User:Cbh

The UESPWiki – Your source for The Elder Scrolls since 1995

This user is from Great Britain.

This user plays on the PC.

This user is male.

Misinterpreting the Elder Scrolls since 2006.

About me

Who?

cbh—the "c" stands for Chris; sorry it's not something more imaginative, and it's in lower case because as an old Unix hacker (as in the code-mangling type, not the 1337 persuasion) I'm too lazy to use the shift key and I'm not a patron of CAPS LOCK!

What?

Vaguely human, though my ancestry seems to predominantly involve brown ale and curry.

Where?

Currently live in Oxford, one of England's many armpits, though originally from Jarrow, the Jewel of the North as a schoolfriend so aptly put it in an essay of his. Since the usual response is "where?!", somewhere near Newcastle.

Stuff I'm doing

Ostensibly a new Oblivion installation, but I seem to have got slightly carried away with fixing stuff up to the point where I wonder if it'll ever be ready to play: two months and running so far, which strikes me as not the quickest game installation ever. Anybody would think I'm still loading stuff off audio cassette.

Essential NPCs

Apparently many players like to remove the essential flag from as many NPCs as possible for added "realism". Not me: I find Oblivion far less busy than I'd prefer at the best of times, and it's depressing when I keep finding people turning up dead. Eventually making it to the Kvatch camp at level 17 (yeah, I know...) and only finding two survivors wasn't a happy experience, so after going through UESP's list of people and fiddling with resurrect/setessential I decided "something must be done". Seemed an easy enough idea, use one of the various plugin editors to create overrides for the NPCs in question, and...

Ah. Looks like the only way is to do them one by one in CS, and I'm not doing that. In the end I wrote a horrible bit of C using the information kindly provided here about the file format to automate the process once provided with a list. Even seems to work, astonishingly. I'm also quite pleased with its ugly syntax:

set npc.flags=(essential, respawn) (plugin.esp."NPC name", ...)

Not that it actually does anything else, as it might imply, but it may do eventually. Only works on Unix, though, but I wouldn't necessarily encourage the use of some spaghetti-like code I wrote over several nights in a semi-awake state.

Various other stuff

Mucking about with other people's mods, either compatibility patches or adding other bits and pieces, but I haven't asked if it's okay to either modify their stuff or talk about what they're doing yet, so any description will have to wait until I do...