Unmountable Boot Volume

Gosh Darn! >:(

Apparently it can be fixed if you have the install disk. Pity the Laptop came with Windows pre-installed. If money was no object, then I'd go for a Mac instead.

Edit: Safe Mode doesn't work. System restore doesn't work. Right now I'm doing a chkdsk, but it's going slow.

Edit 2: Managed to fix it. At least for now. I got hold of a Win 7 install disk and fixed the error. How exactly I'm not sure. 02:20 on Christmas day. I think I'll de-fragment the drive and see what that does. Might not get any sleep tonight.

Skyrim Modding

So I'm taking a mini break from Ash and Dirt, and doing some modding of Skyrim.

One thing I've always been dissatisfied with on the whole regarding Race mods, is the fact that they're always recoloured vanilla presets. I've decided to make new presets in the Tri's which will include hopefully most Bipedal Elven/human Lore race.
First off I decided to go Sea Elf/Maormer. I'm concentrating on the female morph first because they don't have beards to deal with and I want to see how easy/hard it is before I tri (pun intended) to do more races, IF I decide to do more. It's based off of the High Elf morph and will hopefully look different enough when I'm done.

I'm editing the tri. files in Blender.

What I'm doing is adding the preset to the existing ones. Essentially what this means is that if someone makes a new race that is called "SeaElfRace" using this tri. then they choose NONE for morph, then it will grab the correct morph from this modified tri, giving them a new morph, one that is not vanilla.

Now comes in the problem. It isn't as easy as changing ears and face shape, and then giving yourself a pat on the back for making a new race morph. NO! if only it were that simple.
There are Race tri.'s for nearly everything that goes on the face. Scars/Eyebrows/beards. They all go on the face, and all have tri. files that fit to the race. Just the small change seen above took 3 hours. Why? Because I had to make sure that the brow tri. didn't clip when changing sliders that change the brow positions. I also had to check that there wasn't any clipping with facial expressions with the brow sliders at default or their most extreme.
There was and I had to make minute adjustments. They had to be minute, as to make it so the brows also weren't too far away from the face either, making it look cartoony.

The ears are actually on purpose. The Maormer are said to have pale, chameleon-like skin, and by their description they sounded a bit amphibious, so I made their ears kind of "amphibian" like.
I'm not doing textures for them or anything because I'm concentrating on the morphs, and my goal isn't to make race mods from this, but to give others the tools to make the race mods that there always should have been.

My goal is to try and make morphs for:

Mer
Sea Elf - Maormer
Heartland High Elf/Wild Elf - Ayleid
Veloth Elf - Chimer (maybe I'll come up with a better name than Veloth Elf, perhaps Ashland Elf after Morrowinds red mountain)
Deep Elf/Dwarves - Dwemer
Snow Elf - Falmer

Men
Akaviri (Might call them something else. They're supposedly extinct, but who knows.)
Kothringi (Most went extinct, but some escaped Tamriel. We'll see if I bother with this one)

Might make an Ohmes morph as well. I've kind of done one before for Rasha in my ES fanfic, but it wouldn't hold up if you tried to put scars on it.

EDIT: Couldn't get the brows to sit on the face properly, so for now I'm only going to alter the ears, and see where it goes from there.

EDIT 2: Laptop's borked, so this is on hold till I fix it or get a new one. FIXED IT FOR NOW.

EDIT 3: Blender won't open morphs that are over 50KB which has put a halt on this. Might just use existing morphs and change the ears. This means that I'll have to put each race into a unique race morph and have them replace existing morphs, but as they're in a separate morph file, it won't overwrite anything.

Troublesome Chapters.

Fallout AaD: Survivors is a troublesome story. One would think that because it has an almost singular thread, and only a handful of main characters, that it'd be easier than writing a story with lots of different characters.
If only that were so.
The difficulty here is that I just don't have any drive. I've tried finding some by playing FO3. I just find it boring now, even though I'm playing the Alton mod, which takes you to a new world-space. That haunted feeling I used to get when playing it is no longer there.
I'm a mere 1262 words into chapter 19, and I feel as though I'm running out of things to write about, even though the story doesn't feel ready to end yet, or rather can't end yet as all the pieces aren't in place.
It would be easier if I stuck with the original outline, but as with all things I write, I tend to go in the direction of what feels natural, more than what I had set out to write months before.
As with how the story is now, they aren't going to be where I wanted them to be by the end of the story. (location wise)
Heck if I went by the original idea, Oliver got stupider because his brain was tied to the vault computer, not because he was breaking down, and Milly didn't even exist beyond a brief mention about it being her birthday.
Perhaps when Fallout 4 releases in 2016 or whenever, it'll motivate me more. But that's a very long time to wait.

JG

Orc Eyes Alternate

So, I made a mod that adds a new texture for the Orc eyes in Skyrim. I'm now using Natural eyes, but their Orc eyes were just wrong. Completely wrong, so I made some myself.
I have made an eye mod before, which included Orc eyes, but it was just lackluster at best. This new mod aims to make the eyes look as awesome as they can.

There's also a plugin version that adds 4 new eyes, with new colours including bright green/brown/deep red/violet.
In my ES story, I mentioned that Magoza had green eyes, yet there isn't green eyes selection in Orcs, so I made one. :)

Memory Lane 1

I was reading through some of my old posts and realised how far I've come. It's odd to see just how unprepared I am for near everything I do in writing fan fiction. My Elder Scrolls story was originally just going to run straight through with no breaks from beginning to end, until I decided to break up the different 'parts'. It also had a dumb name, the sort you'd give to an anthology.
Fallout as well. Where I had 4 stories going on at the same time. Stories that wouldn't intersect for perhaps 60 chapters. So I split them, and right now I'm continuing AaD Survivors.
My Trek story has flown off into the ether, and I have no clue if I'll continue it after AaD S.

Anyway, it's late and I need sleep.
JG

An Elder Scrolls Saga P2 - Complete

So, part 2 of my Elder Scrolls Fan Fiction is complete. The ending is far more open than the last, but it sets up the jump off point for P3.
P3 is going to take a while till it's ready to be written. I have 19 major and supporting characters to juggle, with up to 5 different story arcs. Perhaps I'm in over my head, but I've started it now, I will have to finish it.
That said, it'll be a while till I start part 3 (Though I said that about part 2 and then started writing it almost as soon as the words had left the keyboard.)
Anyway, as I have some kind of neurosis, I made all 19 characters that I'll be juggling.

In other news I've been editing the chapters of Fallout: Ash and Dirt. the next one was already half written, so Ch10 may be out soon (as of this posting)

JG

Fallout: Ash and Dirt - The Return.

So, the last chapters of An Elder Scrolls Saga: A Dagger in the Wind has been written. All that remains now is to edit them, and to spot errors/typos.

When it is done I will be shifting my focus back to my fallout fanfic, which has been sorely neglected. With that said, I started to continue writing the chapter I had left off on, and immediately started calling LeBethany, Valerie from AESS.

So what I decided to do was to star re-reading AaD, to try and get a feel for it again. What I found was errors and typos and mis-constructed sentences.

So once I have finished editing DitW, I will re-do AaD part 1 (I must really learn to plan stories that aren't serials)

Another thing I decided to do, was to remake the cover. It's just plain too dark, and you can barely see the thing. I also thought it was too 'busy'

OLD

NEW

The old version doesn't exist as a big image anymore, but I could easily remake it if need be. In the end though it was hard to see.

JG