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Old Friends

Kris Takahashi Other No Comments

2013-10-24_00002

It’s no secret the chairs are soaked in ale. Wet and rotten and filled with bugs. Probably. That’s the theory, anyway. Degaine, for one, is a believer. That’s why he’s crawling on the stone, sniffing the chairs, inhaling their musk.  He finds one that’s damp. Sticky. He clings on to it for dear life. He licks its thorny stems.

Sometimes he’ll get too excited and bite into the wood.  It’s soft, splintery.  Degaine doesn’t chew. Not at first. He clumps them in the corner of his mouth like bales of hay. Then he presses them with his molars. Squeezes out that last bit of juice.

On this day though, his bite severs the chair’s artery. Sweet, golden barley pours out from the wound. Kleppr sighs. The innkeeper only sees a mess to clean. Luckily Degaine’s clothes are made of old rags. Frabbi, Kleppr’s wife, spears his back and uses the beggar to wipe the floor.

The Khajiit doesn’t find this behavior odd. Not after Ysolda told her of the tree. She has cradled it many times, tasted its purple nectar. The tree sleeps. The soul dreams.

A chorus of sneers fill the inn as Frabbi’s mop soaks up the last of the malted syrup. This mop, which once had a name, Dejohn or something or other, was said to be a liar. Perhaps this was so, the Khajiit thinks, but the drink changed him. In the end, the mop was true to his feelings.  It was the ale that made him honest.

When she’s alone with her thoughts, the Khajiit sometimes gets anxious. She wonders if the last time will be just that. Her body shudders. Her whiskers go limp. She tries to say goodbye, but her mouth can’t even form the words. Yet with each breath, all of her doubts are trapped in a chrysalis of smoky white. And when the cocoon tears so does time itself, transporting her far beyond, to a place where she too has lost her name.

In that vision, she finds herself laid out in front of an old hearth.  Her owner, a High Elf, ambles slowly across her pelt, his bare toes wading through her gentle fur. He falls into his velvet chair before falling asleep, counting the crackle of flames as they warm the curved stone. As his body grows still, his grip loosens. He drops the bottle in his hand. It barely makes a sound.

From the lip of the bottle, a milky substance drops onto the pelt. An old friend. And the Khajiit realizes, in this life and the next, that she has no need for parting words. She’ll never have to say them.

Creation Kit – First Impressions

Kris Takahashi Other 3 Comments

2013-10-30_000052013-04-23_00024Whenever someone is critical of an NPC in ways that are ostensibly subjective, the first thing I try to do is understand why, and perhaps figure out ways to improve the experience. Why do some users hate an NPC that others unconditionally love? Sure, it’s easy to ascribe this to taste and opinions, but that would imply it’s an unsolvable quandary for which I can only toss my hands in the air and curse the Gods for making people different.

However, if you’re like me (for your sake, I hope not) and are unsatisfied with such an answer, there is another explanation. Even if the world was filled with emotional clones who felt the same and thought the same and were in love with the same person, if you think about it, there is still one variable that often changes depending on the playthrough, and could account for some of these varying opinions. Location, location, location. In other words, where you meet an NPC is just as important as what they’re saying.

For instance, when I added daily schedules way back when, it may have compromised your first impression of certain NPCs, especially the folks in Whiterun. Meeting Iria outdoors in the sun results in a completely different mood than if you’re meeting her in the Hall of the Dead. Even in the crypt, if she’s sitting down chowing on a piece of bread, that doesn’t feel particularly morbid. As a result, the deadpan, gallows humor can get misinterpreted.

On the other hand, if you meet her in the crypt first, then see her parading around Whiterun, suddenly it adds a second layer of depth. All right, she’s a creepy, ghoul of a woman, but she also doesn’t mind the occasional walk in the park. So, minor tweaks like the one pictured are aimed to enhance the experience. In the next version, she’ll stay here mulling over a corpse (I considered the open coffin being taboo, but fuck Andurs asks you to kill skeletons so whatever) until you speak with her. Only then will she depart. The same could probably be done for Eldar, although it would be somewhat bizarre for him to run the shop in the middle of the night. Larkspur too will have his initial encounter moved to the dungeon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXuMsXtEpRc

Another thing I want to correct is the generic combat dialogue for super followers. Bethesda used generic combat lines because the same files were utilized across multiple NPCs. Since Aela has the same voice as Uthgerd, it’s convenient for them to share the same battlecries.

Conversely, there’s no reason for unique voice types to do the same – it was probably laziness on my part that I had the actors share a list of generic babble. This results in hilarious incongruities like Valgus screaming “Why won’t you die already!” despite him being a healer who advocates peace. The video also shows him heal you at the end of battle, which yes, isn’t the same as him using the spells in combat, but I’ve yet to figure out how that’s done – hence no animation or magicka use involved. It’s solely for immersion.

In any case, these are some examples of what I’m working on as I take a break from quests and new NPCs. I think the mod can always find ways to get better, and not just by adding new content. In other words, it’s more about turning my brain sideways as opposed to upside down. Yeah, that metaphor makes no sense.

Creation Kit – New Vanilla Dialogue

Kris Takahashi Other 3 Comments

2013-10-23_00003First I want to mention I added a new volunteers section to the sidebar for anyone who’s interested in helping out. Basically right now the main thing I am looking for is wiki contributors, but I’m not going to say no to any talent of any kind, whether you want to provide blog stories or fan art and the like. I’ve already added an author – which means I need to figure out how to place a byline. First world problems.

As far as new content, I’ve gotten a little quest fatigue so I’ve returned to adding follower commentary. This can take a while though, because it requires playing Skyrim again, forcing myself to dungeon crawl instead of say, hunting antelope, then writing the lines, then waiting for them to get voiced.

Another thing I want to go back and do is add more scene interaction between vanilla and mod NPCs. Who I do this for will depend on actor availability, as well as how natural I can make the vanilla tracks sound. Splicing up lines can take hours to get right.

Most of these scenes have to be reverse engineered. For example, today I was playing around with having Ysolda speak to Larkspur, the former bandit. Rather than construct the scene and hope there was audio to match it, I just looked for a line that mentioned bandits, and built the conversation from there. This is the track – spoken by Muiri – that forms the basis for the conversation:

Of course, while there’s plenty of meat in this track, in order to make it work for the scene, I had to splice it together with two separate tracks so that Ysolda is addressing Larkspur directly instead of talking about Alain Dufont. This is the end result:

The tone of all three tracks in this situation is similar enough that the sentence flows smoothly. You can’t just pick any track from a specific actor, as the emotion and voice can change depending on the NPC. For example, Elisif’s tracks can’t be used for Ysolda, and vice versa. Either way, now I can build Larkspur’s dialogue around this.

In any case, more conversations that don’t involve the player always helps the surrounding environment feel more alive, and including vanilla NPCs helps integrate the mod ones into the world. It’s just given all the variables, it isn’t the easiest thing to do.