Modding on the Spectrum

I finally managed to take the time to watch the video: I love the Matrix reference (the first Matrix movie belongs to my all time favourites). A motorcycle race in Oblivion? That's cool! Hearing the engines of the motorcycles would make this even cooler. Being a Science Officer at a military base and its "VIP" resident is an interesting concept. Do you plan to animate the wheels of the jeep? The birthday present is very cute. I liked the crumbling animation of the present box. Great cityscape. A few doors on the buildings wouldn't be bad, which would make this a bit more realistic. But it's just a small thing. The overlaying of the custom music with the game's music bothered me more. How is the custom music integrated? Is it a sound effect or is it played via the StreamMusic or PlayMusic command? I found some good information about StreamMusic and its alternatives here (see under “Some Notes”).

All in all, I am fascinated by your project and your ideas and I am looking forward to your next progress report.

Thank you Selene Loved the the first Matrix movie myself! Yes hearing the engines would be great and if I someday find the time to look at it I will.

To be honest I am saving myself a lot of time and labour by shamelessly using stuff some talented creators have already made available for other modders on nexusmods
Most of my time and effort when creating this mod is consumed by picturing a scene/scenario/series of events, in my imagination and then trying to recreate it inside Oblivion to the best of my abilities, the challenge then often being that what I imagine and want to put together ingame have not always been done before so I have to figure out how to do some demanding things from scratch. But I love a good challenge

The script I use for moving the train along the rails is actually a script originally made by Jason1 a guy who was the first creator to make actual pilotable ships in Obivion, he gave the community his script a long time ago. Then the script was improved upon by Dark Monk, and the version I am using here is an adaptation that I made of the version of the script found in the mod CLS Sailboats OBSE https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/17150 by CLShade, who gives permission for anyone to use his version of the script as long as the script is changed enough to be compatible and run fine alongside his version of the script used in his mod. Credits given of course.

The animated Matrix-like textures I used in the opening sequence was made by retexturing the shield in the "animated texture shield" modders resource by nchov2 https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/23547 (who made his animated shield simply by joining together assets from two different modders resources , that would be the "Dark Tower Shield" modders resource by LHammonds' which is available for use for credits, and "Animated Stargate Modders Resource" by Sahardoom, also available for use for credits given.)

The Jeep https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/45767 is part of a mod with a helicopter, a riverboat and a jeep, by a skilled modcreator called Elbethien and as far as I can make out from the permissions involved anyone can use the assets for their own mod by giving credits to Elbethien, MrSiika and Umpa but not improve on the meshes without asking permission first. So for that reason and the sake of modesty I will just leave the wheels as is as I am not in any way or form skilled enough to make the wheels animate properly

The Honda motorcycle is from a mod by a talented creator called Gumin who also generously lets anyone use it for their mods as long as credits is given https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/35978 . I must say I totally admire how the wheels on the motorcycle is animated, and the reflections in the mirrors. Its really well done.

Yes the giftwrapped chest falling apart is a very nice animation, the animation was made by a great creator called lavatumente who lets people use it if they credit him, https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/50944

I think the doors you mentioned on the buildings are a really good idea! Thank you for this feedback, I will put them in for you
Oh the music playing, that is just something I borrowed from the DukeCity mod, the sounds are placed inside the gamespace (can be enabled/disabled and played through scripts triggered or activated) so its just playing the sound in the game when you enter the very cell where its placed which is why if you have the volume of the regular oblivion music up high in the gamesettings you will hear both at the same time *turning down the oblivion music volume in gamesettings should leave only the sound files in the worldspace playing. The idea is that the music at the birthday party originates from the loudspeakers in front of the partytent, and in the beach house it is supposed to come from the loudspeakers at Mugs Munnys livingroom. The link you provided me with was however really interesting, I will certainly at a later point test that stuff out and see what posibilities it presents and if it is something I can use somehow

What I have moved onto working on right now is the city itself, already tested out having an airplane flying low above the buildings but that was not as cool as I thought it would be so I am debating my self if I should drop the idea or not. Having a car driving around the city on its own however really added to the feel of the city so thats a keeper I think. Now you have to watch out for a fast driving car when crossing the street I am sort of playing around with an idea of having a small boat moving about close to the beach. But it will have to be tested and see if it adds something cool to the scenery or not.

I have already made a few buildings, a diner, a hospital, a gas station. I just have to watch the framerates cause if I make too many of these buildings and framerates goes through the roof

I think I am very close to being in a position to post a progressupdate. The great DukeCity mod did an excellent job at recreating a city core with great vibe. I should not go down the same route so I focused more on recreating an outskirt of city environment in stead. Its taken me a lot of time get to the point of having something worth showing as I have been battling framerateissues throughout the whole creative process. Anyways, progressreport should be incoming soon with some vid and pics

I'm eager to see how this unfolds.

Uploading the new video, will take a while though. I'm not running the fastest computer in the world and the recording software I use is pretty ancient and resulted in a 25 minute video taking up 56 gigabytes in .avi format. Good luck processing that, youtube

Anyways I thought I could talk a little about the motorbike race from the previous footage whilst I'm waiting for the new video to finish uploading. Might be something usefull in it for other modders

One of the first challenges when putting that sequence together was starting the race. Both bikes had to appear at the startingpoint at the correct spot and both the player and the npc had to spawn right next to them. Next challenge was to convince the npc to get on the bike every time the race was about to start. The way it works now is that the race will not commence untill/unless the npc has mounted the bike and started moving forward. 99 out a 100 times this will work as intended, but sometimes that npc has a mind of its own.

So the race starts and the npc rides along a predermined path heading for an xmarker. The player just goes wherever it wants. There is a failsafe in place here, if the npc gets too far ahead of the player in the first 10 seconds of the race, the race ends and the player must start the race again. This is done simply because if the npc gets to far ahead of the player, it will loose its sence of direction and no longer follow its path, it will stop in its tracks or alternatively start moving around and around in cirles endlessly. The only way to counter this behaviour is for the player to ride as close to the npc as possible throughout the whole race.

Then comes the next obstacle. If the xmarker is too far ahead, like several worldspacecells ahead, the npc will no longer follow the specified path, it will move towards the xmarker in a straight line, cutting every corner. Solution here was to put the xmarker just far enough away for the npc to stick to the path and then right before the npc reached the xmarker, move the xmarker a similar distance ahead along the path to trick the npc to still keep going and stick to the path. I followed this tactic to the finish line.

But some places between the positions of this xmarker, the npc would still occationally stop or go into "going in circle" mode. Solution here was to introduce subspaces. By covering every inch of path the npc had to travel with these subspace markes and only leave a small gap between them at the spots where the xmarker was moved to, the npc would finally 90 out of 100 times finish the race, (provided the player were close by the whole race through) which I decided should be good enough.

The npc will ride slightly faster than the player but follow a path that is not optimal, so if the player rides well the player has a good chance of winning.

However I designed this race segment around the speed of a male imperial, so results may vary when playing as something else.

By the way, I did put in that if the player is too far ahead of the npc when aproching the finish line, a message appears saying player 2 disconnected from the server, (because this usually means the npc is running in circles somewhere along the racetrack and wont be finishing the race).


So when you cross the finish line you can enter the podium. If you finished the race solo, you will be the only one on the podium and you qualified for first place.
If you won the race your opponent will take second place on the podium and leave first place to you.
If you lost the race you must take second place at the podium and the npc takes the first place spot on the podium.

Once you step into your designated spot on the podium, a timer sets off counting down.

After a second or so a big sign appears saying game over, a few seconds later the floor on to which you are situated, is removed and you fall into a huge hole where the walls are inspired by the matrix movie.

This is a long fall, its more than a 1000 meters in real life. And thus ends the racing segment.

The timer that sets off these events is made up of a falling npc and some strategically placed activators.
The moment you step into your place at the podium, a npc is teleported to the opening of the huge hole, and starts falling.
After a second of falling the npc hits the first activator which enables the "game over" sign to appear.
Moments later the falling npc hits the next activator which removes the floor from under the player so that the player starts falling into the hole as well.
At the bottom of the hole, the player hits an activator which teleports the player onto the next stage of the mod.

Well this has been a behind the scenes look at the racing segment of the mod.
A wall of text, yes I know

allright so it is now time to present the latest development.

Here is the fluff about what is going on in the mod at the moment. I thought ealier about connecting three settlements, traveling to the first one by train, the second one by air plane and one last one by boat.

Didn't go there in the end, the development took a different path. Now I'm more thinking of leaving it to just one settlement, the one you travel to on the train.
The vision I try to convey is that of some kind of outskirts of a huge city. The impressive Duke City mod which I admire a lot, already did a city core in the most fantastic way/rendition and I wanted to do something different.
So I chose the outskirts.
This is were a lot of the people in a big city actually lives.
So when i pictured what such a place looked like, I envisioned rows and rows of blocks of buildings where people live, and a local diner perhaps, lots of parking spaces, some small part of these urban areas dedicated to sports and where kids can play and have fun and some green areas for relaxing and even a small pond with some birdlife.
Also i imagine there to be like some local shops of different variety and shop owners of different ethnic/cultural background, and even a local pub/club for adults to meet and hang out.

So in short the video just shows off the streets and buildings. I had an airplane flying above the rooftops at first which was kinda cool but framerates skydived everytime it flew over, so i ditched it.

The problem is as old as Oblivion modding, you can have a ton of actors moving about in a scene with very few structures in it or you can have a ton of buildings and structures in it and have very few actors moving about in the scene, but you can't have them both in the same scene at great numbers at the same time or your framerates goes down into the very deepest corners of the basement never to return.

well anyway, the places I don't show in the video are the places in the city that are important to driving the plot/story forward, mainly that would be the morgue in the hospital basement and the inside of the club at the top floor of one of the buildings. That will have to come later.

So I spent a lot of time on this rather modest section of the mod

So in the VRgamestore there are 5 VR demos the player can try out if interested. These are mostly mods that exist today on the nexus that have generous permissions attached. These are some very skilled modmakers and these mods are cool! The mods are David Brashers Old School Dungeons, Bond123s crystal isles an adventure, JediKnight05s Attack of The Droids (uploaded by David Brasher), and Elbethiens Betty's Apochalypse Now 2.


By including Bonds123s mod there will be nudity introduced into my mod, but that doesn't worry me much, Duke City was no prude in that area either so I'm going to be an adult about it. The reason I chose Bond's mod was the relaxed tone of it and the feeling oF being on vacation from the rest of the game when visiting the isles. the only major change I did to this mod was providing the player with some helpful spells and gear to start off the mod https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/34165

I chose the Attack of the Droids because I love the idea of a spaceshooter in Oblivion. The only major change I did was add some of David Brashers forcepowers and related clothing, to the player to start things off in a big way. https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/37332

David Brasher is a very productive modder so I chose to include a mod he made called Old School Dungeon (based on a tileset by Phitt) because I am also very inspired by the way dungeons and levels were designed in the old days. The only major change I did to it was provide the player with helpful spells and gear to start things off in a good way. There are are lots of levels to this dungeon, puzzles might be tough to figure out
https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/38902?tab=files

I do also boost fatigue, health magicka whenever the player enters a "VRdemo" and place a return button inside the players inventory which can be activated any time the player wants to quit a demo. After the player returns from the "VRworld" the boost to health fatigue and magicka are taken away again along with any spells or inventory items collected during the "VRdemo".

The fourth and final world you can enter is Betty's Apocalypse Now. It is such a rich world to enter. Elbethien is one of the most productive creators on the Oblivion modding scene in regards to millitary themed mods and animals, plants, cool stuff and scenery.
Ebethiens Betty's Apocalypse Now second Try https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/46444?tab=files


Now there is a bump in the road even to this brilliant gem of a mod, in that if you download the mod in its original form and install it and start playing it there is a chance there will be a lot of NIF-missing icons here and there, and quite a few purple "texture missing" meshes to be found.
So not everything you need is included in the mods BSA archive.

Now when I decided to include it in my mod as a "VRexperience" I just fixed all the issues I could find rather quick and kept the solutions very simple to make it playable


Sidenote:
But later as a service to those who want to play the original Apocalypse Now 2 mod in its original form as the creator intended, I spent a whole week searching through a megaton of mods on the nexus trying to track down the missing meshes and textures. Here are the mods I think you need installed in order for you to play Apocalypse Now 2 with as few meshes and textures missing as possible. To be fair there is only one or two items from each mod listed that is really needed:

momos fishery resource for oblivion https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/39274?tab=files
KoniptionsKreations KoniptionsResourcePack1V3 https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/18961?tab=files
mr siikas farm animals https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/14265?tab=files
Bettys Junk and Sampan Mounts - (optional files : Static Resource) https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/46350?tab=files

out of these few the most important one to have installed is the pig from Siikas Farm animals, as the game will crash to desktop at a certain point of travel up the river beyond the brigde without it.

I must also stress the fact that the version of Apocalypse Now 2 included in my mod works quite well and has been "fixed". These extra mods mentioned are only useful if you download and play the original version of Apocalypse Now 2!




Well OK then back to the integration of Apocalypse Now 2 into my mod. I did change the major in the opening scene from Orc to Redguard, as it seemed to fit the scene better somehow. Nex thing I did was look at the weaponry.

In Apocalypse Now 2, there is an AK47 and these are originally set to fire fireballs like staffs in Oblivion. I changed that so that they fire bullets instead as it fits the modern war theme better adding visuals and sounds to match.

The helicopters in the mod also originally fires fireballs Oblivion style, I decided to change that as well. Luckily, included in Betty's mod is already a model of a rocket which is a big one on display at one of the sites in the mods worldspace. I thought it would be very cool to have the helicopters firing what looks like real missiles insted of fireballs, so I took the rocket and made it smaller and turned it into the projectile the helicopter is firing. (added visuals and sounds to match).

So now if you as player kept the conversation with the major relatively short in the beginning and then travel up the river in your patrolboat to reach the brigde, you can experience a real looking and sounding firefight between the AK47 wielding Vietcong soldiers and an American Chopper

I also gave the player an american gun to play with.

Then I changed some of the wildlife by adding some exotic animals from Elbethiens own mods like Betty's Animal Planet https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/46420?tab=files
As for the Vietcong, there is an optional file under Apocalypse Now 2 that actually add those, however it also adds them to the maingames levellists, so I did the necessary changes to contain the Vietcong soldiers to only appear in their respective mod/worldspace


Summa sumarum, if you play through all these "VRdemos" all the way to the end you'll spend more than 5 hours doing so, though most likely a whole lot more

So enough of the VR portion

I did include a basketballcourt this time and that was inspired by some old games, Thief:the dark project, and Deus EX (the original). both those games feautured a basketball in the early part of their game as a nod to one another. I thought it was a fitting addition to the city

That little burning carcrash thing is a thing that Duke City originally did so I included one too

other little details to mention is the ducks and swans, they all share the same movement pattern so I took care to make them initiate movement at different times so they move more naturally in relation to one another, and the spotlights shining down from the ceiling onto the people enjoying themeselves at the club (visible from the street below) are being turned on and off at seemingly random intervals which might be hard to notice unless one stares at it for a while

enough chatter and smalltalk I guess it's time to roll the clip :
https://youtu.be/C9r2EfpZRpw?si=weYbCWKBLsFZAidh