New Arktwend English Version: 3.1

[JohnMoonsugar]

Greetings,
A couple months ago, Golden Thief turned over Arktwend English to me, and I have just released a new version: 3.1.
It is available from TesNexus here.
I put an announcement on the Bethesda forums here, which includes a list of release notes explaining the changes. A more detailed list is in the Changelog included in the download, but it contains a few spoilers.
I hope people like it. Thanks to everyone.

[Hoxyd]

Great work! Thanks for informing us. We will update the download page soon.

[arvisrend]

Wow, this is great work! And the German version will also profit from it, thanks to your epic changelog!

The "Trun Telur 72hr bug" is horrible and now we finally know where it comes from. As soon as I have some more time, I am going to fix it in the German version, and some other problems as well. As for the "Forest Guard Cave - Passage" bug (where controls are messed up), I already fixed it on the German version by completely changing the doors. As for the constant-effect summoning objects - I simply changed it to time-limited summons, as I found the constant effects rather unbalancing. But if you are sure that with corpses-persist the crashes go away, I'll reintroduce these summoning items with somewhat weakened effects. I also did some work on Esu Tra Nur, in particularly hiding the weapon instead of having it float in the air. Are you sure that enlarging the stats of the Frost Ogres is a good idea? One has some 200 of them to kill during the return with Mauragin (if one decides to go through the caves).

Anyway, I'll trake a closer look at your changes when I have more free time. Many thanks again for this work!

[JohnMoonsugar]

Hi Arvisrend,

(there may be a little bit of spoiler information in this post, so players: caveat lector )

Yes, the constant effect summons are very highly powered. I sort of wanted to keep them that way as it seemed to be the creator's intention. And they do come in handy with some of the enemies that are also very strong. In any case, yes, I am confident that making them "persistent" solves the crashes associated with summoning the creatures. A similar fix is used by quorn in his MPP(Morrowind Patch Project) to solve this issue in Morrowind. Since the change, I've had zero crashes related to summoned creatures in Arktwend.

On the topic of the Frost Ogres, it's hard to say what is "good" with balancing enemies. I just thought the original health of 5 was sort of too easy compared to the snow gnomes, wolves, bears, etc you meet on the other path. After my change I did the run-through of the caverns in Slate Mtns with Mauragin a few times, and felt that now they are now a nice challenge. One necessary consequence was that I also changed all the armaments on all the companions that follow the player in the game to be highly durable. Otherwise, Mauragin's armor is destroyed and he comes out of the caves naked (of armor anyway). There are quite a few ways to defeat the tougher frost ogres. They have the "trollkin" ability and so are susceptible to fire. And of course, the Player has just exited Naremar and if they have any presence of mind, they'd have grabbed all the dwarven darts from the dead mechanical archers. You can usually walk out of there with 1000 of them or more, if strong enough. That's more than enough to kill them all a few times over. Alternatively, the player can use the "Helm of Seven Ghosts" to become invisible, and just run past them all. Mauragin will take a few hits, but you can usually get him out the last cave door without too much fighting this way. You probably don't even need invisibility, as I think you can just run past them as they are so slow.

In any case, I will change their health to whatever you think is best, if you think they are too tough now.

Edit: I just thought I'd mention I have a little program I wrote called tes3cmd that I used to help me with this project. It has a number of features, for instance, it can dump a plugin to readable text (tes3cmd dump plugin.esp > plugin.txt). This was helpful as it let me review things from the different versions and find where every object is used, etc. It can also modify records (if you know a little Perl), and so I used it to re-anchor those thousands of terrain_bm_icechunks, some of which were floating up in the air at a height of 64 or something like that). So, if you are interested in fixing those icechunks, I could send you that bit of code I used to do it.

Edit 2: Forgive me for another edit to my post, but I'm grateful for you mentioning version 3.1 and my Overhaul on your download page, but I have a couple small edits to suggest:

"Only activate Arktwend EMaster v3.1 after installing, nothing else. Further information here & the ten steps to install Arktwend you will find here."
should be:
"Only activate Arktwend English.esm" after installing, nothing else. Further information here "
(I removed the mention of Burrowind's installation tutorial for the moment as it was for the previous version of the English translation and refers to some files that are no longer used. This confused at least one person so far, so I thought it best just to go with the instructions in the Readme for now).

Also, thanks for mentioning "TAO"! But could I impose upon you to add a note to say: "This overhaul only works with the English version"?
This is because it refers to some IDs that I think only exist in the English version, and I don't want to confuse users. (Of course, if anyone wishes, they may use the overhaul content to make other versions). Thanks in advance.