Kilgorin sword and its owner

[Razorwing]

Kilgorin and Luciender are two swords that became symbols of our work-in-progress capital city Silgrad Tower in the old days. Their symbolism extends to a lesser degree to the overall mod as well, and you can often see them in forum logos (especially Luciender). In our Morrowind mod the swords were in-game weapons in the possession of Valderon, whom was the guy in charge of the city. I believe he will be in the Oblivion version as well, but I'm not sure. In either case he'll still be in the mod and should have the swords in his possession.

The designs are real-life swords created by Kit Rae.

Porting working weapons isn't easy, nor is it as easy to create them as it was in Morrowind where you could get basically any model to work as an in-game weapon. I haven't specialized in weapon creation myself, so I'm kinda stumped on getting them in-game. What I can provide though is an Oblivion nif of Kilgorin plus textures, which I've attached them to this post. I have one of Luciender too but there is an Oblivion version of that already, albeit the mesh isn't perfect and I think it lacks a sheath.

[Alasdair]

You might want to change the position of the capsules used for the collision a bit, but it seemed to work perfectly in game.

[Phitt]

Bringing weapons in the game is quite easy once you know how. All you need is a Beth weapon of about the same size and copy your weapon to that nif. Then adjust the box/capsule collision shapes and you're done. Of course delete the original weapon.

To tell the game what kind of weapon it is you need to adjust the prn string extra data. SideWeapon is for one-handed, BackWeapon is for two-handed. If the original nif already had the right category you don't need to do that.

Scabbards have an extra node which your new scabbard must be a child of (unlike the sword itself the scabbard is not a child of the root node).

If you have a very 'special' shaped weapon that is way different than any vanilla weapon when it comes to collision you might need to use the Blender exporter to get the right intertia values for havok collision. Otherwise the sword might act weird. But small adjustments are no problem. Never use TriStripShape collision for havoked objects (really bad for performance), only use primitives or in combination with Blender ConvexVerticesShape (to get the right havok behaviour). Collision doesn't have to be as accurate as for statics, only the outer limits need to be covered so the object doesn't sink in the ground.

I've uploaded Kilgorin here. It's a one-handed weapon, didn't know what it was supposed to be. Just change the string data if it's two-handed.

By the way, I still need a bit with the Dwemer tileset (maybe two or three weeks). I did quite a lot of stuff this year already, but I started a new job two weeks ago and it was quite tiring, leaving little to no time for modding. I will try to finish the basics asap.
As an example you can see a bad quality video of a few machines I made here in case you're interested.

[Razorwing]

Thanks for your help guys! I'm confused about one thing though. Maybe it's just me but when I view this thread Alasdair's post comes before Phitt's, yet Alasdair's post strikes me as being a reply to Phitt's - which only seems to be underlined by the fact that the nif file he posted has a later modified timestamp than the one Phitt posted. Which version of the nif should be used?

Phitt: Thankyou so much for your assistance and tips! The part about using Bethesda's collision could explain why I never got my weapon experiment to work, since I used my own collision. When I equipped it in-game it turned invisible, so that it looked like the player was swinging an invisible weapon. I surmised I needed to read up a lot more on making weapons and give it another go when I had a lot of free time.

You're right that it should ideally be a one-handed sword. It looks fat, but neither the blade nor the hilt are particularly long, so it would likely look weird as a 2h. Thanks for the tip about the sheaths/scabbards, I might look into making one for Kilgorin later on just to try out how that works.

All we need now is Valderon's home, hehe. Or maybe his office depending on whether he's still in charge of the city.

Looks like the Dwemer tileset is coming along nicely. The machines look really cool I look forward to checking it out when you're finished!

[sandor]

Originally posted by Razorwing


All we need now is Valderon's home, hehe. Or maybe his office depending on whether he's still in charge of the city.

IMO he should be in charge of the city.

[SACarrow]

IMO he should be in charge of the city.

If not, there should be one hell of a story behind it. That would be a major freaking development, more akin to a coup than a simple election loss.

[TheImperialDragon]

In favour. Though maybe in a separate thread.

[Trankintor]

Originally posted by SACarrow

IMO he should be in charge of the city.

If not, there should be one hell of a story behind it. That would be a major freaking development, more akin to a coup than a simple election loss.

Why not have him be in charge in the start of the game, and then something happens so that he isn't in charge any longer...
But I don't really know what that could be but anyway

Maybe a strugle in the chambers of who to be in charge as some don't find Valderon capabel any more? And he looses and he moves out of town and settles in a manor that you get the opption to build for him.
Abit like the building of your house in Morrowind...But if it is possible the chance to affect what is being buildt...Like having 3 choises for what kind of house, a 1 story house or a 3 story house, and if you want to have a little farm and such...
Don't know if that could be done, but I think it would be fun
Or the house building thing don't have to be for Valderon but it coud be for your self or something...

Just some brain storming

But this is getting out of topic...Move some of theas things somewhere else?

[Razorwing]

Good to know our capital's mayor will still be in office

Originally posted by Trankintor
But this is getting out of topic...Move some of theas things somewhere else?

Nah, that'd be tricky. But I can change the thread title instead so that it's on-topic
Original topic: Are you an expert on weapon modelling?

[TheImperialDragon]

Internally, we discussed a possible scenario where Valderon lost power, but I think for the time being we should just focus on making sure the city has a proper - what would it be called - command structure? I can't find the right word...

We can always add our new stories later on. After making sure everything we're working from works and after a lot of thorough planning.