Balketh's recent activity
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Comment on Oblivion Remastered releases today in ~games
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Comment on Oblivion Remastered releases today in ~games
Balketh Link ParentThe original engine ESPs and ESMs are present in the UE5 game files. They can be loaded, and edited, in the original Oblivion Construction Kit. A script extender was made and working with Ob:Re...The original engine ESPs and ESMs are present in the UE5 game files. They can be loaded, and edited, in the original Oblivion Construction Kit.
A script extender was made and working with Ob:Re within an hour or two of its launch.
Non-texture, non-shader, non-randomizer mods are already made (UI, gameplay changes, more), and more are coming. A new golden age of Oblivion modding is likely upon us.
However, this doesn't mean much for Skyblivion; theirs is a free modding project that will ultimately produce very different results, and likely be more readily playable on older hardware than most-all underoptimized UE5 implementations.
It's a good day all around for lovers of Oblivion.
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Comment on Anybody LARPing? in ~hobbies
Balketh LinkWow! A question that actually dragged me out of lurking! LARP'd for more than a decade in Australia, in a nation-wide, long-running World/Chronicles of Darkness LARP club that recently closed...Wow! A question that actually dragged me out of lurking!
LARP'd for more than a decade in Australia, in a nation-wide, long-running World/Chronicles of Darkness LARP club that recently closed after 25(+?)yrs of operation. Most of its operation was full tabletop rules - Australians pioneered using full rules in addition to parlour style LARP, because we wanted to eat our cake and have it too. It waxed and waned over the years, sometimes as low as 5 people in a room for the evening, with highs of 50+ for a weekend con in a big city. Chronicles (persistent world story) would run for roughly 7 years a piece, with games every other Saturday night, give or take, cons once a year.
Most times, several genres (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, sometimes Changeling) would run at the same time. Some chrons, they'd be forbidden from crossing over at all, as in separate worlds/stories. In later chrons (as we moved into Chronicles of Darkness over o/nWoD), we did the cross-genre thing, but it was run very poorly by different storytellers with no experience (or interest, IMO) in running a balanced cross genre game.
It even made it through (most of) COVID unscathed, but it ultimately fell apart during a lull in part because someone fucked off with one of the largest city's entire venue and game into their own, distinct LARP club/setting, cutting the game in half. They then later had that all fail on them, too, so it didn't go well across the board. Otherwise it always fell to, and ultimately succumbed to, mismanagement and narcissism, due to being built entirely on volunteer labour. Social cliques and other social engagement issues became too much for the mostly neurodivergent volunteer crowd, as well as some of the most Drama(TM) drama you've ever seen.
I played a Vampire that survived his chronicle (the Rapture happened, mostly only vampires were left, he was an aussie drover Gangrel that wielded a stop sign as a one-handed polearm and a riot shield in the other), and a Mage that survived the next chronicle (ended up Ascending and coming back to help when the God Machine started to get uppity.) I also did a lot of admin work in later years, eventually running the Mage genre con in the second last chronicle.
In the last Chron we used the new VTM V5 rules (all, always, with heavy addenda to try and curb problem players/cheating/etc). We tried to come at it with a modern, fresh view of LARP to mitigate a lot of the issues we were having in previous genres. It generally led to the collapse of the organisation as a whole, so. LARP, she is a fickle beast.
It's a hell of an experience, having that connecting history and lasting consequences, and having interstate contacts and plot, but... All on the backs of volunteers? We simply don't have the population density to drum up the fresh blood to sacrifice on the altar of burnout.
Some days, I miss it. But it's like missing a WILD ex. The sex was GREAT. The rest, not so much.
It's an Unreal Script Extender for being able ot make further changes in the UE5 side of things, since it seems the EXE is for/goes through UE5, not through Gamebryo/Creation engine.
Unless someone writes a translation layer or something from scratch, there's likely not going to be an early drop-in replacement for OBSE mods and the remaster. We're still very early days in seeing what's possible, so might just be something to come back to in a few months.