I can’t find it rn, but some dude was getting an unhinged amount of upset about the way they handled the character models or something. Claimed it would make horny mods much more difficult to make than Skyrim.
As far as I’ve seen, CBBE, Fusion Girl and Bodytalk authors all talked on this subject.
Previously in Skyrim and FO4, you could pretty much just drop in either the body or a body and a skeleton and you could replace every single body in the game with something better. That is not the case this time around.
So we’re probably going to need a separate mod developer (someone focused on code rather than modeling and rigging) to implement an infrastructure to facilitate doing what the older engines could do by default.
Previously, Bodyslide/outfit studio and Looksmenu simple extended what you could do with these skeletons and bodies, they weren’t actually required to use those.
Now we’ll likely need those types of systems plus even more, simply to get basic body replacements to work.
Having played the game, I also have a feeling they dumbed down the animation engine and made it worse than it already was, which may cause issues for the sex frameworks to port animations from the older games over.
Thanks for explaining it. Part of my wonders if making that harder was intentional. With how sanitized the game is, part of me thinks BSG isn’t exactly happy the existence of loverslab lol.
Dunno, from a developer perspective, most of the changes in the engine regarding models, clothing slots and the like/ seem to be created to make the workflow with external companies easier, by being exponentially more restrictive. Which is hilarious to me as there’s nowhere near enough clothing or space suit variety in this game for that to even matter.
If you hire 10 companies or people to make 100 pants and another 10 to make 100 blouses and another 10 to make 100 shoes and another 10 to make 100 gloves, you need to have all those checked and cross referenced with each other internally to make sure they fit and don’t clip. That’s 100x100x100x100 (100 million) different combinations from 40 different sources.
Now if instead you hire 10 companies or people to do 500 complete outfits, you have but to look at them once and that’s done.
Now if you simple have no body under any clothes, the clothes cover everything and just 1 clothing slot that doesn’t conform to any body sliders other than the “fat/fit/skinny” one, you can remove the need for bodies and clothes to fit each other all together.
It also looks like where Skyrim and FO4 tended to have the body underneath clothes (which is why with mods, bodies could clip through the clothes), Starfield simply replaces the whole body with a spacesuit/clothing item that’s rigged to the skeleton. The body you can see when you take of your clothes off simply isn’t there.
This causes the additional issue that to make suits and clothes work with stuff like CBBE/Fusion Girl/Bodytalk correctly, and allow for exposed skin on more skimpy looking clothes, you’ll have to almost completely replicate all spacesuits and clothes in the game, to actual fit a body as FO4 and Skyrim did, rather than simply fit a skeleton. Otherwise they won’t change looks and shape with the underlying body sliders for body proportions.
The system in Skyrim and FO4 was already very fidgetty, but the modding community actually did great work in making it all work relatively seamlessly imho.
But it looks like for Starfield, they super simplified all that to the point of no longer having layered clothes or even bodies under clothes.
There’s also the issue where instead of hands/arms/separate items for first person view, it now looks like you just have arms with the hands integrated, which makes adding gloves separate from the armor or nice hands/nails/rings to the game either impossible, or a functionality that has to be re-added by moders on an engine level.
It’s all not to bother modders, but to make using external development farms easier and less error prone.
Trust me, Bethesda knows full well that the longevity of their games, what made them able to sell Skyrim 3 times on lord knows how many diffferent platforms, in a decade, is all down to the modding community and sex mods.
Any animosity against Loverslab and any other sort of lewd mods is like Christian Conservatives acting all offended over anything sexual to then be the primary porn consumer in every single area they exist in.
Cause that’s how it is. You can look at porn trends and from those trends alone know what the current hate topic is with Christian conservatives.
When they are being extra racist towards black people, it’s woman getting gangbanged by black dudes.
When they are being extra racist towards middle eastern people, Mia Khalifa is at the top of the charts.
When they are being hateful towards LGBTQ, wheee, trans and gay porn is on the rise.
Same for Bethesda, if they say anything against the modding community, it’s a farce, they know full well these people saved their bacon over and over again.
Because without mods, most of the games they made themselves tend to be oceans with the depth of a puddle that have moderate longevity.
FO3:NV being a major exception, because it was made by a different company.
Awesome comment! I learned stuff and the porn trends as a reflection of bigotry makes a lot of sense.
It does seem the trend in BSG is simplifying stuff. ES3 to ES4 lost medium armor, throwing weapons, all sorts of stuff. Same for every subsequent game. As miffed as the loss of depth makes me, it’s hard to be mad if it genuinely makes life easier on the devs.
Would that simplification if workflow you talked about extend to easing the creation of new clothing items that don’t try to “color outside the lines”? As you said, not a lot of space suit variety, but does it make easier to just make a new suit and not have to worry about body clipping?
As a complete side note: it’s truest amazing what the Skyrim modding community built. I recently installed a nexus collection with nearly 800 mods. It’s basically an entirely new game. It’ll be wild to see what happens if starfield can attract that passion.
I’d agree with making life easier on the devs, if that was the purpose.
The purpose is making everything cheaper by removing complexity. And said removal of complexity, makes for far less varied content in the game. If your system is strong enough to spawn large crowds in the game, it quickly becomes obvious there isn’t much variety in terms of clothes and armors in the game.
As for making it easier to make full armors, sure, but only full armors.
One of the big things that has made the modding scene so vibrant is because slot item clothes have been created and ported over since Morrowind and Fallout 3.
It makes it so that there is a large volume of mods that simply carry over with minimal work.
Making it simple being the key requirement.
If you now want to import just the whole of the VTAW collection for Fallout 4 and the many variants created for it by other modders to Starfield, you’ll have to combine all variations of all 100 something clothing sets and armors, manually, instead of simply being able to wear all individual pieces.
And like I said earlier, that’s not 100x a job (that’s how many sets there are in VTAW, each with 5-15 items per outfit), but 100(hands)x100(shoes)x100(coat)x100(pants)x100(left arm armor)x100(right arm armor)x100(left leg armor)x100(right leg armor)x100(shirts)x100(mouth, yes that’s actually an official slot)x100(underwear)x100(hats)x100(jewelry)x100(glasses/masks)x100(other accessories), etc, etc, etc, etc, etc combinations you have to combine and bring together and edit.
It won’t only make for an obscene amount of work, but will also make the disk size requirements for all these combinations go from 1000 or so items to exponentially more, as every combination now is its own mesh, rather than simply a reference to an item slot.
In FO4, there are 60+ item slots (with modding tools, there’s even more than that). The most commonly known and used by Bethesda themselves for vanilla assets are:
Hat
Eyes
Mouth (for cigars, cigarettes, lower face maks, surgical masks, etc, etc)
Pants
Shirt
Chest
Left Arm
Right Arm
Left Leg
Right Leg
Backpack
Weapon
Boots / Full outfit (they use the boots slot to equip single mesh outfits)
Gloves
But there are also slots in the background for jewelry, earings, ring (like the weddingring), top hair, long hair, undershirts, underpants, beards, eyepatches, shoulders, belts, capes/backpacks, left hand, right hand, bracelets, weapon on back, leg addons like gunbelts, headbands, necklace/scarves, offhand weapon, etc, etc and many more agreed upon and assigned by the modding community.
Starfield as far as I can see only has suit/clothes, helmet/cap, backpack and gun slots. None of them layered.
So to release mods with many clothing and accessory items, you’ll have to manually combine all of these or only release a few full outfits.
And you won’t have a choice in what body you use as they need to be baked into the single outfit.
What made Skyrim and FO4 so awesome was the fact you could pick and combined all these different mods, some pants from here, some shirt from there, a standard left light armor on one arm, a modded right arm armor on the other arm, a gun holster on one leg, a standard armor on the other, a mask from some obscure mod and a hat from some sex mod.
Easy peasy to have a completely unique outfit and even possible to use mods to have every single NPC in the game use a random outfit comprised out of all the available clothes items you loaded into the game through mods.
You could really make every single NPC you came across wear something unique to them very easily.
Starfield now has about 40 armors and about as many (or a little more) full outfits (of which many are just very small variations on the same full outfit), but that still only makes 100 or so possible clothing and 100 or so possible hat combinations.
In Fallout 4, even with only the default clothes and armor, you had less “sets” of armors (light/mid/heavy variants of metal/leather/gunner/atom/minutemen/raiders/covenant/etc,etc), but you were able to combine any one of them to result in far more possible armor combinations than the 40 in Starfield.
In Skyrim and FO4, you could load thousands of clothing and armor items into the game and wear any combination of any of them and have NPCs wear any combination of them.
Give it a few months, there will definitely be a mod. Pretty sure there has been for every Bethesda game since Morrowind.
I can’t find it rn, but some dude was getting an unhinged amount of upset about the way they handled the character models or something. Claimed it would make horny mods much more difficult to make than Skyrim.
As far as I’ve seen, CBBE, Fusion Girl and Bodytalk authors all talked on this subject.
Previously in Skyrim and FO4, you could pretty much just drop in either the body or a body and a skeleton and you could replace every single body in the game with something better. That is not the case this time around.
So we’re probably going to need a separate mod developer (someone focused on code rather than modeling and rigging) to implement an infrastructure to facilitate doing what the older engines could do by default.
Previously, Bodyslide/outfit studio and Looksmenu simple extended what you could do with these skeletons and bodies, they weren’t actually required to use those.
Now we’ll likely need those types of systems plus even more, simply to get basic body replacements to work.
Having played the game, I also have a feeling they dumbed down the animation engine and made it worse than it already was, which may cause issues for the sex frameworks to port animations from the older games over.
Thanks for explaining it. Part of my wonders if making that harder was intentional. With how sanitized the game is, part of me thinks BSG isn’t exactly happy the existence of loverslab lol.
Dunno, from a developer perspective, most of the changes in the engine regarding models, clothing slots and the like/ seem to be created to make the workflow with external companies easier, by being exponentially more restrictive. Which is hilarious to me as there’s nowhere near enough clothing or space suit variety in this game for that to even matter.
If you hire 10 companies or people to make 100 pants and another 10 to make 100 blouses and another 10 to make 100 shoes and another 10 to make 100 gloves, you need to have all those checked and cross referenced with each other internally to make sure they fit and don’t clip. That’s 100x100x100x100 (100 million) different combinations from 40 different sources.
Now if instead you hire 10 companies or people to do 500 complete outfits, you have but to look at them once and that’s done.
Now if you simple have no body under any clothes, the clothes cover everything and just 1 clothing slot that doesn’t conform to any body sliders other than the “fat/fit/skinny” one, you can remove the need for bodies and clothes to fit each other all together.
It also looks like where Skyrim and FO4 tended to have the body underneath clothes (which is why with mods, bodies could clip through the clothes), Starfield simply replaces the whole body with a spacesuit/clothing item that’s rigged to the skeleton. The body you can see when you take of your clothes off simply isn’t there.
This causes the additional issue that to make suits and clothes work with stuff like CBBE/Fusion Girl/Bodytalk correctly, and allow for exposed skin on more skimpy looking clothes, you’ll have to almost completely replicate all spacesuits and clothes in the game, to actual fit a body as FO4 and Skyrim did, rather than simply fit a skeleton. Otherwise they won’t change looks and shape with the underlying body sliders for body proportions.
The system in Skyrim and FO4 was already very fidgetty, but the modding community actually did great work in making it all work relatively seamlessly imho.
But it looks like for Starfield, they super simplified all that to the point of no longer having layered clothes or even bodies under clothes.
There’s also the issue where instead of hands/arms/separate items for first person view, it now looks like you just have arms with the hands integrated, which makes adding gloves separate from the armor or nice hands/nails/rings to the game either impossible, or a functionality that has to be re-added by moders on an engine level.
It’s all not to bother modders, but to make using external development farms easier and less error prone.
Trust me, Bethesda knows full well that the longevity of their games, what made them able to sell Skyrim 3 times on lord knows how many diffferent platforms, in a decade, is all down to the modding community and sex mods.
Any animosity against Loverslab and any other sort of lewd mods is like Christian Conservatives acting all offended over anything sexual to then be the primary porn consumer in every single area they exist in.
Cause that’s how it is. You can look at porn trends and from those trends alone know what the current hate topic is with Christian conservatives.
When they are being extra racist towards black people, it’s woman getting gangbanged by black dudes.
When they are being extra racist towards middle eastern people, Mia Khalifa is at the top of the charts.
When they are being hateful towards LGBTQ, wheee, trans and gay porn is on the rise.
Same for Bethesda, if they say anything against the modding community, it’s a farce, they know full well these people saved their bacon over and over again.
Because without mods, most of the games they made themselves tend to be oceans with the depth of a puddle that have moderate longevity.
FO3:NV being a major exception, because it was made by a different company.
Awesome comment! I learned stuff and the porn trends as a reflection of bigotry makes a lot of sense.
It does seem the trend in BSG is simplifying stuff. ES3 to ES4 lost medium armor, throwing weapons, all sorts of stuff. Same for every subsequent game. As miffed as the loss of depth makes me, it’s hard to be mad if it genuinely makes life easier on the devs.
Would that simplification if workflow you talked about extend to easing the creation of new clothing items that don’t try to “color outside the lines”? As you said, not a lot of space suit variety, but does it make easier to just make a new suit and not have to worry about body clipping?
As a complete side note: it’s truest amazing what the Skyrim modding community built. I recently installed a nexus collection with nearly 800 mods. It’s basically an entirely new game. It’ll be wild to see what happens if starfield can attract that passion.
Thanks again for the in-depth responses.
I’d agree with making life easier on the devs, if that was the purpose.
The purpose is making everything cheaper by removing complexity. And said removal of complexity, makes for far less varied content in the game. If your system is strong enough to spawn large crowds in the game, it quickly becomes obvious there isn’t much variety in terms of clothes and armors in the game.
As for making it easier to make full armors, sure, but only full armors.
One of the big things that has made the modding scene so vibrant is because slot item clothes have been created and ported over since Morrowind and Fallout 3.
It makes it so that there is a large volume of mods that simply carry over with minimal work.
Making it simple being the key requirement.
If you now want to import just the whole of the VTAW collection for Fallout 4 and the many variants created for it by other modders to Starfield, you’ll have to combine all variations of all 100 something clothing sets and armors, manually, instead of simply being able to wear all individual pieces.
And like I said earlier, that’s not 100x a job (that’s how many sets there are in VTAW, each with 5-15 items per outfit), but 100(hands)x100(shoes)x100(coat)x100(pants)x100(left arm armor)x100(right arm armor)x100(left leg armor)x100(right leg armor)x100(shirts)x100(mouth, yes that’s actually an official slot)x100(underwear)x100(hats)x100(jewelry)x100(glasses/masks)x100(other accessories), etc, etc, etc, etc, etc combinations you have to combine and bring together and edit.
It won’t only make for an obscene amount of work, but will also make the disk size requirements for all these combinations go from 1000 or so items to exponentially more, as every combination now is its own mesh, rather than simply a reference to an item slot.
In FO4, there are 60+ item slots (with modding tools, there’s even more than that). The most commonly known and used by Bethesda themselves for vanilla assets are:
Hat Eyes Mouth (for cigars, cigarettes, lower face maks, surgical masks, etc, etc) Pants Shirt Chest Left Arm Right Arm Left Leg Right Leg Backpack Weapon Boots / Full outfit (they use the boots slot to equip single mesh outfits) GlovesBut there are also slots in the background for jewelry, earings, ring (like the weddingring), top hair, long hair, undershirts, underpants, beards, eyepatches, shoulders, belts, capes/backpacks, left hand, right hand, bracelets, weapon on back, leg addons like gunbelts, headbands, necklace/scarves, offhand weapon, etc, etc and many more agreed upon and assigned by the modding community.
Starfield as far as I can see only has suit/clothes, helmet/cap, backpack and gun slots. None of them layered.
So to release mods with many clothing and accessory items, you’ll have to manually combine all of these or only release a few full outfits.
And you won’t have a choice in what body you use as they need to be baked into the single outfit.
What made Skyrim and FO4 so awesome was the fact you could pick and combined all these different mods, some pants from here, some shirt from there, a standard left light armor on one arm, a modded right arm armor on the other arm, a gun holster on one leg, a standard armor on the other, a mask from some obscure mod and a hat from some sex mod.
Easy peasy to have a completely unique outfit and even possible to use mods to have every single NPC in the game use a random outfit comprised out of all the available clothes items you loaded into the game through mods.
You could really make every single NPC you came across wear something unique to them very easily.
Starfield now has about 40 armors and about as many (or a little more) full outfits (of which many are just very small variations on the same full outfit), but that still only makes 100 or so possible clothing and 100 or so possible hat combinations.
In Fallout 4, even with only the default clothes and armor, you had less “sets” of armors (light/mid/heavy variants of metal/leather/gunner/atom/minutemen/raiders/covenant/etc,etc), but you were able to combine any one of them to result in far more possible armor combinations than the 40 in Starfield.
In Skyrim and FO4, you could load thousands of clothing and armor items into the game and wear any combination of any of them and have NPCs wear any combination of them.
Thanks for going into detail! I don’t really have anything to add, but that was an interesting read.