(Yes I know everything here can be looked up but a bit of discussion churn is nice)

I’m just about wrapping my head around the different versions now. The Anniversary Edition doesn’t appeal to me at all and I don’t really want to buy it, but I’m surprised that some mods seemingly require it as a dependency. Do I need that? Robbery.

The game has a built in Survival Mode now too which is weird.

The mechanics of modding seem to be familiar (MO2, patches, LOOT) but I haven’t gotten in too deep yet. When I was modding at the peak. I was using MO, LOOT, Wrye Bash, and Tes5Edit, which I understand might have been merged or changed since. Probably one or two other things I can’t recall. I’m pretty sure animation frameworks have also evolved since the days of FNIS but again I haven’t looked into it yet. What am I missing?

And the elephant in the room: last time I looked into returning to Skyrim, I wasn’t totally able to understand how to port original Skyrim mods to Special Edition, and that turned me away. It was just around when it was changed. And last time I thought of the game I was “waiting for Inigo V3” to get back in. God I still sound like such a Redditor. But really.

I just launched SSE, got disappointed in the frame limit now that I have a better computer than I did one decade ago, fought out of Helen on Master, and closed the game. I miss this world!

Some of the mods I remember most fondly are:
Hearthfire Extended
Inigo
Helgen Reborn
Follower and Horse system overhauls
Terrain upgrades like windmills, waterfalls, signposts, street lamps (and the map!)
SkyUI if that bears mentioning at all
Perk overhaul mods I don’t remember
Wet and Cold / Frostfall (how does that even work with Survival?)
Tons and tons of texture and model mods that kept the original artistic design

Bizarrely I’m struggling to remember more. And that might be a good thing! The vanilla game even after a decade felt very plain for the forty odd minutes I just played. But I was definitely less of a hardcore player and just wanted more stuff verging on Sims-adjacent features.

I even have a script mod I’d like to make, that I thought of all those years ago before I knew how to write code. Might be worth doing.

(Also I accidentally opened the console and it warned me that I might disable achievements. Surely that can be fixed? I only ever cheat to get out of buggy soft locks lol)

I remember STEP and Lexy’s LOTD as starting points, might do that if those still exist.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    9 hours ago

    Aaaaah, yeah I am mixing up SE and AE. Ignore me, I am ignorant of the difference there.

    I remember that the physics engine is tied to framerate I think, but I wasn’t complaining about a limit that wasn’t there before. My hardware is much better now than in 2015, and I have a display over 60Hz. So I was hoping I’d get more frames. I’ll definitely look into it, I know modding more frames into games that don’t support it can have other issues.

    Indeed. I had a high refresh rate display back then. Modding it above 60 was a thing, but I think the ‘quirks’ it would expose weren’t worth it.

    radioactive white-hot take

    Indeed.

    Honestly I don’t even care about TTS; text is fine with me, like the oldschool BGS games. But even then I put that kind of usage in the bucket of fanfics or firmware hacks: personal, noncommercial recreation, even if based on proprietary work. We aren’t selling anyone slop. It’s just… janky Skyrim hacking, a personal experiment. Janky roleplay was the main use of “hobbyist” LLMs even before ChatGPT launched, when people were playing with GPT-J 6B and naming finetunes after Star Trek captains, and “filling in” stuff between context is literally what LLMs were designed to do before they were turned into chatbots.

    Anyway… yeah, I think your characterization of Skyrim being a chaotic hacking ground is right, hence Skyrim seems to be the nexus of “LLM mods” for games. There are a handful of others (like RimChat for Rimworld), but of course Skyrim would be the first and most sprawling testing bed.