News archive

Ever wanted to throw weapons, fight like an infamous gladiator or just stab people viciously with a pointy thing? This video might well be for you.

Thumbnail image for this video is "Dragon in the Mist" courtesy of symplexity.

Download links for reviewed mods:
Throwing Weapons - Death From Afar
Throwing Weapons Redux - Beta
Gladiator Armor - Spartacus
New Animation - Power Thrust

Mod preview videos:
Skyrim Heart Rate

One of the most customizable armor mods ever made, a great selection of weapons, and a mod that will help immerse yourself in the game.

Thumbnail image for this video is courtesy of ZeroKing.

Download links for reviewed mods:
Aesir Armor
Warrior Within Swords
Immersive Beds

Mod preview videos:
Imaginator - MCMenu
Sound Propagation and Footsteps Sounds Overhaul

We came across a bug today that meant when users downloaded files through NMM the download was not being counted as a “Unique download” but it did add to the “Total downloads” counter. For those who don’t know, unique downloads are counted once per user, per file, per page. So if you download the same file 10 times it adds 10 to the total downloads counter but only 1 to the unique downloads counter. It’s a more accurate way of seeing the true number of unique individuals who have downloaded your files.

We’ve been able to run a script to recount all the unique download counters and I think some of you will be pleasantly surprised how high your unique download counters have jumped (I’ve seen some that have doubled, or even tripled, in count).

This bug only affected files with NMM enabled and those who downloaded the files through NMM.

CDProjektRed committed to releasing a powerful toolkit for The Witcher 2 some time ago and it’s been in a closed beta for many months now, but today the lid is off and the kit is out there for everyone to use.

It’s really exciting for a great game like The Witcher 2 and it’s modding community to be strongly supported by the developers, and it’s a great breath of fresh air for a triple A game developer to care so much about it, and it bodes really well for The Witcher 3. That’s why I care about supporting CDProjekt as much as possible in whatever way I can and getting the word out there to any of you who might be interested; The Witcher 2 modding just got a whole lot better.

There are already a lot of mods available on our Witcher Nexus site for you to download and use. This release of the Redkit will open the modding doors to much wider modding possibilities including epic quest lines, new locations and everything in between so keep your eyes peeled as many mod authors in the closed beta have been working on some great projects for many months now. I’m sure we’ll be hearing from them in due course.

In the coming months as we work towards our goal of supporting mods for all games we will be splitting any sites that have more than 1 game supported (for example Witcher Nexus, which supports TW1 and TW2) into separate sites for each game. This should help increase ease of use for people looking for specific mods for specific games.

We’ve also been working behind the scenes to make NMM compatible with the new Witcher 2 mods that will have been created by the Redkit. While we’re confident we’ve got it right we’re going to wait a day or two until we can test a few of the new creations uploaded to the site before we give it the all clear and release that functionality to you. If you’re a mod author wondering how you should package up your files to work in NMM I’m told all you need to do is place your files in the root of the archive you create, e.g. don’t create a folder for your mod, like placing all your files in a folder called “My first mod”. Just put it all in the root directory.

To download the Redkit and find all the information you need on how to get started with it head on over to the Redkit site CDProjekt have setup.

In the meantime you can take a look at the trailer CDProjekt released for the Redkit, with perhaps the most high-octane music I’ve ever heard used to show case mod tools!

Tyrannicon is still making great Skyrim based movies, this time telling the Ironman story using his video making skills and a whole lot of great mods. But which mods did he use whilst making this video I hear you ask? Here is the complete list:

Nexus mods:
Flying Mod Beta
March Madness - Craftable Sheogorath Suits
Aetherium Armor and Weapons Compilation
Iron Man Repulsor Spell
Summon Ball Lightning
Puppeteer Master
360 Walk and Run Plus
Bandit Eyepatch
Bald Head
ApachiiSkyHair
Shooting Stars
Midas Magic - Spells in Skyrim
Push-up sexy bikinis CBBE v3
Vibranium Helmet
Beards
Girls of Skyrim - add 4 Companions
Temptress Race
Rayban-like Sunglasses
Review Studio With Green Screen Rooms
Artillery - Death From Afar
Dwarven Bionic Suit Dwemer Light Power armor
Space Wiking Dwemer Exoskeleton
Dance Animations - Shake it
Bathing Beauties or Beefcake - Luxury Suite
A Classier BB Luxury Suite
Make Inferno - Enhanced and More Realistic Fire
Blue Jeans T-shirts and Singlets
Dragonplate Helmet Fix and Alternate Masked Version

Steam Workshop mods:
Ironman's Assistance

As you’re probably aware from the advertisements we’ve dotted around the sites and in NMM we offer a Premium Membership service to users who would like to support the sites and get a little something back in return. I regularly get asked if we have a donation button on the sites. I regularly respond that we don’t take donations at the moment because we consider Premium Membership to be the perfect donation as it allows you to get something back for your financial support; so if you do want to donate to the sites then Premium Membership is the way to go. Premium Memberships are really important to us, as noted in that blog post I keep linking, because we rely more on you guys to keep us going than we do on the ads on the site. I think that’s how it should be and that’s how I like it. It means you guys are more important to us than advertisers.

In recent weeks we’ve added 2 more Premium-only file servers (servers only Premium Members can download from) to bring the total to 4 and last month we changed Supporter membership so that Supporters no longer see adverts on the sites. If you become a Premium Member you are automatically moved into the Supporter group for life when your Premium time expires. Supporter membership costs £1 (around $1.60) and 1 month of Premium Membership costs £2.49 (around $3.99).

We’ve always only offered Pay Pal as a payment method for Premium Membership which has become a point of contention for some people who would like to support these sites but don’t like Pay Pal, don’t want to use Pay Pal or can’t use Pay Pal for whatever reason. I promised that if that ever changed and we offered more payment methods I would let you guys know in the site news so here I am to let you know that we’ve (finally!) got some more payment processors for Premium Membership.

We’ve now added 2Checkout, a popular and well known payment processor to our list of payment processors which you can now use in place of Pay Pal for 1 month, 3 month, 6 month and 12 month memberships. Unfortunately 2Checkout weren’t big fans of the idea of a “Lifetime” membership for some reason so unfortunately we can’t offer 2Checkout as a payment method for that package. To pay via 2Checkout all you need to do is pick a package from the Premium Store and select “2Checkout” from the payment drop-down box. You’ll be redirected to 2Checkout for payment and then your membership should be applied within 10 minutes of payment being received.

Similarly we’re also trialing a different payment processor called Fortumo who provide the ability to pay for 1 month of Premium Membership via SMS/text message from your mobile phone. We’re currently trialing this in a number of European countries including the UK, France and Germany as well as Australia. In total we can currently support 21 countries via this payment method. First of all let me apologise if your country isn’t currently accepted (including those of you in the US and Canada). Every country has different rules, regulations and max amounts that can be paid via phone and the countries we’re trialing are the ones that were easiest to conform with in our system or who actually allow you to pay enough to cover the cost of the membership. We’ve setup a special package in the Premium Store to pay via SMS which you can find here. If this is something that you would like to use but can’t because it’s not currently accepted in your country please let me know as it will help me in deciding whether I want to expand on this payment processor or not.

I’ll finish by simply thanking, once again, those people who have helped to keep these sites running by becoming Premium Members. I really do mean it when I say these sites most definitely wouldn’t still be here without your support.

Update:

Wow, this has garnered a lot of interest very quickly. First of all, thanks a lot for all the constructive feedback so far, it's extremely useful and very much appreciated. A few pointers I forgot to put in the original peace which I'll add now:

• That "spacey" background behind NMM is the desktop background and not a part of NMM itself
• We will still be supporting "category view" and "all view", I just haven't had a mock-up done for the non-category view yet
• Search functionality is actually the next thing going in to NMM, and will be in way before this redesign is complete. Same with mod profiles.
• The ability to skin NMM to better suit your own personal favourite colour schemes has been requested a lot. I'll pass this on to the development team but I do think it's likely that we'll just have this one dark-colour theme to begin with and then look to provide more skins further on down the line (and hopefully open it up to you to make your own)
• We cannot and will not be providing an optional switch between the old and the new UI. It's just not feasibly possible for us to support both the old, defunct UI and the new UI. Upon moving to the new UI we'll jump the versioning up to 0.90.0 of NMM, go through a final round of BETA testing and then, fingers crossed, release 1.0 once we're confident the transition is bug free. Older versions of NMM should still work but will be no longer supported by us directly.

Original news post:

I thought I’d share with you some preliminary, non-final mock-ups that we’ve been working on with some professional web/graphic/software/UI designers over the past few weeks for the Nexus Mod Manager in the hopes of not only preparing you for the shock of the change but also to get some feedback.

As I’ve said all the way through the life-span of NMM how NMM looks is most definitely not final. Before I will stick that coveted 1.0 version number on to the software that indicates it’s out of beta it will most definitely be going through a face-lift, and it’s going to be a face-lift that completely changes the look of the software from a “my first .NET coding project” look to a “yeah, this might be going somewhere” look.

At the moment NMM isn’t the prettiest of software but it does pay homage to the grassroots of the software and that cliched “made by modders, for modders” look to it that suggests functionality and simplicity was more important to the author than snazzy superfluous graphics. However, going hand in hand with our current focus on shifting the Nexus from supporting a handful of games to supporting all games I’d like to work closer with some developers to integrate their games better into NMM right from the get-go. Fact is, it’s actually very easy for us to add support for most games in to NMM but (a) we don’t have Nexus sites for the game and (b) if you show a developer NMM, on first sight, it doesn’t give off the best impression. We’re in the process of sorting out (a) already, and now we’re in the process of sorting out (b) as well. Ergo what we really want to do is give NMM a face-lift that makes me happy, makes you happy and makes game developers happy to endorse it while, hopefully, improving the experience for everyone.

It’s my hope that you’ll look at these mock-ups and think “Wow, it’s changed, but actually, a lot of the stuff is in the same place, it just looks different”. I want you to be able to open it up and not spend minutes trying to find features you used to be able to find easily out of habit. In all honesty the current NMM design is horrible in this regard for new-comers and has heavy “mystery meat” UI elements that mean you don’t have a clue what a button does until you press it and find out. Of course, you’re used to where everything is in NMM now, and hopefully with this new UI you won’t be doing too much (or any searching) to find the functions you use in the current UI.

I’m sharing these mock-ups with you to not only show you what we’ve come up with so far but also to get your opinion. Unfortunately opinions on massive changes like this can sometimes be extremely dividing and it can be very tough for me to sift through the honest, proper critiques, criticisms and feedback that I really want to pay attention to and the “haters gonna hate, being bitter about change for the sake of being bitter” category of person who’s just going to dote on hate just because they’re that kind of person. So if or when you provide feedback on the mock-ups please try to take that into consideration, for my sake. Are you providing valuable, useful feedback that I can use or are you just a hater with nothing worthwhile to say? Show enough hate and I will just hide your comment as it’ll be unhelpful to the process and clutter up the feedback I actually want to be looking at. You can dislike it, but you’ve got to give good reasons why. How would you change it? What would you do when “don’t change a thing” isn’t an option?

We also want to try and maintain as much roll-back functionality as possible with NMM. We provide users with a large number of our previous versions that you can roll-back to at any time if you don’t like what we’ve done. We don’t stop you from doing that like most others out there, but if you stick to older versions and avoid getting used to new versions then you are going to miss out on new functionality, bug fixes and the like. That’s completely your choice.

So without further ado here are the mock-ups. Remember these are preliminary, unfinished, and things like wording (and spelling mistakes) are most definitely not final.


Loading splash screen





Game detection screen





Installed mods screen





Download manager





Plugin manager





Settings window

Back in January when I blogged about money and running these sites a lot of people expressed an interest in what I’d written and surprise at how I ran things and how I think. This in turn surprised me; I didn’t think many people would be very interested, it’s only me. Similarly a few online publications got in contact to set up interviews with me on the topic, something I’m more than happy to oblige with. While I only ended up doing one interview as the interest seemed to die down the results have been summarized, quite heavily, in to an article on the Edge magazine website.

I’m an extremely opinionated person and very happy to be extremely open and candid both online and offline with how I express myself. I’m always really happy to be myself and tell people exactly what I think irrespective of whether I’m right or wrong or broaching difficult and controversial subjects, because I hate insincerity. As far as I’m concerned you should say what you mean and mean what you say, while trying to remain respectful. It doesn’t always work out like that, but hey, I try. I don’t want the image of me to be some corporate bigwig who only says things that I think will appease others and broaden my appeal to the masses, I want to be myself and if people don’t like that then so what!? We were never going to get along anyway. I’m not here to be everyone’s best friend, I’m here because I want to run a good modding community that really helps and supports modding. Sometimes the two don’t go hand-in-hand, and it wasn’t a particularly hard lesson for me to learn.

In the few interviews I’ve done they always start out formal; question, answer, question, answer and then just end up with us talking for a good hour or so about anything and everything under the sun to do with games. Mainly because I just cannot stick to one subject and have to go off on tangents as issues get raised (my teachers in school diagnosed me with “verbal diarrhea”). This interview was no exception, and I enjoyed it just for the great chat. And I’m always open to do more.

A couple of years ago I ran a little fun night with the Amnesia: The Dark Descent demo on Mumble. Around 30 of us got in to the voice comms and played through the demo together while having a good chat and laugh together. It had a nice sense of community to it and I know the people who took part enjoyed it. It also gave members a chance to chat to me openly and ask me questions which I answered back freely. I’d like to start up something similar, but honestly, time just isn’t on my side these days. It’s not the turning up that’s the problem, it’s the organising it. I’ll try my best to get something like this done soon, and if you have any ideas on what we can do, fire away.

We’ve updated the sites today with what will probably be the last new feature we add to the sites for a little while as we focus fully on expanding the Nexus sites to support all PC games which I mentioned in my recent blog piece.

Today’s update has added a new link titled “Download history” to file comments which is displayed next to the post date information for mod authors on their own file page comment areas. When the author of the file clicks this link they’ll be able to see your download history for that file (and only that file), which will display the file version you downloaded and when you downloaded it.



You might be asking why, and what’s the point? There’s a few good reasons why it would be handy for a mod author to see your download history for their file.

One of the assets of Nexus functionality over Steam Workshop is the fact users have complete version control over the files they download. If a mod author releases an update that has a major bug in it then users can roll-back to a previous version or skip updating to the latest version until the mod author fixes the bug. This is in direct contrast to Steam Workshop where mod updates are applied automatically, without warning or a user choice, when a mod author uploads a new version.

However, with complete version control for users also comes a typical issue: users reporting bugs on old versions (say v1.2) that were fixed in newer versions (say v1.4). Because the user is still using the old version the bug still exists for them. When reporting the bug the user (more often than not) might not report what version of the mod they’re using, so the mod author has to waste time getting to the bottom of whether the bug is still in their current version or whether the user is using an old version that has since been patched. This is something we’ve attempted to help fix with this feature.

When a mod author can see your download history for their file they can quickly skip that “What version are you using?” step of communication and quickly provide you with feedback based on your download history. It’s hopefully going to save mod authors some time when trying to help you with your problems.

Another good reason is in helping to prevent mod trolling. If someone is trolling a file page comment section about how the file doesn’t work or how it doesn’t do what it says the mod author can quickly check their download history for the file and see whether the user has actually even bothered to download the file at all. And my personal favourite, “I’ve been using this mod for over 3 weeks and it’s broken all my saves”, *checks the download history and finds they only downloaded the file 10 minutes ago*, yeah...

To alleviate a few privacy fears let me just tell you that this feature does NOT give mod authors access to your complete download history for every file you’ve ever downloaded. Only the author of the file in question can see your download history, and only for THAT file. If I’ve released mod A and you post in the comment section for mod A I would not be able to see that you’ve downloaded mods B, C, D and E as well. When I broached this subject in the private mod author forums a relatively valid argument was raised that people don’t want their download histories to be public knowledge. However, having said that, if you’ve downloaded a nude mod, for example, and you didn’t want it to be public knowledge that you’d downloaded the file, you wouldn’t be posting in the comments section of the nude mod. By posting in the comments section of a nude mod you’ve already expressed your interest in said mod, and a mod author being shown your download history for that file isn’t going to make that interest any more or less obvious for the public.

This update is now live on all the Nexus sites. I hope that the mod authors can put it to good use.

Glass armor, book covers and something for the werewolf looking for a challenge. A look back at a couple of old mods as well as a few new ones.

Thumbnail image for this video is 'WorldEater' courtesy of kaldaar.

Download links for reviewed mods:
Mods covered in this video:
Better fitting Glass Helmet
BGM Glass and Elven Armour and Weapons
Realistic Transparent Glass Armor and Weapons _UNP female - standard male
Book Covers Skyrim
Werewolf Aftermath - Gota Get My Stuff Back

Mod preview videos:
SpellMaking In Skyrim; The Last Altar
Dovahtracker