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Opening Scene unlocked?


anonymouselbow

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1.  I found there are mods for various opening starts, but is there a mod that has an unlocked opening scene, whereby the player character could say escape from the prisoner cart or try to escape at anytime before the execution scene, or even escape Helgen without having to enter Helgen Keep by implementing something like the Open Cities mod so the player character could jump over the walls or opening a gate?

2.  Is there a character creation mod to fully customize player character that can be accessed as a game menu option that can be accessed before starting the game?

Has anyone previously explored these ideas as mod options but found they were impossible?

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The most often used mod to bypass the opening (and which allows you to create your character in an interior cell - which thus also allows all your mods to load, as well, without interfering with the game), is Alternate Start - Live Another Life - as you may have seen. The opening itself, in the vanilla game, is completely scripted, and so cannot, by itself, be modded (or, at least, not in any manner that would be practical, or which would not create issues).

The mod offers a selection of different start options, as well as being very useful for testing mod builds.  Highly recommended!

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For the second question you'll want to look at Racemenu. It replaces the vanilla character creation with more options and you can access it anytime using the ~showracemenu command.

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@smr1957  By describing the opening scene as completely scripted does that mean that it cannot be tampered with, that it is hard-locked somehow?  Or what I mean is, could it be removed entirely, or rewritten?  I imagine the potential thrill of trying to escape could be quite interesting, with the option to observe the execution proceedings from a distance and still be able to witness the dragon's appearance.  Basically, I'm wondering if such a thing is impossible by design or just too much effort. 

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@Hana, looks like Racemenu is mostly a cosmetic mod?  I'm more interested in being able to set the actor values, eg. similar to how choosing a race has presets for skill levels, but say my character cannot do any magic, I would want to make all the magic skills set to zero, and remove what seems to be default starting magics for all races.

I've seen some mods are able to do things with the game menu so that's why I'm wondering if the game menu could have a character creation option inserted into it, or perhaps the main menu itself.

I did find Skyrim Unbound Reborn (Alternate Start) at Skyrim Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com)

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42 minutes ago, anonymouselbow said:

@smr1957  By describing the opening scene as completely scripted does that mean that it cannot be tampered with, that it is hard-locked somehow?  Or what I mean is, could it be removed entirely, or rewritten?  I imagine the potential thrill of trying to escape could be quite interesting, with the option to observe the execution proceedings from a distance and still be able to witness the dragon's appearance.  Basically, I'm wondering if such a thing is impossible by design or just too much effort. 

It is one scene in entire - it can be skipped (as alternate start mods do), but the whole intro is scripted from start to finish - attempting to change it would likely just result in it being completely broken.  Of course, theoretically, anything can be changed and an entire scripted scene and segment rewritten, so if asking if it is possible, of course.  The question is not so much is it possible, it is more one of is it really plausible to do so, and even if it is, is it worth the time and effort, especially for something that just happens at the very beginning and then never again.

 

Really, just use an alternate start mod - they provide all the variation to the beginning of the game that most people could wish for (and there are several alternate start mods out there to choose from).

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51 minutes ago, anonymouselbow said:

@Hana, looks like Racemenu is mostly a cosmetic mod?  I'm more interested in being able to set the actor values, eg. similar to how choosing a race has presets for skill levels, but say my character cannot do any magic, I would want to make all the magic skills set to zero, and remove what seems to be default starting magics for all races.

I've seen some mods are able to do things with the game menu so that's why I'm wondering if the game menu could have a character creation option inserted into it, or perhaps the main menu itself.

I did find Skyrim Unbound Reborn (Alternate Start) at Skyrim Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com)

All the things you mention are possible - and, in fact, there may be mods out there that do what you wish - though many people just reset these things using console commands (though one needs to be very careful when using the console, as it is a developer's tool and not a gameplay aid, and use of some commands may have unintended consequences - so it is usually recommended that one not use the console except for known, totally benign commands, or as recommended by a known reliable source).

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Okay, thanks.  I haven't looked at learning how to mod yet myself so kind of just wondering what is possible and what is not possible if known.

In the bit I've played so far, I did try the console and found some commands are really useful, but was confused by some, like when actor values I assigned to my follower didn't stick.  There is an unknown factor, either time or level up process perhaps, that reset the skill levels of my followers back to the defaults.  Eg.  When I found a skill book, I let my follower "read" it also and used the console to increase it's corresponding skill level.  It worked for a while but I noticed the skill increase was gone at some point.  The other thing is, other than general trepidation using the console, is the immersion breaking aspect...I kind of wish I could just set things up once and never have to touch anything again.  Because, another thing I tried was setting the timescale to 1 from the beginning, but it stalled the opening scene at the execution block with the dragon flying around and the executioner holding the axe above his head preparing to swing down indefinitely.  I had to open the console to increase the timescale temporarily and then open the console again after the dragon broke up the execution.  There were no noticeably glitches like that in the 7 hours I'd played after that but considering there was a glitch with timescale set to 1, it's likely there are others I haven't encountered yet.

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Time scale should NEVER be set below 6, as it will bork your game, and usually the minimum suggested (if one changes it at all) is around 12, as striking a good balance.

Obviously, you enjoy experimenting and playing around with the game, so just make sure that you save - manual saves are suggested as they are not limited in number as are autosaves and quicksaves.  And, actually trying things out and seeing how they fail is a good way to learn - as nothing teaches better than failure.  So, while a lot of things you do would not be recommended actions, they will all, in some manner, teach you - so don't be afraid of trying things - as long as you know that they may potentially completely mess things up and break the game.  There are a lot of good resources - here, at Nexus, on the Steam forums in the pinned topics - but I am sure you will discover a lot of them in just researching things about the game, and much you will probably find out on your own.

Good luck and have fun as you do all this!:dancing:

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Just one note - messing with timescale at all has never been a very good idea. It's been known to throw off animation timings even with what should be a mild edit.

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In the case of slowing down the timescale, you could have animations either being run too slowly or not at all because they missed their window. That can, as Imstearn says, break various things like scenes and AI. If any of those have events attached that fire with scripts, they may end up firing too early or too late and the effects of this compound from there. Given that you're talking about the opening scene, messing with this will very likely break the game entirely because you won't be able to complete the vanilla intro properly.

So it's generally best to leave Skyrim's default timescale of 20 in place.

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As Arthmoor posted.  I once (when I was first starting to experiment with mods and changing things in Skyrim, many years ago) set the timescale to 15 (a relatively minor change compared to what some do), and began seeing bugs and anomalies occur in the game due to it.  I immediately ended the playthrough and began a new one, with the default settings restored.  Like many things, changing the default settings are a do at your own risk type of thing, and a person is completely on their own should they do so, as no help can or will be given - other than to say "reset the settings to the default value and start a new game" (a new game being needed as any errors that may have occurred will have been baked into the save).

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  • 2 weeks later...

(Strange I just got an email notification that this post had new comments.)

Well, I hope TES6 implements timescale as a functional variable, because 20:1 is way too fast for me.

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I wouldn't be surprised if the notification was due to a spam reply. We've been fending off a huge wave of spammers over the last couple of weeks.

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There is, in the Settings, under Other Settings/Notification Settings, in the Followed Content section, an option to be notified by email whenever there is new activity on things you are following - so it is possible that you have it set to send you an email whenever a reply is made to a topic you are following. You might want to change that - especially considering the issue that, as mentioned by Arthmoor, the site is having in dealing with spam.

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