News and updates

Are you lazy, and just want to download oblivion mod manager without having to look for it? If so, then click here. If it's fallout mod manager you're after, then click here.

10th of June

I've been off on another tangent the past couple of days, poking a bit at baldur's gate 2. There's piles of npc interactions/interjections, but for some reason I always seem to end up with similar parties. After deciding that I'd never have a chance to see everything, I was trying to increase the maximum party size. That didn't work out too well alas; I got rid of the reorder party prompt that springs up, and got a 7th member to join the party, but a couple of frames later they played their leaving message and semi-dropped out without me doing anything. (Although they did stay green, so maybe I was closer than I thought I was...) I could decrease the maximum party size quite easily, but that wouldn't make for a very interesting mod. In the end, all that I managed to do was raise the cap on ability scores; 25 is a little easy to hit, especially when trying to do a solo playthrough. I've made an ickle weido mod that raises it to 30,* (tob 26498 only, although it should be easy to port to other exes) but given that I don't actually know how to use weidu it could probably use a bit of improvement in the not-blindly-overwriting-.2da-files department.

Oh, and speaking of baldur's gate, there's another sfall update out that lets you set a key to highlight all items on the ground. The number of times I've been playing fallout, hammered tab, wondered why nothing was happening, and then taken a few seconds to work out the reason it isn't working is because I'm playing the wrong game was making me feel a bit senile.

*Not that I have any idea if that's legal in the p&p game.

2nd of June

First an ickle sfall update: sfall 1.44 adds two additional hook scripts that allow you to override the death animations of critters.

Next up is something new. I don't usually take requests for games I've never even heard of, but catch me when I'm bored enough and anything can happen. In this case, I've knocked up a fix for crimson skies, fixing some of the issues caused by running it on modern computers.

5th of May

fomm and sfall have both been updated. fomm 0.9.14 is mainly a bugfix release, but sfall 1.43 includes a few new things, most notably a fix for the corpses-block-line-of-fire problems. There's also an option to print karma changes to the console in the same way as when you gain exp, an option to play the players weapon reload animation when you reload, and several other contributions from others.

Bethesda released a 1.5 patch for fallout 3 a few days ago. A warning to anyone who uses mods: do not download it. The pattern we've seen so far of each patch getting progressively more buggy has been continued pretty well, with this one almost certain to eventually cause you to crash every time you try to save if you use any mods that modify exterior cells. There are also some other new equally obvious but less fatal issues, like all npcs placed by esps losing their race.

10th of April

fomm is up to 0.9.13. It now exposes tessnip esm/esp editing functionality, including the script compiler, as well as some dds manipulation functions to fomod scripts. nif manipulation would be nice too, but niflib and .net aren't the most cooperative beasties, so I'm having difficulty thinking of any way to include generalized nif editing support. On the other hand, individual more specialized functions are much easier, so if anyone has anything specific nif related that they want to be able to do from a fomod script, let me know and I can add it in. For anyone not using fomods, there have been a few other improvements, the most noticeable of which is that you can now access the settings menu from the load order screen. I know a lot of people were having trouble finding it. (Hint for next time: just read the manual. :p)

I haven't mentioned MGE for a while because I haven't done much work on it myself recently, but Krzymark has taken over where Liztail left off and is still making regular new releases. Check sourceforge for the latest download. There's been a lot of great improvements since the 3.8 release I made back in February.

Finally, I received my first ever donation on sourceforge today. Not a big deal, given that in the little message* I explicitly say not to waste money on me, but still slightly interesting: The reason I opted in to the donation thingy in the first place was because of a discussion about how many downloads obmm has had (500000-ish last I checked) compared to what it would have had if each download cost £1. (My guess was about 5.) Obviously I had no intention of charging for obmm, or anything else for that matter, but it still led to me betting that if I opted into donations on sourceforge I wouldn't receive a single one for 6 months. (This was about 18 months ago, so I won that quite easily. :p) On a related note, if anyone is too rich for their own good and wants to give me lots and lots of money, this page is a good place to start. More usefully, it also gives an up to date display of what I've been up to on fomm, although you'll need to follow the links to see any actual detail.

*Wow, how long ago did I write that? The fan I was talking about died a protracted, noisy death long ago... Guess it's time I updated it.