Old blog posts from Augest 2006

29th of August 2006

And 5 days after saying I’m never going to be a release-every-two-days modder again, I’ve gone and made 3 releases of obmm... 0.8.11 is a beta though, so probably doesn’t count. A few people have spotted a bug in obse which I’m entirely to blame for, although interestingly it was originally an MGE bug. No-one had complained about it in the past 8 months since it was introduced to MGE, so I copied and pasted it into obse without doing enough testing. Silly me, I guess.*

The rest of this post is probably going to turn into a bit of a work related rant, so you can go away now if you like. Today was a bank holiday, but tomorrow I go back again. The project has now overrun so badly that we can no longer use our old room, and so I’m working in the actual PR COM office. That apparently means I need to wear a shirt and tie. I couldn’t care less about the whole overrunning thing, because it obviously means I get paid more. It’s not my fault after all; it’s the fault of whoever mutilated the CMS so badly that it became unusable. What I do have a serious problem with is the whole idea of a dress code. It’s not required for any functional reason, it’s not a uniform, and no members of the public can see you anyway. What on earth is the point? It’s far to hot over hear to be wearing shirts at the moment, and wearing shoes means I can’t do my usual jog on the way to work.**

Finally, I’ve set up a new email address for myself, which I’m actually going to share with the general public: oblivion@remove.me.timeslipped.co.uk. Remember that while I find modding fun, tech support is not. If I start getting loads of pointless emails from idiots who haven’t been bothered to read their manuals again, it’s going to die the same death that my morrowind email addy did.

*And for anyone wondering what the bug actually is, the MoveMouseX/Y functions don’t accept negative values. The bug still exists in MGE, for the moment. I wonder if anyone will notice before I get around to updating it…

**At least, not if I want my toes to be intact by the end of it. And if I don’t mind spending all day in work with sweat patches under my arms.

24th of August 2006

I’m still working, so I’m not getting much done on the oblivion modding front. obmm is up to v0.8.8, obse is up to v0007* and that’s about it really. I haven’t even done much on MGE, apart from a small test dll to add proper reflective water to the distant land thingy. Looks like I’m going to be working on part time even when I go back to uni too, so I’m probably never going to be the overactive new-release-every-two-days modder that I used to be. :(

I’ve put a copy of obmm’s manual online. You can get to it from the links bar on the left.

*My modified version is up to r18. The new stuff is mainly input functions. I did manage to get rid of the script editors size limit, but there’s still a limit on the number of opcodes that a compiled script can contain.

12th of August 2006

obmm is up to 0.8.7 and obse v0005 has also been released, with my maths and input functions included. My modified version is now up to r12, with the latest twisted additions including a PlayChipTune function to play music files on your motherboard speaker. Not really the sort of music which fits in well with the oblivion universe, but it certainly doesn’t have the CPU overhead that mp3 decoding has.*

The old temporary link to obse is dead at last, and I’ve given it it’s own spot in the menu bar. Remember that I’m still not an official author of obse, and neither do I want to be.** I do not offer a binary download from this site, either of my modified version or of the original. If you want a binary or a copy of the original unedited source, please download it from the official site.

I’m back in full time work again, and am likely to remain so for the rest of my summer ‘holidays’.^ Any updates will once again slow to a crawl until I finish. Work is as fun as always. rhythmyx still doesn’t work,` and still randomly deletes the whole content of pages. We also can’t actually complete the content of pages because all of the required content types haven’t been completed, and we have to do another pass over the whole website each time a new content type is added. The whole project should have only taken 3 passes, one of which could have been automated. We’re now up to our 7th or 8th pass, and still have at least 2 more to go, so basically this whole project is taking ~5 times longer than it would have if they’d got everything working correctly before employing us. I don’t particularly care of course, since it means I get paid 5 times as much. On top of that, every other member of my team has got bored and left, which in a very twisted way made me the team leader and hence gave me a 30% pay rise. Adz has left too, making me the official joint Best At Quake person in the building. I’m winning about half of my matches atm. The only competition I have left is from John, with the score usually ending up something like 20, 18, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, -2.

*I don’t have a soundcard…

**Mainly because I’d end up adding even more stupid functions like PlayChipTune and Beep, and obse would soon end up roughly as stable as MGE.^^

^What part of the definition of ‘holiday’ involves working 8 hours a day for goodness sake. I’m really starting to miss uni.

^^i.e. not very stable at all…

`Apparently, this is more the fault of the extensive modifications the uni attempted to make to it rather than a problem with rhythmyx itself. At least it isn’t crashing as often now as at used to.

3rd of August 2006

obmm 0.8.5 is out, and has a fancy new nif reader thanks to the NifTools team. The ‘scan plugin for required data files’ option no longer misses all the textures, unless the meshes are packed into a bsa somewhere. It also makes a spirited attempt to get required data files from scripts* and books.** There is the slight problem that the NifScanner dll is almost as big as the rest of obmm put together, but since it has the 50mb niflib.lib compiled into it, a mere 1 mb is excusable.

I’ve made a few updates to my copy of obse, and the official version has been updated too, and includes some of my maths functions. DragoonWraith has just informed me that I should have been using degree’s instead of radians, but it’s too late to fix them now… In a very unTimeslip like style, I’ve spent some time improving ApplyFullscreenShader and the related functions to not crash under any circumstances. They should now survive anything apart from the complete destruction of the graphics device. MGE on the other hand tends to crash if you even think about alt-tabbing.

*StreamMusic and PlayBik

**The <img> tag