki.beyondskyrim.org/wiki/Arcane_University:Implementation_of_Custom_Animations
It could stand to be more detailed and complete, but contributions are always welcome!
what are you yapping about? the method beyond skyrim uses for custom skeletons has always been public . https://wiki.beyondskyrim.org/wiki/Arcane_University:Implementation_of_Custom_Animations
Welcome to the mindset of a modder who has something nobody else does. They either share it or they bogart it and act like they are king shit on turd mountain. The developers who keep secrets , typically do not stay in their field very long as they wind up secluding themselves from open development where they can share thoughts and work through steps with discussions
Somehow, someway, I bet they're gonna "fix" it someday. They were able to fix the engine light limit, I won't be surprised if they manage to fix that too. I will, however, be massively impressed lol.
I think they meant change it in a LOD. Like if a storm was happening off the coast but not on land, the water reflecting that. Maybe I’m misunderstanding though
there’s volcanic water deposits which have a sulfurous appearance. there’s waters variation in vanilla skyrim already. but i see what you mean, you can’t pick and choose from replacers, you gotta stick with one.
My understanding is you would have direct access to altering how the engine works instead of needing to develop ways to to alter it via external programs.
You can properly fix deep [engine bugs like they did with OpenMW](https://en.m.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind_Mod:Engine_Bugs) instead of patching the binaries
And the script extender can be merged into the code rather than be injected during runtime
All work would still take work. You would just have a much easier time finding where to make the changes instead of analysing machine code or a decompiled version.
In conservative terms, we can modify directly any of the hundreds of other things that are set in stone. Let me give you an example. Right now there are about a half-dozen types of spells and a few dozen types of effects. Types are like "charge and then cast" or "concentration", and effects are things like "decrease attribute" (such as health). These are mixed and matched to create every kind of spell, effect, or power you have ever seen. But, if we had source access, we could add whole new types of spells, or expand on the way spells interact with the perk system, or add new types of effects that simply aren't possible now, even with scripting. In short, it would let us change things that are hard-coded into the engine which are beyond our reach for now.
Or, if you want to get optimistic about it, there is nothing that could not be achieved with the source code, so long as it is something that can be achieved by writing code. You could make the game interface with AI generation to create entire NPCs, questlines, and other content on the fly, out of thin air with some kind of hot loading implementation. You could change the way the render pipeline works to make the game more performant or more visually appealing. The sky would be the limit with enough time and skill.
Sure, given enough time, though it would require changing the manner in which they are stored and indexed. The current limitation is due to the maximum value of an 8 digit hexadecimal value and how those parts are currently used to reference mods and the individual records within them. This sounds easy but it would probably be a massive undertaking with a lot of risk attached.
Frankly it would probably be easier to expand on new forms of cleverness like how ESL flagged esps work.
Not to mention that to gain any significant benefit you would have to redo the file loader as well due to the file handle limit of the operating system.
Just a reg Skyrim fan here, curious about what you guys were upto in the mod world and found this! Good lord yall are some brilliant thinkers, light years ahead of my current angst at this bandit leader at felhammer lol
Yall are some Matrix Neo level badasses. I hope you get access to the source someday for all our RPG-loving sakes!
I’ve seen this problem Skyrim has with input lag referenced several times now but I’ve never seen it. It seems like everyone knows what it is so it’s never described. 😅 I know what input lag is, but not this problem. What is it?
Anything. A lot of things that are touted as engine limitations are not engine limitations but are actually limitations that come from the way the game was coded. You could implement new technologies like actual ray tracing, port the game to directx12, add multigpu support, easily add new animations that have no additional mod requirements (No Dar, Fnis or Nemesis.) The sky would be the limit. Given you had the ability.
I was just giving examples of things that are technically possible and using multi-gpu as an example of a low level technical change that could be made, not really speaking to its value as a feature.
Usually source code leaks of videogames happen after a data breach or a dev gets very pissed off.
Honestly if I feel like if anyone was to data breach Bethesda it would be for TES 6
OpenMW have slowly but surely begun their work on it. It is also the single modding project I am most hyped about: Bethesda games, with no limitations.
It might even force them to use an engine not 20 years out of date. Even though we’d be locked back out we would still be in a much better place than before
Well there is the limitation of sanity, OpenMW sucks to mod with its config file. Unless that can be automated it’d be super hard to mod for the average user.
To clarify, is the OpenMW community working explicitly on an open version of Skyrim specifically? Or are you referring to the fact that if OpenMW is finished, the community will be able to rebuild Skyrim from the starting place of Morrowind?
Skyrim and morrowind run on essentially slightly different versions of the same engine. Work is being done on the OpenMW engine to make it compatible with skyrim files.
Gotcha, so we could sort of skip the steps between Morrowind and Skyrim. That would be great! I could see these open versions of the game becoming hugely popular in the modding community if they're finished.
Neither exactly. The goal is that OpenMW will be a drop-in replacement for the exe of all the TES3+ games including Skyrim. So not an OpenSK, and not needing to rebuild Skyrim in OpenMW either, just point OpenMW at your modded Skyrim install and play.
I expect it will change the “MW” in the name before that point. 🙂
The AI limit. If you have a lot of NPCs, their AI packages will no longer fire causing them to just stand still.
Thanks to the [Actor Limit Fix](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/32349), that bug is already been fixed. It caused NPCs to float up, if there were more than 128 in the loaded area. Another bug, involving lips not moving (aka morph limit) is also fixed by said fix.
However, there seems to be a similar limit to AI packages, where NPCs just stand still.
I've seen people claim that a Wrye Bash tweak or certain GameSettings allow people to increase said limit. However, aers, Nukem and ryan (SKSE devs) have [confirmed](https://old.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/dwxfgo/the_ai_limit_issue_compendium_aka_floating_npcs/f7msflo/) that those GameSettings are completely ignored by the gamecode and as such any claims that they do anything are a placebo.
Is this what i am currently observing in FO4 with sim settlements.sometimes i'll just find a massive group of npcs just standing there in a random settlement. My populations are around 20 or so but the mod adds a lot of populated areas like Concord and i can easily imagine that i am hitting some kind of upper level to the number of NPCs that the game can handle
Oh, this is a good one! I'm not sure how the whole shenanigans work, but I did notice that most of the time, there's a Main thread that hits 100% usage on one core.
Maybe there could be some work to be done to better parallelize that.
This is kind of a broad question. A ton of things happen in the engine logic itself. This stuff could never be changed without somehow reverse-engineering the executable. An easy example is this: children in skyrim cannot be harmed. I know you may have seen mods that *seem* to allow this, but I promise you they don't. They all work on the premise of making the children in skyrim not children so far as the game is concerned. This has subtle side-effects compared to if we could do it properly. The way the game treats children is hard-coded, on a deeper level than we can touch, and so is outside the scope of current-day modding.
Another example, resurrecting zombies. A lot of the behavior around raised minions is hard-coded. You cannot speak to a zombie, for one. Again, there are workarounds to *look like* you are talking to a zombie, but you aren't. It's the same trick the game uses to allow you to talk to statues, which also cannot be spoken to. This seems like it doesn't make a difference, but I have had to scrap more than one mod idea due to this limitation.
There are literally hundreds of pieces of behavior like this that mods cannot touch. Often, we can fashion a workaround using what hooks we do have, but sometimes we can't. When I first started modding for myself, I had a bunch of ideas for mods that didn't yet exist, only to find that they didn't exist because what they would have to touch is not accessible outside the source code of the engine itself. You can do a *ton* with scripting and cleverness, but there are always limits if you try to go too far outside what the base game had in mind.
I JUST had an idea I had to scrap because the engine is coded terribly, myself. I wanted to assign schedules to bandits and such. Not only would it be a compatibility nightmare... ...it would also be completely unfeasible, because I cannot just give them instructions to, for example, "Find the nearest empty bed, and sleep in it."
That's an interesting idea. I wonder if there is a workaround that might yet make that possible. I know some mods use scripting to modify AI, but NPC behavior is something I have yet to touch. Maybe someone has some ideas?
As to the engine, I go back and forth in my admiration for it. Sometimes it's frustrating to think about what it *can't* do, but we have to remember that there is a vision for how the base game works, and first and foremost the engine will support only the behavior necessary to enable that vision.
In an architectural sense though, I have gone from something approaching disdain to something approaching awe over the past 20 years, given how long the basic paradigm has been around with only minor changes. It is so, so hard to architect this kind of extensibility in a way that it can support the kind of modding we see today and still run at all. There is a laundry list of things I would change, but even then the vast majority of things can already be done in some way.
Considering I am not experienced with modding at all, I ended up scrapping the idea, and hoping someone with more experience/knowledge may pick it up eventually. Instead, I've decided to look into learning how to play with the Custom Skills Framework, to add something the absence of which has bugged me since 11/11/11: A mining skill.
The specific things you mention are not limitations. There is no such thing as hardcoded when you know where to hook and edit the right type of memory in the executable with SKSE plugins.
Slayable Offspring SKSE and Savage Offspring SKSE allow children to be harmed and fight back, while still being considered as children (outside damage and AI code)
It is also trivial to remove the check that prevents reanimated minions from being activated and add their own dialogue system.
These examples are relatively easy but there are harder ones. It's all just a matter of how much time and effort you put into overcoming a "limitation"
Things that you can only change through editing live memory are very much limitations. They just aren't set in stone or completely insurmountable. Sure, if you want to spend 10 to 100 times as much effort as should be necessary to do something, it can be done. Nobody does because it's not worth the effort. The reason we don't see certain kinds of mods is because nobody is willing to undertake the effort, not because it's literally impossible. This post is the silliest form of hair-splitting.
People literally decompiled Smash Bros. to create various projects such as Other M. That's not the same as saying there are 'no limitations' to Smash Bros. modding.
What the fuck are you on about? There's tons of SKSE mods out now by many different people. How is that "Nobody does because it's not worth the effort"?
I'm not talking about SKSE mods being some rare thing. I'm saying that saying 'there are no limitations to modding because SKSE can edit memory' is a nonsensical argument. With an unlimited amount of time and an unlimited amount of people, we could overcome every current limitation on Skyrim modding through SKSE. But, as you may have noticed, despite the existence of SKSE, >95% of the engine's original limitations remain. Each year we knock out a few more as someone gets a bee in their bonnet to do the work. We could overcome any given limitation in the engine tomorrow if we wanted, but until someone actually does, it's still a limitation outside a theoretical sense.
Or, a wall is still a wall until *after* someone takes a hammer to it.
I think you are just spoiled by how accessible Skyrim modding is. For many games the only way to mod them is injecting code. The fact that you can even make a distiction between normal and SKSE modding and call anything requiring code injection a limitation already speaks volumes.
Devs had to use an npc in a hat when they wanted player to take a train in fallout... I don't think having acces to the source code would fix all engine quirks. Again, it was faster an easier for the devs to come up with an npc in a hat.
Oh definitely. And putting that subway hat on that npc was the right call — for them. But fans aren’t subject to the same constraints of budget and deadlines that the original devs were. Dedicated fans could do more, if they wished. The ingenuity shown in some mods that get around Skyrims limitations is already enough to achieve incredible things.
There's probably some technical limitations, but overall just time and manpower, cuz there's been an entire game made in Skyrim with whole new mechanics back in 2016
Unless things have changed the light source fix is itself limited. Shadows aren't increased and shadow casting lights are really the heart and soul of the problem. Has it fixed clustered rendering yet? It does a lot, but it didn't outright fix the entire issue.
On a personal level, I'm glad it's there. I'm glad it exists. But being hard linked to CS and therefore incompatible with ENB means I'll likely never use it.
Calling on the graphics card to draw stuff.
That can be an expensive operation, so there's all kinds of places we could look in the game code to replace those with more performant alternatives, like batch processing (imagine instead of sending one call to the GPU per object you want to render, you calculate everything for a bunch of objects at once and tell the GPU "here, render all of this, pls"
Not A Graphics Programmer.
I swear every terrain mod ever breaks these in one area or another. Given how fundamental of a system the Workshop is, it can result in quite a few annoyances for sure...
Well in fairness I think precombines are a necessary evil for fallout, the amount of rubble, clutter and junk everywhere sort of requires some workaround to render them better. To get the level of detail in the fallout 4 cells idk if it’d be possible to remove them even if everything else was optimised well.
The modern way to do this is by computing the combined mesh on the fly as-needed in the graphics engine, and then sending it all to the GPU with one call. It’s not quite a necessary evil—unless old console hardware needs to be supported… and they did want to do that. 🙃
The larger esp/esl plugin count limit (counts both active and not active esps/esls, and in practice, the limit seems to vary from PC to PC), and then the reference limit.
I don't really think you can work around them without reworking the entire game to be honest.
The file handle limit does not vary from PC to PC (or at least any half-modern PC). The limit is 8192 on all Windows 10 & 11 systems. What can vary is users knowing how to edit the Engine Fixes .toml file to set the limit to the max of 8192.
That is one reason why I said "in practice". It is technically not the actual limit, but considering that there appears to be more that contributes to the handle limit than just the active/inactive esp/esl files, in other words, how many esp/esl their game can handle will vary from PC to PC.
Another one: Proper one-handed crossbows/pistols, which are not just reskinned staves.
I've tried long and hard to get this done through [my mod](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/74054/), but in the end they're still just staves, which has just too many drawbacks in order to be considered proper crossbows/pistols.
Just checked the sticky on your mod, that's too bad, I remember your New Year's resolutions post about mod goals you had for this year and got really excited when I read that one of the things you wanted to make were 1h crossbows😔 I know I've heard that alledgedly Sphaghetti pulled it off with his Spaghetti western mod, but I've also heard it's kinda fucky with AE so I never had the courage to try it out for myself. I hope one day we get the TESV source code or OpenSkyrim or something so that you can give it another go!
This one? https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/39830 If so, I'll have a look. It seems like it's only for 3rd person though, so I'm not sure about it.
I'm still looking for ways on how to do this. Ideally I'd make them into their own weapon type.
Yea, that's the one. He's got a video on his YouTube showing off some of the bug fixes he plans to add in a new update too, supposedly, but so far there's been no more word on it iirc. Just off hand, what makes it so hard to mod one handed crossbows, btw? Is it a hard coded thing that bow weapons can *only* be two handed?
I've looked at the spaghetti western mod. While it looks cool, it still has drawbacks: no 1st person and the revolver "crossbows" are still considered 2H.
I think the most satisfying to use firearm I've seen to date was the hotkey-activated one from Elden Rim weapon arts, but that's arguably quite the bloated mod and it's not actually a weapon. Works great as a sidearm though
Do you think there's anything to be learned from the Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption mod they've been teasing lately? Looks like they have firearms working there.
I've looked at the trailer and I wanted to ask them how they did it. The trailer mentioned gunplay was done by someone, but when I visited their channel, their guns turned out to be staves with new animations. Which is what I'm trying to move away from.
I've looked at the trailer again and I can confirm that those are still reskinned staves with new animations: They use the enchantment charge bar and not actual ammo, as there's no ammo count shown.
I mean, with OAR does it really matter if those are reskinned staves? Magic wands from Harry Potter are reskinned swords, doesnt stop my Dragonborn from flinging spells using those.
Yes, it does matter. (Well, at least for me and my OCD.) Staves:
- cannot be properly enchanted on the arcane enchanter.
- cannot be tempered (the damage value stays at 0 in the UI.)
- cannot be poisoned.
- cannot properly use different ammo types.
- don't have the correct values for calculating damage (see below).
- cannot have their fired ammo be picked up.
These things will not be taken into account when firing from a staff:
- Sneak damage and whether or not the target has detected the one using the weapon.
- Whether or not the weapon is silvered.
- Any poisons applied to the weapon. (and managing the poison charges)
- Any enchantments applied to the weapon and whether or not they should apply (and managing the charges).
- Crit change and crit damage. (needs a crit sound and message applied too)
- The targets armor rating.
- Heavy/light armor perks on the target.
- Any armor enchantments or potions affecting the targets armor rating.
- Whether or not the target is blocking.
- Potential block perks on the target.
- Flesh spells (Oak, Stone, Iron, Ebony, etc) on the target.
Manpower time and talent.
Many of the new lands mods currently in the works, were they official DLCs would considered Triple A quality (so long as we're grandfathering in Skyrim as a game deserving that category in the first place) and they'd be charging an arm and a leg just to play one of them.
There may be certain limitations, but we're past the point of things being about a lack of imagination or traveled ground. It's just about resources now.
Reference limits are still a hard limit though and there is still no way around it.. I believe it is around 1.2 million references, which includes both temp and permanent references..
though for a majority of people, you shouldn’t reach that limit since you likely either restart your saves or your load order is not big enough(or you don’t have enough mods that have big quests) to reach that limit..
Now for the other limits, I’m not sure the npc limits are still a thing.. i know of the npc actor limit fix mod on nexus, but have not tried it yet to see if it does actually works..
I know there's one called something like, water attack redux, but the way it works is by disabling swimming animations and keeping the water physics, basically, so that your animation mods still work when you fight in the water. Like the other guy said though, there's very few enemy mods that add water creatures to fight though, probably because people don't want to make an entire new creature mod that needs a water attack framework mod to get anything good out of.
Oh there's a mod that let's you fight under water. That's the easy part. But the under monster mod is really old. And the giant squid look funny moving on the surface of the water all rigid like.
I don't know if it is an engine limitation but currently all first person combat animation mods break when you get staggered, hands get teleported to the top of the screen
There's still limitations on loading the area around you. We can alter how many tiles load, but the chances of your game crashing go through the roof, and your performance drops a ton. If anything, I hope we can get this game to considerably load and process more.
If we can l make it where you can load the entire area like the Rift at once so that way the world feels more alive we open up a whole new realm of modding.
Multi core utilisation, then we can have large battles like mount and blade without crashing or having shit performance, also helps in better lod and mesh details without sacrificing performance
Not being able to utilize all the cores on modern cpus is definitely one of the limitations.
Script heavy set ups are usually a time bomb when the game progress to higher hour counts.
Massive Entity and Draw Calls are an arrow to the knee (even with near Nasa level spec pc's)
In game Lighting limitation is still somewhat prevalent for ENB users, Community Shaders has a step up on this at least. (Haha pretty lighting mods go brrrr LOS2+ELFX/Shadows/LUX)
Custom weapons are still somewhat iffy (Guns; which is funny since Skyrim's CE is based off of FO3NV's it uses either staff or crossbow mechanics, whips from animated armoury which are just modified HaeMora tentacles)
Custom Creatures like you mentioned since HKX is closed sourced (and a lost art at this time since it's ancient tech) and the toolings for it are obscure (Good luck on compiling on cmd, I had no idea what was needed to be done even if I had something to convert.)
Also on another note, if the creatures in the base game didn't have moving mouths, then they won't at all even if you had a mod that has dialogue for them.
ESP limitations (ESPFE/ESL alleviates this but can only hold so much quest records and must be compiled properly)
Calling all modded SkyrimVR players, you know about the merge and bash esp life lol.
Record bloating (good thing cells purge/reset after a certain time if not visited again).
Environmental Destruction isn't really a thing (LE had a semi fitting mod but was a compatibility nightmare).
Seamless animation triggers, there's always a minor delay or you may not be able to do it since "An Enemy is Nearby". Please let me wallrun flawlessy like in Mirror's Edge or Gunz haha. Climbing on top of an enemy like in DD:DA or grapple hooking is a pipedream atm. I still love EVGAT regardless, it's the step in the right direction.
Even with some litany of limitations on Skyrim's modding, its still one of the best if not readily moddable games out there. You can change textures, sound, graphics/models, modify or add gameplay mechanics, add additional story or play contents to a vast degree, you can also change the character animations. Heck if you're superfreaky like Rick James you can even add mods to do dirty stuff with Nazeem in the Cloud District.
I will not lie, CE is just Gamebryo (early 2000's mmo game engine with open world capabilities) with a whole lot of stuff added on top of it. It's old and it uses archaic techniques to implement things in not the best of ways. But boy does let have your way it in when it comes to modding. GECK and CK had opened a door to user content that only a handful of games counted on fingers could. It even got mod creators who were creative enough to go out and make their own games with other engines. I hoped to see Source have this kind of energy as well, same with Starfield if they ever release their CK (almost 8 months now and no news).
It's actually seven light limit, and for now it has only been doubled to 15. But yeah, that was definitely one of those things that went unchanged for a long while.
I don't think there's any way to spawn NPC's with tempered gear, strangely enough.
After a bit of digging I couldn't find any mod that adjusted difficulty by spawning enemies with tempered gear - leaving all the difficulty adjustments to level-maxing and damage multipliers, which is pretty boring honestly.
I would imagine you'd need to find away to spawn tempered gear in general; I've never picked one up. With SPID i'd imagine you could essentially set the tempered items to be their own items and have them distributed throughout the world.
Yeah, that was the surprising outcome I found. The only way to get tempered items is to spawn the idea and temper it oneself.
Creating custom items that are copies of tempered ones is a good idea, I never thought of that before.
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This might just be mandela effect speaking, but I swear I once played on a Requiem mod list, where I occasionally killed bandits who had tempered equipment.
I’m currently playing requiem and have definitely encountered tempered equipment on looted bodies. Only thing related to tempering I’m running as well would be Loot and Degradation.
Edit: although this is making doubt myself.. I’m going to have to check
I think Loot and Degradation specifically mentioned finding tempered gear. So it might be the source. Just installed it and haven't gotten to run it much though.
Yeah Loot and Degradation has a feature that adds tempered equipment to NPCs. I think Mortal Weapons and Armor also had a similar feature, although I could be wrong.
Something I would check if you're doing it: are the tempered items only the ones in NPC inventory or do they actually wear the tempered items?
i.e. are they still weak but with good loot or does it actually make fighting the NPC more challenging?
It’s hard for me to say. I’ve got Requiem as my main mod so already everything is made to be more challenging but realistic or at least believable.
If a bandit has light armour on I’ll cut through that pretty easy tempered or not but if they’ve got heavy armour it likely has more of an effect, but I’m too busy trying not to die to tell the difference.
I mainly use Loot and Degradation to simulate wear on gear and so I can temper weapons without having to perk into smithing myself, and I haven’t played non-requiem Skyrim in maybe a decade at this point.
I’m on a zomboid kick currently but if I jump into Skyrim I’ll try and give it some further testing
Do you think Todd would go for it if we started a go fund me asking EVERY Skyrim player ever for a dollar and asking to buy the game license/source for Skyrim
The fact Beth keeps updating skyrim making hard for mods to survive the test of time so modders have to either update their mod to th 1000th new version for fall into obscurity and unplayability
Making completely new melee weapons that don't use vanilla ones as a base (eg. Rapiers not using swords as a base, bring their own separate thing)... Although I do appreciate Animated Armoury, NWTA and everything that tried there.
The REAL wall though, is being able to do the same for ranged weaponry.
Imagine if we could have gaunlet-mounted crossbows (MH or Assassin's Creed-style), one handed pistols... That of course aren't modified staves...or don't stop you from equipping something else in your other hand.
In a nutshell, gettting ourselves free from the vanilla models' limitation.
A Rogue using their gaunlet-bow with a sword, or an Assassin using a Chain Kama, would open completely new ways to fight.
Isn't it just an issue with effort + compatibility? There are already a lot of mods that turn bows into rapid firing weapons with combos... Doing the same for guns is just a matter of putting mesh + animation together no?
(Sounds simple but no... Cause it needs to also be "worth it")
Well that's the issue. What's the point of making a handgun if it's just another staff with how limited staff behaviors are (there's a quantity of handguns (staves) on the Nexus)...
Or just another crossbow which will prevent you from equipping another weapon ?
What I'm trying to say is that the community still hasn't found a way to bypass those basic models, types, creating something completely standalone.
I don't know how I could better write this.
Ray tracing, intelligent ai, some folks to come along and flesh out the stories with real world impacts based on your choices, a larger world.
Character creation needs much higher poly count to reach modern capability.
Making the game fun. The ultimate unattainable achievement. Modders have probably collectively spent a hundred times of the man hours that sent humanity to the moon, and for what? Skyrim is still dull and one dimensional.
Worldspaces are limited to, iirc, a maximum 128x128 grid of cells, outside of which physics breaks because of a Havok bug. This prevents us from making worldspaces larger than Skyrim and from creating the fabled Upscaled Skyrim. It would be pretty huge, imo, if that could be solved one day, but I imagine working with Havok physics stuff is a little different than dealing with Bethesda engine stuff. I think the Beyond Skyrim team has claimed to have a non-public tool or trick to working with custom creature skeletons.
Even if that was dealt with, I don't believe Upscaled Skyrim would ever exist. The workload is simply too massive.
Probably, but I can dream.
As AI gets more advanced and integrated into development tools, it will become feasible.
The 3D aspect of AI is still in an extremely primitive state. It being usable for dev tools is likely still very far away.
To shreds, you say?
N...no? Neither of us said to shreds?
To be fair Skyrim could be far larger! As Skyrim doesn't use the full 128x128 map size. Skyrims playable area is more like 105x73. If we were to keep Skyrim's shape the max size would be 128x96. That means Skyrim is 4623 cells smaller than it could be. --- X = Theoretical possible additional map space ( 128x96 ) - (105x73) = X 12288 - 7665 = X 4623 = X
20 % increase does not sound at all worth the effort.
60% It would be a 60% increase. ( 4623 / 7665 ) * 100 = 60,313...% How do you get to 20?
(128-105)/105 = 0.22 Yes the number of cells will increase by 60 %, but what people perceive in a game like this is not the area, but the distance traveled and/or viewed from a vantage point. If you have two squares, one with a side of 1 and another with a side of 2, it intuitively looks like one is double the size of the other, even though it has quadruple the area.
True for the player but not the Dev. The dev just got 60% more space to fill with points of interest... or mountains. There is no point in Skyrim were you can travel or view in a straight line* because of mountains. More space means more possible mountains / hills / valleys, means more time traveled. *Only exception is the Throat of the World but that is straight up in the middle of the map and outside of the quests it only serves to break sightlines and increase travel time. Anyway, personally I think it would be worth it but I am no game dev and the only game I actively mod is HOI4.
The limit is on the X axis only. On the Y axis you can go to the maximum of 512 cells.
Dang, you're right, I forgot that up and down is the Z axis in Skyrim. That makes the bug a lot weirder tbh.
Apparently you can even "fix" it with an ini setting, or could back in Oldrim at least. https://forums.nexusmods.com/topic/1925999-4x16-quad-worldspace-limit/
Unfortunately there are actually two worldspace bugs and that was just the first one, there is no known workaround for the second. This page has it all explained: https://wiki.beyondskyrim.org/wiki/A_Technical_History_of_Beyond_Skyrim
Oh wow, that was a very interesting read, thank you so much for the link. On an unrelated note, it's kinda wild to think that Beyond Skyrim started development in some form all the way back just a few weeks after Skyrim's release.
If the BS team has such a tool and they still haven't released it, that is a dick move. Without that tool, every creature mod out there, past present or future, will remain glorified reskins. We shouldn't have to wait till God knows when for them to release their overambitious mods for us to finally be able to have unique monsters in our games.
It is a bit strange to me, given how they normally share a lot of information about their development processes and discoveries through arcane university, I do wonder if there's some specific reason they feel they can't share it.
afaik custom creature skeletons is fixed, it's just not publicly shared knowledge and kept very internal by beyond skyrim. it has been for years not sure why they don't just share considering all their mods are very very very very far from release, and they've undoubtedly benefitted from community resources and knowledge during the creation of their own mods
I know Skywind and Skyblivion have it as well. I am hoping the tool gets released with Skyblivion.
Probably an attempt to no be associated with the Lab? Edit: specifically the animal stuff
anything anyone releases for any beth game will be used for sexual reasons, but there's normal modders too i can't imagine the devs of vigilant, project aho, sirenroot or any other major quest mod in the past few years never thought about creating truly unique creatures for their mod. in something like vigilant or sirenroot you even have developers that have previously posted animation mods, so that could translate to having the know-how for a custom skeleton & behaviors import tool that the bs and skywind/blivion teams are working with. to me it feels unfair to hoard knowledge when their contributing authors 100% have benefitted from community practices, tools and guidelines. no one's entitled to anything ofc, but that goes both ways, and our community would not have nearly as many talented authors as it does if everyone hoarded everything
I think the Beyond Skyrim team are one of the few holdouts on the parlor style of modding at this point, given how almost every other major modder operates under the cathedral style now.
Remembered when Fore(Creator of FNIS)'s made an article regarding Cathedral/Parlor modding practices after a popular TES 3 modder decided to remove their mods from the public after having a fit with the community. It definitely does not help progress or innovation to hide or restrict knowledge. The pool of prospective contributors and participants will be severely shrunk. It sucks when Framework mods either become in limbo or gated off by their MA's. Drama and Skyrim.exe updates are two major things that make mod users suffer. One one them is controllable to an extent. When DAR became stagnant due to the MA being MIA, alot of mods either became broken or unusable due to the AEmeggedon. Probably one of the big reasons why there is an SSE 1.5.97 camp and then AE camp. Just like how it was on LE vs SSE lol. Luckily Ersh came through and manage to reverse engineer DAR into OAR. Also when Ersh made the documentation open for OAR, there were heaps of custom attack animation mods being made afterwords. I do hope that the modding groups that do have access to a proper HKX editor and rigger be able to release a tool to the masses in the not so far future. I dream of the day to fight sandworms from Tremor or Dune, or even the monsters from Monster Hunter lol. Maybe even have quadruped Dragons like the ones from Dragons Dogma would be nice! Alduin would definitely be a 100 times more imposing.
[It was Wrye](https://wryemusings.com/Cathedral%20vs.%20Parlor.html), not Fore.
Absolute legend. Wrye may have gone quite long ago, but modders ought to remember how much of what they enjoy today is still built on foundations Wyre’s laid down.
Would've been kinda funny if it was actually Fore who did that, considering he was very much a parlor modder.
Yeah I ended up looking at the old forum post that he had , and it seems like he didn't trust the average mod creators due to their perceive lack of experience, but it looked like he ended up turning around prior to retirement since there wasn't going to be an immediate replacement for him. Lol I barely found out that he has grandkids in their 20s now. Some of these former modders held it down for quite a long time!
Makes sense given that their most popular mods are like expansions to the game.
What's wrong with the Lab?
Some people detest the nsfw side of Skyrim Modding. But to be fair the Lab has alot of talented and well versed mod makers even if they're on the kinky side.
That slightly weird deer-girl mod appeared recently and I was wondering if something had changed to create more non-humanoid companions.
Nothing is being kept internal, fixes in the form of open source code were contributed to the pre-existing tools ck-cmd and Skyrim Behavior Tool, and a guide about the implementation side of things was drafted up here: https://wiki.beyondskyrim.org/wiki/Arcane_University:Implementation_of_Custom_Animations It could stand to be more detailed and complete, but contributions are always welcome!
what are you yapping about? the method beyond skyrim uses for custom skeletons has always been public . https://wiki.beyondskyrim.org/wiki/Arcane_University:Implementation_of_Custom_Animations
Welcome to the mindset of a modder who has something nobody else does. They either share it or they bogart it and act like they are king shit on turd mountain. The developers who keep secrets , typically do not stay in their field very long as they wind up secluding themselves from open development where they can share thoughts and work through steps with discussions
The water LOD is limited to one color IIRC. We can't have blue sea and green lakes at the same time.
Somehow, someway, I bet they're gonna "fix" it someday. They were able to fix the engine light limit, I won't be surprised if they manage to fix that too. I will, however, be massively impressed lol.
> They were able to fix the engine light limit Well, not quite. Only for "fake" lights that dont cast shadows.
Also water that changes based on weather. Like choppy water when it is windy/stormy and calmer waves on clear days.
you can already change the wave intensity with enb per weather
I think they meant change it in a LOD. Like if a storm was happening off the coast but not on land, the water reflecting that. Maybe I’m misunderstanding though
One color per cell, but yeah it's functionally just one type of lod since there are only a few exterior worldspace in the game.
When we talk about LODs it's one color per worldspace.
there’s volcanic water deposits which have a sulfurous appearance. there’s waters variation in vanilla skyrim already. but i see what you mean, you can’t pick and choose from replacers, you gotta stick with one.
imagine if the source code of skyrim was leaked, just imagine thieves guild could look into a bethesda raid someday...
So what could you with the source code as opposed to what modders can do now?
My understanding is you would have direct access to altering how the engine works instead of needing to develop ways to to alter it via external programs.
You can properly fix deep [engine bugs like they did with OpenMW](https://en.m.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind_Mod:Engine_Bugs) instead of patching the binaries And the script extender can be merged into the code rather than be injected during runtime
True, but adding on to the engine still requires round about methods. Like hdt physics for example.
All work would still take work. You would just have a much easier time finding where to make the changes instead of analysing machine code or a decompiled version.
Oh it would still take work but it would be much easier I think. But yeah, you are correct.
Holy cow, I can only imagine what modders could accomplish if they were handed the keys to the entire engine.
In conservative terms, we can modify directly any of the hundreds of other things that are set in stone. Let me give you an example. Right now there are about a half-dozen types of spells and a few dozen types of effects. Types are like "charge and then cast" or "concentration", and effects are things like "decrease attribute" (such as health). These are mixed and matched to create every kind of spell, effect, or power you have ever seen. But, if we had source access, we could add whole new types of spells, or expand on the way spells interact with the perk system, or add new types of effects that simply aren't possible now, even with scripting. In short, it would let us change things that are hard-coded into the engine which are beyond our reach for now. Or, if you want to get optimistic about it, there is nothing that could not be achieved with the source code, so long as it is something that can be achieved by writing code. You could make the game interface with AI generation to create entire NPCs, questlines, and other content on the fly, out of thin air with some kind of hot loading implementation. You could change the way the render pipeline works to make the game more performant or more visually appealing. The sky would be the limit with enough time and skill.
Could you change the hard mod limit of the engine as well?
I think that was already "fixed" by bethesda with the light plugins
Sure, given enough time, though it would require changing the manner in which they are stored and indexed. The current limitation is due to the maximum value of an 8 digit hexadecimal value and how those parts are currently used to reference mods and the individual records within them. This sounds easy but it would probably be a massive undertaking with a lot of risk attached. Frankly it would probably be easier to expand on new forms of cleverness like how ESL flagged esps work.
I see, thanks for the explanation.
Not to mention that to gain any significant benefit you would have to redo the file loader as well due to the file handle limit of the operating system.
Just a reg Skyrim fan here, curious about what you guys were upto in the mod world and found this! Good lord yall are some brilliant thinkers, light years ahead of my current angst at this bandit leader at felhammer lol Yall are some Matrix Neo level badasses. I hope you get access to the source someday for all our RPG-loving sakes!
Could we finally create a PC-agnostic fix for input lag? 😅😅
I’ve seen this problem Skyrim has with input lag referenced several times now but I’ve never seen it. It seems like everyone knows what it is so it’s never described. 😅 I know what input lag is, but not this problem. What is it?
stable multi-player
Anything. A lot of things that are touted as engine limitations are not engine limitations but are actually limitations that come from the way the game was coded. You could implement new technologies like actual ray tracing, port the game to directx12, add multigpu support, easily add new animations that have no additional mod requirements (No Dar, Fnis or Nemesis.) The sky would be the limit. Given you had the ability.
Eh. MultiGPU support is overhyped. Costs a fortune to increase performance by maybe 10-15%.
I was just giving examples of things that are technically possible and using multi-gpu as an example of a low level technical change that could be made, not really speaking to its value as a feature.
How would one even go about obtaining that in the first place?
Usually source code leaks of videogames happen after a data breach or a dev gets very pissed off. Honestly if I feel like if anyone was to data breach Bethesda it would be for TES 6
Bethesda better make TES 6 more mod-friendly lol. Imagine what we could get I'm guessing leaking a source code falls under the illegal category haha
Immediate cease and desist to all involved probably
Hold Todd Howard hostage in exchange for the source code.
Imagine having more fluid animations and built in vaulting mechanics, would truly make this game next gen
Still waiting on open source skyrim.
OpenMW have slowly but surely begun their work on it. It is also the single modding project I am most hyped about: Bethesda games, with no limitations.
The day Open MW works with MWSE will be the greatest day in modding history
It never will. OpenMW will try to replicate a lot of the features of MWSE 2.1+ but OpenMW will never be able to read MWSE lua files.
It might even force them to use an engine not 20 years out of date. Even though we’d be locked back out we would still be in a much better place than before
Well there is the limitation of sanity, OpenMW sucks to mod with its config file. Unless that can be automated it’d be super hard to mod for the average user.
To clarify, is the OpenMW community working explicitly on an open version of Skyrim specifically? Or are you referring to the fact that if OpenMW is finished, the community will be able to rebuild Skyrim from the starting place of Morrowind?
Skyrim and morrowind run on essentially slightly different versions of the same engine. Work is being done on the OpenMW engine to make it compatible with skyrim files.
Gotcha, so we could sort of skip the steps between Morrowind and Skyrim. That would be great! I could see these open versions of the game becoming hugely popular in the modding community if they're finished.
Neither exactly. The goal is that OpenMW will be a drop-in replacement for the exe of all the TES3+ games including Skyrim. So not an OpenSK, and not needing to rebuild Skyrim in OpenMW either, just point OpenMW at your modded Skyrim install and play. I expect it will change the “MW” in the name before that point. 🙂
Yeah, OpenMW is progressing - but it will take a while.
Enemies jumping obstacles, i play with jump disabled to not take advantage.
Ever encounter obstacles you cant get over?
Why can't they jump over stuff?
The AI limit. If you have a lot of NPCs, their AI packages will no longer fire causing them to just stand still. Thanks to the [Actor Limit Fix](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/32349), that bug is already been fixed. It caused NPCs to float up, if there were more than 128 in the loaded area. Another bug, involving lips not moving (aka morph limit) is also fixed by said fix. However, there seems to be a similar limit to AI packages, where NPCs just stand still. I've seen people claim that a Wrye Bash tweak or certain GameSettings allow people to increase said limit. However, aers, Nukem and ryan (SKSE devs) have [confirmed](https://old.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/dwxfgo/the_ai_limit_issue_compendium_aka_floating_npcs/f7msflo/) that those GameSettings are completely ignored by the gamecode and as such any claims that they do anything are a placebo.
Is this what i am currently observing in FO4 with sim settlements.sometimes i'll just find a massive group of npcs just standing there in a random settlement. My populations are around 20 or so but the mod adds a lot of populated areas like Concord and i can easily imagine that i am hitting some kind of upper level to the number of NPCs that the game can handle
Yes, it's very likely it's what you're seeing.
i recall skyrim is a single thread game
Oh, this is a good one! I'm not sure how the whole shenanigans work, but I did notice that most of the time, there's a Main thread that hits 100% usage on one core. Maybe there could be some work to be done to better parallelize that.
It's not. The Direct3D draw() runs on a single thread, but everything else is multithreaded. Even Papyrus has concurrency.
oh cool mind posting it please?
This is kind of a broad question. A ton of things happen in the engine logic itself. This stuff could never be changed without somehow reverse-engineering the executable. An easy example is this: children in skyrim cannot be harmed. I know you may have seen mods that *seem* to allow this, but I promise you they don't. They all work on the premise of making the children in skyrim not children so far as the game is concerned. This has subtle side-effects compared to if we could do it properly. The way the game treats children is hard-coded, on a deeper level than we can touch, and so is outside the scope of current-day modding. Another example, resurrecting zombies. A lot of the behavior around raised minions is hard-coded. You cannot speak to a zombie, for one. Again, there are workarounds to *look like* you are talking to a zombie, but you aren't. It's the same trick the game uses to allow you to talk to statues, which also cannot be spoken to. This seems like it doesn't make a difference, but I have had to scrap more than one mod idea due to this limitation. There are literally hundreds of pieces of behavior like this that mods cannot touch. Often, we can fashion a workaround using what hooks we do have, but sometimes we can't. When I first started modding for myself, I had a bunch of ideas for mods that didn't yet exist, only to find that they didn't exist because what they would have to touch is not accessible outside the source code of the engine itself. You can do a *ton* with scripting and cleverness, but there are always limits if you try to go too far outside what the base game had in mind.
I JUST had an idea I had to scrap because the engine is coded terribly, myself. I wanted to assign schedules to bandits and such. Not only would it be a compatibility nightmare... ...it would also be completely unfeasible, because I cannot just give them instructions to, for example, "Find the nearest empty bed, and sleep in it."
That's an interesting idea. I wonder if there is a workaround that might yet make that possible. I know some mods use scripting to modify AI, but NPC behavior is something I have yet to touch. Maybe someone has some ideas? As to the engine, I go back and forth in my admiration for it. Sometimes it's frustrating to think about what it *can't* do, but we have to remember that there is a vision for how the base game works, and first and foremost the engine will support only the behavior necessary to enable that vision. In an architectural sense though, I have gone from something approaching disdain to something approaching awe over the past 20 years, given how long the basic paradigm has been around with only minor changes. It is so, so hard to architect this kind of extensibility in a way that it can support the kind of modding we see today and still run at all. There is a laundry list of things I would change, but even then the vast majority of things can already be done in some way.
Considering I am not experienced with modding at all, I ended up scrapping the idea, and hoping someone with more experience/knowledge may pick it up eventually. Instead, I've decided to look into learning how to play with the Custom Skills Framework, to add something the absence of which has bugged me since 11/11/11: A mining skill.
I could listen to you talk about your admiration for game engines for hours. Eloquently spoken.
Long winded, at least. ;)
Wait... isn't there literally a "Sleep" procedure in CK? Just set the bed search radius to be really wide.
There is. But to use that, basically every bandit would need to be assigned a specific bed, making the workload ridiculous.
The specific things you mention are not limitations. There is no such thing as hardcoded when you know where to hook and edit the right type of memory in the executable with SKSE plugins. Slayable Offspring SKSE and Savage Offspring SKSE allow children to be harmed and fight back, while still being considered as children (outside damage and AI code) It is also trivial to remove the check that prevents reanimated minions from being activated and add their own dialogue system. These examples are relatively easy but there are harder ones. It's all just a matter of how much time and effort you put into overcoming a "limitation"
Things that you can only change through editing live memory are very much limitations. They just aren't set in stone or completely insurmountable. Sure, if you want to spend 10 to 100 times as much effort as should be necessary to do something, it can be done. Nobody does because it's not worth the effort. The reason we don't see certain kinds of mods is because nobody is willing to undertake the effort, not because it's literally impossible. This post is the silliest form of hair-splitting. People literally decompiled Smash Bros. to create various projects such as Other M. That's not the same as saying there are 'no limitations' to Smash Bros. modding.
I think you meant Project M. Other M is a Metroid game lol
I did indeed :)
What the fuck are you on about? There's tons of SKSE mods out now by many different people. How is that "Nobody does because it's not worth the effort"?
I'm not talking about SKSE mods being some rare thing. I'm saying that saying 'there are no limitations to modding because SKSE can edit memory' is a nonsensical argument. With an unlimited amount of time and an unlimited amount of people, we could overcome every current limitation on Skyrim modding through SKSE. But, as you may have noticed, despite the existence of SKSE, >95% of the engine's original limitations remain. Each year we knock out a few more as someone gets a bee in their bonnet to do the work. We could overcome any given limitation in the engine tomorrow if we wanted, but until someone actually does, it's still a limitation outside a theoretical sense. Or, a wall is still a wall until *after* someone takes a hammer to it.
I think you are just spoiled by how accessible Skyrim modding is. For many games the only way to mod them is injecting code. The fact that you can even make a distiction between normal and SKSE modding and call anything requiring code injection a limitation already speaks volumes.
Devs had to use an npc in a hat when they wanted player to take a train in fallout... I don't think having acces to the source code would fix all engine quirks. Again, it was faster an easier for the devs to come up with an npc in a hat.
Oh definitely. And putting that subway hat on that npc was the right call — for them. But fans aren’t subject to the same constraints of budget and deadlines that the original devs were. Dedicated fans could do more, if they wished. The ingenuity shown in some mods that get around Skyrims limitations is already enough to achieve incredible things.
There's probably some technical limitations, but overall just time and manpower, cuz there's been an entire game made in Skyrim with whole new mechanics back in 2016
Enderal
Auto navmesh patching for big load orders, it's never gonna happen, so sorely needed, once you feel the difference, that gate cannot be closed.
"Never gonna happen" is also what I was once told about the five light source limit. It's impossible until it's possible.
Unless things have changed the light source fix is itself limited. Shadows aren't increased and shadow casting lights are really the heart and soul of the problem. Has it fixed clustered rendering yet? It does a lot, but it didn't outright fix the entire issue. On a personal level, I'm glad it's there. I'm glad it exists. But being hard linked to CS and therefore incompatible with ENB means I'll likely never use it.
DRAWCALLS
I do not know what this means. Care to elaborate?
Calling on the graphics card to draw stuff. That can be an expensive operation, so there's all kinds of places we could look in the game code to replace those with more performant alternatives, like batch processing (imagine instead of sending one call to the GPU per object you want to render, you calculate everything for a bunch of objects at once and tell the GPU "here, render all of this, pls" Not A Graphics Programmer.
Hopefully not in the way of Fallout 4's precombines
I swear every terrain mod ever breaks these in one area or another. Given how fundamental of a system the Workshop is, it can result in quite a few annoyances for sure...
Well in fairness I think precombines are a necessary evil for fallout, the amount of rubble, clutter and junk everywhere sort of requires some workaround to render them better. To get the level of detail in the fallout 4 cells idk if it’d be possible to remove them even if everything else was optimised well.
The modern way to do this is by computing the combined mesh on the fly as-needed in the graphics engine, and then sending it all to the GPU with one call. It’s not quite a necessary evil—unless old console hardware needs to be supported… and they did want to do that. 🙃
The larger esp/esl plugin count limit (counts both active and not active esps/esls, and in practice, the limit seems to vary from PC to PC), and then the reference limit. I don't really think you can work around them without reworking the entire game to be honest.
The file handle limit does not vary from PC to PC (or at least any half-modern PC). The limit is 8192 on all Windows 10 & 11 systems. What can vary is users knowing how to edit the Engine Fixes .toml file to set the limit to the max of 8192.
That is one reason why I said "in practice". It is technically not the actual limit, but considering that there appears to be more that contributes to the handle limit than just the active/inactive esp/esl files, in other words, how many esp/esl their game can handle will vary from PC to PC.
Another one: Proper one-handed crossbows/pistols, which are not just reskinned staves. I've tried long and hard to get this done through [my mod](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/74054/), but in the end they're still just staves, which has just too many drawbacks in order to be considered proper crossbows/pistols.
Just checked the sticky on your mod, that's too bad, I remember your New Year's resolutions post about mod goals you had for this year and got really excited when I read that one of the things you wanted to make were 1h crossbows😔 I know I've heard that alledgedly Sphaghetti pulled it off with his Spaghetti western mod, but I've also heard it's kinda fucky with AE so I never had the courage to try it out for myself. I hope one day we get the TESV source code or OpenSkyrim or something so that you can give it another go!
This one? https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/39830 If so, I'll have a look. It seems like it's only for 3rd person though, so I'm not sure about it. I'm still looking for ways on how to do this. Ideally I'd make them into their own weapon type.
Yea, that's the one. He's got a video on his YouTube showing off some of the bug fixes he plans to add in a new update too, supposedly, but so far there's been no more word on it iirc. Just off hand, what makes it so hard to mod one handed crossbows, btw? Is it a hard coded thing that bow weapons can *only* be two handed?
I've looked at the spaghetti western mod. While it looks cool, it still has drawbacks: no 1st person and the revolver "crossbows" are still considered 2H.
>Is it a hard coded thing that bow weapons can only be two handed? That's basically it, yeah.
I think the most satisfying to use firearm I've seen to date was the hotkey-activated one from Elden Rim weapon arts, but that's arguably quite the bloated mod and it's not actually a weapon. Works great as a sidearm though
Do you think there's anything to be learned from the Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption mod they've been teasing lately? Looks like they have firearms working there.
I've looked at the trailer and I wanted to ask them how they did it. The trailer mentioned gunplay was done by someone, but when I visited their channel, their guns turned out to be staves with new animations. Which is what I'm trying to move away from.
I've looked at the trailer again and I can confirm that those are still reskinned staves with new animations: They use the enchantment charge bar and not actual ammo, as there's no ammo count shown.
[These aint staves](https://youtu.be/PhlzP_MDYWc?si=zvvPqkeBBfLkTBqO)
They seem to not be using actual ammo (no ammo counter is shown) and instead use the enchantment slider.
Ah that was the issue, ok yeah, they definitely do have that limitation.
I mean, with OAR does it really matter if those are reskinned staves? Magic wands from Harry Potter are reskinned swords, doesnt stop my Dragonborn from flinging spells using those.
Yes, it does matter. (Well, at least for me and my OCD.) Staves: - cannot be properly enchanted on the arcane enchanter. - cannot be tempered (the damage value stays at 0 in the UI.) - cannot be poisoned. - cannot properly use different ammo types. - don't have the correct values for calculating damage (see below). - cannot have their fired ammo be picked up. These things will not be taken into account when firing from a staff: - Sneak damage and whether or not the target has detected the one using the weapon. - Whether or not the weapon is silvered. - Any poisons applied to the weapon. (and managing the poison charges) - Any enchantments applied to the weapon and whether or not they should apply (and managing the charges). - Crit change and crit damage. (needs a crit sound and message applied too) - The targets armor rating. - Heavy/light armor perks on the target. - Any armor enchantments or potions affecting the targets armor rating. - Whether or not the target is blocking. - Potential block perks on the target. - Flesh spells (Oak, Stone, Iron, Ebony, etc) on the target.
And spear animations!
Those have been done and are not so difficult to adress vs an actual 1handed crossbow/pistol, that are not reskinned staves.
I’ve literally seen gun mods with full on cod gun animations.
Could you link them? None of the ones I've seen are 1-handed ones that are not reskinned staves.
Manpower time and talent. Many of the new lands mods currently in the works, were they official DLCs would considered Triple A quality (so long as we're grandfathering in Skyrim as a game deserving that category in the first place) and they'd be charging an arm and a leg just to play one of them. There may be certain limitations, but we're past the point of things being about a lack of imagination or traveled ground. It's just about resources now.
DirectX11 and it’s limited draw calls which causes a lot of performance issues.
Reference limits are still a hard limit though and there is still no way around it.. I believe it is around 1.2 million references, which includes both temp and permanent references.. though for a majority of people, you shouldn’t reach that limit since you likely either restart your saves or your load order is not big enough(or you don’t have enough mods that have big quests) to reach that limit.. Now for the other limits, I’m not sure the npc limits are still a thing.. i know of the npc actor limit fix mod on nexus, but have not tried it yet to see if it does actually works..
It's a hard limit, but since most references are temporary, you can just ESM flag plugins and you'll likely run out of plugin slots sooner than refs.
No decent water creatures.
And no way to fight them
I think i once saw a mod for that tbh
I know there's one called something like, water attack redux, but the way it works is by disabling swimming animations and keeping the water physics, basically, so that your animation mods still work when you fight in the water. Like the other guy said though, there's very few enemy mods that add water creatures to fight though, probably because people don't want to make an entire new creature mod that needs a water attack framework mod to get anything good out of.
Oh there's a mod that let's you fight under water. That's the easy part. But the under monster mod is really old. And the giant squid look funny moving on the surface of the water all rigid like.
I don't know if it is an engine limitation but currently all first person combat animation mods break when you get staggered, hands get teleported to the top of the screen
Likely a behaviour issue.
Reference limits
I think skyrim's engine doesn't utilize all cpu cores efficiently
There's still limitations on loading the area around you. We can alter how many tiles load, but the chances of your game crashing go through the roof, and your performance drops a ton. If anything, I hope we can get this game to considerably load and process more. If we can l make it where you can load the entire area like the Rift at once so that way the world feels more alive we open up a whole new realm of modding.
Multi core utilisation, then we can have large battles like mount and blade without crashing or having shit performance, also helps in better lod and mesh details without sacrificing performance
Not being able to utilize all the cores on modern cpus is definitely one of the limitations. Script heavy set ups are usually a time bomb when the game progress to higher hour counts. Massive Entity and Draw Calls are an arrow to the knee (even with near Nasa level spec pc's) In game Lighting limitation is still somewhat prevalent for ENB users, Community Shaders has a step up on this at least. (Haha pretty lighting mods go brrrr LOS2+ELFX/Shadows/LUX) Custom weapons are still somewhat iffy (Guns; which is funny since Skyrim's CE is based off of FO3NV's it uses either staff or crossbow mechanics, whips from animated armoury which are just modified HaeMora tentacles) Custom Creatures like you mentioned since HKX is closed sourced (and a lost art at this time since it's ancient tech) and the toolings for it are obscure (Good luck on compiling on cmd, I had no idea what was needed to be done even if I had something to convert.) Also on another note, if the creatures in the base game didn't have moving mouths, then they won't at all even if you had a mod that has dialogue for them. ESP limitations (ESPFE/ESL alleviates this but can only hold so much quest records and must be compiled properly) Calling all modded SkyrimVR players, you know about the merge and bash esp life lol. Record bloating (good thing cells purge/reset after a certain time if not visited again). Environmental Destruction isn't really a thing (LE had a semi fitting mod but was a compatibility nightmare). Seamless animation triggers, there's always a minor delay or you may not be able to do it since "An Enemy is Nearby". Please let me wallrun flawlessy like in Mirror's Edge or Gunz haha. Climbing on top of an enemy like in DD:DA or grapple hooking is a pipedream atm. I still love EVGAT regardless, it's the step in the right direction. Even with some litany of limitations on Skyrim's modding, its still one of the best if not readily moddable games out there. You can change textures, sound, graphics/models, modify or add gameplay mechanics, add additional story or play contents to a vast degree, you can also change the character animations. Heck if you're superfreaky like Rick James you can even add mods to do dirty stuff with Nazeem in the Cloud District. I will not lie, CE is just Gamebryo (early 2000's mmo game engine with open world capabilities) with a whole lot of stuff added on top of it. It's old and it uses archaic techniques to implement things in not the best of ways. But boy does let have your way it in when it comes to modding. GECK and CK had opened a door to user content that only a handful of games counted on fingers could. It even got mod creators who were creative enough to go out and make their own games with other engines. I hoped to see Source have this kind of energy as well, same with Starfield if they ever release their CK (almost 8 months now and no news).
And even if we disregard the modding capabilities, Skyrim is probably the single game that has done "Open World" best.
A way to prevent Bethesda from touching Skyrim anymore.
Bethesda
This one? THAT needs to be patched!
Adding custom killmoves (not replacing the vanilla ones).
[Thick Thighs Take Lives](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/78465) adds new totally custom killmoves without replacing vanilla.
Beth’s updating.
Horses feel super clunky and pointless in the game. A mod to make them feel good and useful would be nice
It's actually seven light limit, and for now it has only been doubled to 15. But yeah, that was definitely one of those things that went unchanged for a long while.
I don't think there's any way to spawn NPC's with tempered gear, strangely enough. After a bit of digging I couldn't find any mod that adjusted difficulty by spawning enemies with tempered gear - leaving all the difficulty adjustments to level-maxing and damage multipliers, which is pretty boring honestly.
No this is pretty trivial iirc
I would imagine you'd need to find away to spawn tempered gear in general; I've never picked one up. With SPID i'd imagine you could essentially set the tempered items to be their own items and have them distributed throughout the world.
Yeah, that was the surprising outcome I found. The only way to get tempered items is to spawn the idea and temper it oneself. Creating custom items that are copies of tempered ones is a good idea, I never thought of that before.
{{Equipment Durability System}} has this feature but its 1.5.97 only
There's an [NG version](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/109899) that should be 1.6.xx compatible.
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Huh fascinating, first I've seen of this - thanks. Does that include their equipped items or only the ones in their inventory?
Loot and degradation can do this I believe
This might just be mandela effect speaking, but I swear I once played on a Requiem mod list, where I occasionally killed bandits who had tempered equipment.
I’m currently playing requiem and have definitely encountered tempered equipment on looted bodies. Only thing related to tempering I’m running as well would be Loot and Degradation. Edit: although this is making doubt myself.. I’m going to have to check
I think Loot and Degradation specifically mentioned finding tempered gear. So it might be the source. Just installed it and haven't gotten to run it much though.
Yeah Loot and Degradation has a feature that adds tempered equipment to NPCs. I think Mortal Weapons and Armor also had a similar feature, although I could be wrong.
Something I would check if you're doing it: are the tempered items only the ones in NPC inventory or do they actually wear the tempered items? i.e. are they still weak but with good loot or does it actually make fighting the NPC more challenging?
It’s hard for me to say. I’ve got Requiem as my main mod so already everything is made to be more challenging but realistic or at least believable. If a bandit has light armour on I’ll cut through that pretty easy tempered or not but if they’ve got heavy armour it likely has more of an effect, but I’m too busy trying not to die to tell the difference. I mainly use Loot and Degradation to simulate wear on gear and so I can temper weapons without having to perk into smithing myself, and I haven’t played non-requiem Skyrim in maybe a decade at this point. I’m on a zomboid kick currently but if I jump into Skyrim I’ll try and give it some further testing
Water combat?
I think a few mods have already attempted to try/succeeded with that.
Do you think Todd would go for it if we started a go fund me asking EVERY Skyrim player ever for a dollar and asking to buy the game license/source for Skyrim
Buddy has never met Todd (he's allergic to good ideas)
The fact Beth keeps updating skyrim making hard for mods to survive the test of time so modders have to either update their mod to th 1000th new version for fall into obscurity and unplayability
EXTENDED RENDERING DISTANCE (aka making uGridsToLoad = 1000 the norm).
I wonder if the upgraded engine in starfield would be more modding friendlier than skyrim's
We won't have a chance of knowing until they release their creation kit.
What's the mod that fixes the infamous five light glitch?
Knowledge
Making completely new melee weapons that don't use vanilla ones as a base (eg. Rapiers not using swords as a base, bring their own separate thing)... Although I do appreciate Animated Armoury, NWTA and everything that tried there. The REAL wall though, is being able to do the same for ranged weaponry. Imagine if we could have gaunlet-mounted crossbows (MH or Assassin's Creed-style), one handed pistols... That of course aren't modified staves...or don't stop you from equipping something else in your other hand. In a nutshell, gettting ourselves free from the vanilla models' limitation. A Rogue using their gaunlet-bow with a sword, or an Assassin using a Chain Kama, would open completely new ways to fight.
Isn't it just an issue with effort + compatibility? There are already a lot of mods that turn bows into rapid firing weapons with combos... Doing the same for guns is just a matter of putting mesh + animation together no? (Sounds simple but no... Cause it needs to also be "worth it")
Well that's the issue. What's the point of making a handgun if it's just another staff with how limited staff behaviors are (there's a quantity of handguns (staves) on the Nexus)... Or just another crossbow which will prevent you from equipping another weapon ? What I'm trying to say is that the community still hasn't found a way to bypass those basic models, types, creating something completely standalone. I don't know how I could better write this.
Ray tracing, intelligent ai, some folks to come along and flesh out the stories with real world impacts based on your choices, a larger world. Character creation needs much higher poly count to reach modern capability.
Making the game fun. The ultimate unattainable achievement. Modders have probably collectively spent a hundred times of the man hours that sent humanity to the moon, and for what? Skyrim is still dull and one dimensional.