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Starfield: Where Do We Go From Here?
🕑 Added 2023-09-01 12:29:06 +0000 UTCAfternoon folks (or morning, depending on where you live),
Recently with the upcoming release of Starfield, I thought some of you would be interested in the modding developments (and potential) of the game, as well as if I'll participate in making mods for it. This post should tackle both of these matters and hopefully answer any pressing questions that y'all may have.
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Early Modding Developments
User Interface
It's confirmed that Starfield still uses Adobe Flash for its UI and therefore swf files. This means for anything like SkyUI to exist it must first be decompiled and rebuilt.
Animations
Havok was scrubbed from these files entirely so now they use .af files as animations instead of hkx. Annotations (or something similar) seem to be in separate files from the animations themselves. No more need for hkanno, yay!
Behavior
I was lucky enough to be able to look into the behavior files; The formatting is entirely different because of the lack of Havok. It seems that it still needs some sort of patcher (or behavior engine) to merge edits to the same files, although that's for the future, since we don't know what CK2 holds.
SKSE
There is progress on the plugin loader, as well as a collaborative effort being made to reverse engineer the Starfield executable. Although this is a long term project more than anything.
Bug Fixes:
The Community Patch project is a community led, MIT-licensed mod that aims to fix many of the bugs in Starfield, and is headed by prominent authors.
It's an effort to prevent a repeat of the possessive bugfix monopoly in Skyrim of he-who-shall-not-be-named, who likes to take down rival mods or any attempt to revert their changes, even the unecessary ones.
Plugins:
The presence of ESMs, ESPs, ESLs have been tentatively confirmed by reverse engineering.
Overall:
I believe this is the most prepared the modding community has been for a Bethesda game given the foundation we have from Fallout 4 and Skyrim. It's promising, and nice to see as a community.
I'm hoping it won't end up like the current Fallout modding scene that consists of mostly gun mods and titties.
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What Will I Be Doing?
I will be helping with the reverse engineering effort as much as I can with my amateurish skills in that field, but my main interest is diving into Bethesda's new animation system. Perhaps you will see a version of Pandora for Starfield in the far future, who knows ;)
Will you have early access Starfield mods on Patreon?
Most likely yes, but I cannot give a specific timeframe since it depends on the tools available.
Will you switch over to Starfield?
No. Skyrim is still what I will mainly mod. If I do mod Starfield, it will be on the side. A side side hobby if you will.
Are you interested in playing Starfield?
Honestly Starfield so far does not interest me as much as it did when it was announced. This is for a variety of reasons, but mainly because Baldur's Gate 3 is already my game of the year. When you've had the best of RPGs it's hard to go back. I do like min maxing, looting, and shooting, so I'll probably play just for that alone.
I hope this announcement was helpful and informative! And thank you all for your continued support.
Comments
Firebeard
I feel you on the BG3 to starfield train. Finished my first campaign of BG3 and jumped into Starfield and I feel like I have never been more critical of a game in my life lol.
