---Deathcrag Citadel---

I'm working on a mod I'm going to name Deathcrag Citadel at the moment. It's a large castle located very near to Hame and the Scorched grove of the eastern mountains. It's a sort of evil castle, because not all evil characters deserve to live in slimy mud holes. It's best suited for evil overlord-style characters. It contains a massive amount of unbalancing stuff, including spells for reanimation, evil armor, scrolls to give you abilities that make you a god (so far the optional perma-abilities are: Invisibility, 200% reflect damage & spells, resist normal weapons, elements, magic, restore health 9000 points),
as well as a scythe from tda's Scythe Mod to kill your enemies in the most excruciating way available.
I'm working on learing scripts and such to make proper guards, dialogue (maybe), getting everything to work, etc.
So far, here's the rooms I've built as of posting:
-Mausoleum (Keep your dead stuff in here)
-Deep Crypts (A mini dungeon)
-The Lost Citadel (Broken Oblivion Tower)
-Necromancy Chamber (Assorted apparati for necromancy, connected to the Mausoleum and another room)
-Corpse Storage (A small room with several corpse for you to reanimate at will)
-Main Hall (A circular room with statues of the Daedra surrounding it, with a nice pool of lava in the middle)
-Main Tower (A tall tower with a storage area at the bottom)
-Glade (No idea where it's going, a beautiful combination of Bliss's fountains and Mania's fauna)
-Stables (Take a good long guess what this is.)

I've got some other ideas, such as a bestiary for keeping the dangerous animals for study, a torture chamber, a cathedral of.. whatever god I choose (NOT those silly 'Nine' people. Don't like them.), and the usual anemities of a castle, like a smith and such.

If anyone has any other ideas to include into this mod as rooms, features, and other assorted things, post it here.

I'm using a number of different tilesets for the exterior and interior.
For the outside, it's about all from Mr_Siika's Dwarven Fortress, because it has the right elements that make a good evil castle (kinda kills the framerate with complex textures, though).
The Mausoleum uses Barabus' Crypt set.
That's about all I remember

I also have some requests for anyone who knows where I can find some resources. I need an evil statue, something like the Sithis statue from Vile Lair, or a retexture of the Clavicus Vile dog so it doesn't look like a Siamese Kitten. I also need to locate a circular hall, about the size and shape of the Oblivion Citadel's OuterRingRoom thingy.

I'll post other stuff here if I forgot anything, or need some help. If anyone has a suggestion for what to place in the castle, it'd be well appreciated (and don't bother saying a thing about a working Altar of the Nine. Me no like those.).

I've run into a problem. I'm trying to create an NPC something like Creeper in Morrowind, a scamp that will barter and such. However, the game doesn't seem to like it when I use a creature skeleton for an NPC. I've tried 2 different approaches to this, but neither works.
1. Create a creature object and check off 'Trade', 'Train', and 'Repair'. This leaves him able to barter and the like, but unable to chat with the PC.
2. Create an NPC with the scamp skeleton. I haven't been able to even test how to works on Oblivion yet, as every time I go to 'Add a NIF file', and select the scamp skeleton, it just crashes the game.

Does this require me to make a custom race? If so, could anyone give a quick bit of basic info on how to do it?

This sounds good, I like the idea of the Corpse Storage.

Regarding the crash are you using the latest CS?

Are you also using DirectX 9? Try changing your graphics drivers.

Good luck with the mod.

Is it possible to create an NPC with the skeleton of a creature?

no
All NPCs have to use the same sort of skeleton and models in order to make the animations work. Creatures cannot barter, have dialogue, or anything like that. To my knowledge, there was never any good workaround to allow for talking creatures.

Blast, guess I'll have to stick to normal NPC's. Wonder what'd happen if I moved the critter's skeleton to the NPC mesh folder.. I'll try that just for the fun of it.

I've run into another problem, this time with some scripting. I'm working on a small glassed-in area within the Bestiary where you can observe a pair of Gatekeeper model monster duking it out. Right now, here's the current script for the button to activate it.

'deathpitwall1/2REF' is a RFWSecretWall01 object, which I can't get to activate. Can anyone tell me what change need to be made to the script to make the wall open then close after about 5 seconds?

Next problem with the script.. I need to create two factions to put the critters into. I made two, DeathpitFight1/2. I then deleted all current factions and placed one into the player faction. Next, I made each faction have a -100 disposition to the other faction. In playtesting it out, they instead seem to opt to ignore eachother and run against the glass wall trying to kill my character. Any solutions?
-Sal

Meh, nevermind with that. It seems that the fight pit works best without the doorways there, and on playtesting, they've now started to try to kill each other. Other than that, they also attack the fighters in their own factions. Insteresting.

Does anyone know of a resource that adds in seige weapon meshes? All the seige weapons I could find were Midas catapults and Mr_Siika's Dwemer Cannons, but those don't really match the castle.

mr silka has a whole bunch of siege machine meshes (catapults and the like)

also on the creature npc thing you could make clothes that make him look like a creature, but that would take alot of work.

Yeah, I'm not really all too skilled at making meshes; mostly relying on resources.

what you could do is create a new non playable race called skelotons and use the meshes and textures from the skelotons in oblivion or create your own meshes or textures.

Well, I looked at 'races' clicked 'new', and then it asked me for all the textures to put in. I looked at that, then realized I forgot to use the BSA commander on the critter I wanted the skeleton of.
Thanks for the reference to Mr_Siika's seige weapons! I wouldn't have found those myself. Much appreciated.

This mod is going to take up a load of file space, since I seem to have accumulated a large number of modder's resources. I probably should try to use a few less, but vanilla Oblivion's tilesets seem too.. Plain. But only after trekking through a thousand identical-looking Ayleid ruins.

Okay, a bit of An opinion poll here: WHen I was looking at other castle mods, I got so sick of having to carry a torch to see 12 feet in front of me. So, my idea for this castle is for me to place a 'light switch'-like button at the beginning of each room. If you press it, then the permanant light setting comes on (color the whole cell one way). I know it'd be a tad unrealistic to have no obvious source of light, but there always is magic to explain away that little thing. Also, I know I shouldn't use solid white light, so it'd be colored like the bright light option in the CS, but maybe a medium gray-ish color. Who thinks this is a good/bad/horrible idea?

Just run into a serious problem:
When I try to open the CS with Deathcrag as active file, when it's done loading, it gives me this seriously long line of odd error messages, then when I click 'Yes to All", it gives me a "... has encountered an error and needs to close. HAH! Moron! We're closing this 'cuz we feel like it! We are sorry for the inconvenience."
I really hate that message.

Anyone know how to fix this? The mod still works in Oblivion, but I can't finish it without the CS.
-Sal

Hello? Help? I can't do anything with this mod until I can get the CS back open!

Okay, in the interests of getting back to modding as quickly as possible, I'm going to try to post this on TESNexus, see if anyone can figure out what's wrong with it..

why dont you just reinstall it (the CS)? Thats what I always do when i encounter a problem like that. If that doesnt work, then you've probably made a corrupted esp file or something. READ those error messages, they tend to tell you what is wrong/conflicting.

It gave me a long list of messages. The one I clicked through said mostly either ____ script has not been compiled (No idea what that means) or Duplicate ID Form (Somethign like that)

-Sal

Okay, I'm going to click through as many of the warnings as possible. I'll give the general type they are.

"Duplicate form ID encountered in file ______."
SetFormID bashing entry in form ID map at 0300B08C. Form basher: type BOOK_ID
Bashed form: Book Form 'DLCBattlehornChronicleDUPLICATE000Duplicate000' (0300B08C)

Another SetFormID bashing entry thingy, something with Knights of the Nine...
Another DUplicate FormID.
Another script bashing thing. (WHat is this 'bashing?')
Missing object (_____) for reference (_____)
Another SetFormID Bashing entry in for ID map at ___ thing.
Duplicate form ID.
Bashing thing again.
Duplicate form ID.
Missing obj. for ref.
6 of those missing objs in a row.
'Could not fnd target reference (______) on quest (020167167EF) 'aaDremComp'.
Some stuff involving the 'Dremora Companion' mod, no idea where that's coming from.
Unable to find Quest Refernce (_______) on Topic "Attack".
See above, but topic "GOODBYE".
Another, but topic "GREETING".
Topic "HELLO" this time.
Topic "Hit".
Topic "Question", "INFOGENERAL"

'Errors were encountered during InitItem for result script on TopicInfo 020c7D17 "Enough Talk!" in Quest aaSTKear (020bf3db) Topic aaVeryWell (0207db1e)
Clothing 'aaAmozRing' needs to have biped slots selected in the editor.
Unable to find container object (03002D0C) on owner object 'DeathcragSharpshooter'. (THat's one of my archers... Odd)
Buncha 'Could not find referenced object' for a ton of the Dremora Companion stuff.

I'll post again in a moment, after all that stuff it now gave me the 'We are sorry for the inconvenience' message. I'll see what happens if I try to open Deathcrag WITH Dremora companion checked off.
-Sal

Oh, and the file's busy uploading itself to the site.. Don't know if it's working.

Crap! the CS just gave me more errors about 'Reznod's Mannequins' and closed itself. (&%#(%.

Hey, it opens fine with just Oblivion.esm checked. Guess my file is corrupt. Until the time being, I'm going to just work on a different castle.. Hmmm. Seacrest Castle sounds good. Back to modding!
-Sal

Sounds like a really cool mod. I'm looking forward to it.

This problem you're having, I had it when I tried to import a custom race. I deleted the NPC using that race and it worked fine.

Hmm.. I am using Divine Avenger's Dremora race mod.. Wonder if that has anything to do with it.

Would you happen to know how to get rid of an .esp being reliant on multiple .esms? For some reason, there's Oblivion.esm, DremoraCompanion.esm, and CompanionsMod.esm.
Thanks,
-Sal