PC GameSource Blog

I know, you probably read the title and thought, “Huh?”

For those of you who read my previous Oblivion Tip, I hinted at creating a Bash Installer package for your default game files, so that BAIN’s conflict detection will help notify you and preserve your vanilla game files should you wish to overwrite them.

I took this a step further, and created a set of BAIN packages which allow me to completely customize my Oblivion experience without harming any original files. The packages offer multiple versions of the default BSAs (compressed, uncompressed, and with the USIP files packed in), original or cleaned versions of the official DLC, etc.

But I noticed that, even after installing the package, BAIN could not detect the fact that the default files even existed (it would always show Oblivion – Meshes.bsa as ‘Missing’, for example, even though it was there and matched exactly the file in the BAIN package.

This is due to the list of default files stored in ‘bush.py’ in the variable bethDataFiles. BAIN is using this variable as a skip-list so that it does not calculate CRCs or check dates for any default files. My goal was to change this behavior.

This variable, bethDataFiles, is not necessarily only used for Bash Installers, so I did not want to edit it here. Instead, I opened up the file ‘bosh.py’ and found that it is what is actually performing the CRC checks and skipping the default Bethesda files.

There are two places where I commented out references to this variable, and the result is that BAIN treats all files in the Data directory equally… it now calculates CRCs for the default .bsas (which takes a little bit of time) and properly shows matches for my installed files that overwrote the default ones.

If you’d like to have this, too, first let me specify that I take no responsibility for what Bash might do to your default Bethesda game files if you perform this tweak. The reason I did it was to use a set of custom Bash Installers I created which contain the default files, among other variations, so I am not in danger of losing anything. If you do not have such a package, make sure you back up ALL of your data files.

Open up ‘bosh.py’ in a text editor. Around line 9721 look for the following:

if not rsDir and sFile.lower() in bethFiles: continue

Change it to:

#if not rsDir and sFile.lower() in bethFiles: continue

Next around line 9935 look for:

Related articles by Zemanta

• Oblivion Vampirism Guide (brighthub.com)

I watched a lot of horror films as a kid. I really enjoyed them–but something little known about me was that some of them also scared the hell out of me. It’s those films which stuck with me the most. But horror concepts are very hit-and-miss. Different people scare differently.

The same is true for games. I, for one, have had a fear of total darkness (or more specifically what could lurk in it)–fortunately for me, that’s an extremely common way many films and games alike create fear. It’s an effective way of making sure the character–or player–doesn’t know what’s waiting for them. In a movie, this is effective because I empathize with the character on the screen, experiencing similar feelings of fear and dread. In a game, I am directly controlling the experience, and it’s so effective because it forces me to willingly advance into something I know I’m going to be afraid of–essentially, to face my fear.

I believe that this is the reason that horror games (or games with horror elements) in general seem to get by with less scary elements and original ideas than horror movies–it’s simply easier to scare people when they are directly involved instead of passively observing. Hollywood needs to think of ways to scare people who are sitting in a chair with no control over what’s happening other than to leave the theater or turn off the television. A gamer has many options, but knows the only way to progress is to cause more scary things to happen–a powerful scare tactic in itself.

I’ve finished every horror movie I’ve started, aside from the few that were simply so bad that I did not want to continue wasting my time watching them. I had no problem getting to the end, regardless of whether or not or to what extent they scared me.

Games, however, are a different story. I am much more of a game buff than a movie buff, but I’ll let you in on a little secret–I could never make it all the way through System Shock 2. I’ve never seen the ending of Doom 3. I played about an hour of Dead Space and have barely touched it since. Hell, I barely made it through the F.E.A.R. games.

Hold on now, I’m not saying every horror game I play simply makes me stop playing. But I can safely say that all of those I’ve listed are some of my favorite games of all-time. They are the ones I remember playing the most, and they have certainly affected me more deeply than almost any other game, because they tap into some primal sense of dread and oppression that I can neither explain nor understand. It would seem so complex, yet most of the games I listed use very simple concepts such as darkness, evil things jumping out at the player, ominous sounds and oppressive atmospheres. Top it off with limited ammunition and other resources, and you’ve got the majority of survival horror games in existence today. Yet–cheap tactics or not, many of them still succeed in scaring me.

But many people are not affected by the same things as me, and do not get scared by cliche things such as monsters in the dark. Others have already learned to overcome those fears and simply push on. The former often do not enjoy many horror games–many reviewers seem to look at horror games in this light, as well (either because the conditions and mindset they are playing the game in is not ideal or simply because they are not scared by the tactics being used). But that’s great, actually–it’s because of these types of people that the horror genre in general must advance–game developers need to think of new and less gimmicky ways to scare their players. And that should make for a continually evolving and ever-more-interesting genre of games.

Recently I have started to revisit many of the titles that I inadvertently abandoned due to never working up the willpower to click on them again. It’s truly satisfying to finish such a title and achieve the real-world benefit (by accident, of course) of pushing myself to overcome my fears.

First up, Dead Space…

Related articles by Zemanta

• Suda (and many other devs) on the difficulties of scaring players (gonintendo.com)
• Visceral: Dead Space 2 will “scare the pants off you” (vg247.com)
• Talking about Horror from Life and Times of a Philippine Gamer (philgamer.wordpress.com)
• Horror needs to mature (gonintendo.com)
• F.E.A.R. 3 shots arrive from E3 (vg247.com)
• EA Sends Players on a Blood-Curdling New Adventure on January 25 with Dead Space 2 (eon.businesswire.com)
• Scared Now? (blogcritics.org)
• The Tragedy of Alone in the Dark (gonintendo.com)
• Creepy horror game Afterfall coming to PC, XBLA, PSN (destructoid.com)
• Metro 2033: “It’s not a horror game,” says THQ (vg247.com)