Creation Kit Is Live

[Maigrets]

The Creation Kit is now live on Steam. I've downloaded it and started it up but that's as far as I've gone. Had a long day and too tired at the moment to get into it, but it looks very much like the Oblivion CS as far as navigation.

I'm not going to type up a heap of details as it's just as easy to go here for more info.
http://forums.bethsoft.com/forum/184-the-creation-kit/

Creation Kit Wiki
http://www.creationkit.com/Main_Page

First thing I'll probably be looking at making myself a house with proper storage instead of a heap of bookshelves and weapon racks that don't work properly and where I can store gear in one central location rather than all over the map in various houses. I try to keep things organized..ie crafting gear, weapons etc, but I usually end up stashing it all in one chest. I do store alchemy ingredients and potions in separate chests though but it would be nice to have them actually where the alchemy table is.

Anyway...

There's also a HD texture pack as an added extra from Bethesda via Steam. I haven't downloaded it as I don't know if my system will like it, but I'll keep an eye on the forums and see what people have to say about it. I already have texture replacements that I like, but not complete world textures.

The pack is 3.2Gb and comes in BSA format with esps so it can be disabled if it does have a performance hit.

Edit..I did say I was tired. I even spelled the title wrong.

[Maigrets]

Well, having read a LOT of posts on the Official forums in the CK area I think it will be some time before I start experimenting with the CK if ever. Besides not being as user friendly as it was supposed to be there are a lot of people having errors and crashes even on just loading the esm, not to mention landscape editing hangs and crashes among other things.

I never bothered with the GECK and apparently this is harder although Bethesda said it was going to be easy for new and experienced users alike. I'm not really that bothered as soon all sorts of mods will be released and I'm sure anything I could need will appear at some time and I don't feel like studying a new system just now. Maybe later and if they patch the CK to fix the problems many are having which it seems is not limited to newbies.

People are also having issues with the HD texture pack and using existing mods, but it can be overcome by making some edits to the ini files and reinstalling already used mods which also seems to be problematic and not always successful. I don't think I'm going to bother with that either. I just want to play the game not go into troubleshooting mode again. I was so over that with Oblivion.

[Fessels]

Yeah after i read the reports about the problems people have with the HD pack i am glad that i am still happy with how the game looks for me with the textures i use.

[WizardOfAtlantis]

As for the HD pack....You know, although I don't have a super up-to-date pc, I also certainly don't have a slouch of a pc by any standards (2009 Mac Pro, running partitioned Win7, 4gb very fast ram, ATI Radeon 5870 1gb). That said, the HD pack on my modded game is just not worth it. I have 50-ish esps loaded and a few texture replacers (UNP bodies, armors, Bellyache's animals). The esps include things like PISE, Balanced Magic, the new TCOSS, Deadly Dragons, SMIM...it's not a huge list, but it makes the game much more fun.

The HD Texture Pack free download kills the playability with my rig. I can run it on a vanilla game okay, but on a modded game, forget it. It needs to run smooth for me (currently at 720p recently....I can't seem to see/perceive a difference in-game between 1080 and 720 on my tv).

And the difference in visuals gained by the HD pack? For me, almost negligible...unless I walk right up to a wooden board and stare at it, and that's something I just don't do while I'm playing. I'm actually kind of stunned at the performance hit vs. the improvement in graphics, and I'm very disappointed by this, actually. This should have been exactly what I wanted, a HD version of vanilla textures (which I really love, style-wise)...only the quality improvement in-game is minimal in my eyes, whereas the fps hit is noticeable on a modded game.

My workaround for the HD pack was, by the way, to use FOMM's BSA unpacker and load it through NMM as a packaged mod (rar) like normal in folders/subfolders.

The CK reminds me of the GECK, but I've already come across problems and I'm a total noob. One of the work-arounds mentioned for exporting npc faces/textures won't work for me right now (ctrl plus f12 or something like that) as my mac keyboard in boot camp doesn't have those functions. Maybe a straight-up pc keyboard might...

[Maigrets]

Yeah, I've been going to try out the CK and get all enthusiastic about it, then I read about all the limitations and hard coded stuff (aka Oblivion's CS) which is ultra frustrating, and then I think....why bother.

The first thing that annoyed me was loading the CK and having a ton of errors related to navmesh, clicking "yes to all" then having the editor not respond for up to a minute. The first several times that happened I thought it had locked up so I shut it down via Task manager until I discovered it was a "feature." Supposedly, the next patch is going to fix that issue.