The Phoenix Flavour - February News

Hey guys!

TPF 4.2 is coming today and I wanted to get you up to speed on the changes it includes and, more importantly, explain them. There are two major ones: I replaced Cathedral NPCs with separate mods (many of which were also included in Cath NPC) and facegen is now regenerated by users (obviously Wabbajack users do not have to do this step and will be able to download premade facegen).

Scroll to the bottom for some other important news: There are updates regarding new addons for TPF, streaming TPF on Twitch, support for Wabbajack, and what I'll be working on next. Go read it!

New Appearance Mods

I'm a big fan of the idea behind Cathedral NPCs: Simply improving NPC appearance-related assets and regenerating facegen without plugin-based changes to their faces. This makes consistency patching for mod-added NPCs incredibly easy: I simply have to regenerate facegen for them.

Unfortunately, there are some aspects of Cathedral NPCs that I dislike and I quickly came to the conclusion that in order to change them, facegen for all vanilla NPCs would have to be regenerated anyway. This prompted the decision to simply ditch Cathedral NPCs and do our own selection of appearance mods.

Notable additions and changes are:

• High poly hands and feet for males and females.
• Shiva's Vanilla Body with UNP Textures.
• All eyes covered by Authentic Eyes.
• High Poly Vanilla Hair and Vanilla Hair - Salt and Wind.

The selection is still a bit of a work in progress but the worst thing that can happen is that an NPC looks ugly. Because we are using many separate mods instead of one big collection now it's easy to swap things out or selectively hide files.

Argonian and Khajiit feet are currently bugged but unless you take off your boots and tfc 1 to zoom in on your toes, you will hardly notice it. I'm working on a solution.

Rebuilding Facegen

A little while ago there was a poll on the TPF Discord server (#quick-questions) where I asked people how they wanted facegen handled. To my own surprise only ~50 people voted for DIY instructions while ~140 people wanted to simply download pre-made facegen. I'm assuming some of those 140 were Wabbajack users so to put your minds at ease - no, I will not make you run the Creation Kit and generate facegen. This is only for manual guide users.

The point of the manual guide is to teach you as much about the modding process as possible. I could provide pre-made DynDOLOD or Nemesis output files but what would be the point? You would learn nothing. The same goes for facegen in my opinion: If we have to regenerate that for TPF, might as well teach people how to do it. Those who don't want to learn how to mod can simply use Wabbajack anyway.

Long story short: Users of the manual guide will have to generate facegen of their own from now on. Detailed instructions are of course provided and the whole process is far easier than it is made out to be. =)

In other news...

Because we've had an influx of user-made patches lately, there is now an official channel on the TPF Discord server to feature them. Currently these forks, patches, and addons are available:

• TitanBane's Elysium list on Wabbajack started out as a TPF fork.
• Spice up your TPF installation with Sr. Kaio's Seasoning.
• Add Legacy of the Dragonborn with Codygit's patch and instructions.
• Integrate Creation Club content with Delta's patches (coming to the Nexus soon tm).

Another fork in the form of a manual guide is also in the works so keep an eye on our Discord server for any news regarding that.

TPF Streams

After a fun experimental stream on February 10th I have taken to streaming on Twitch. We're playing the latest version of TPF with Lillith the Dunmer Shieldmage, hunting bugs and dragons with our murderous psychopath sidekick Lydia. I'm a complete beginner at the whole streaming business but making progress.

Streams are every Saturday @8pm CET on Twitch. Grab the @Stream Sub role on Discord to be notified about upcoming streams and for any stream-related news!

Wabbajack Support

Following in the footsteps of other Wabbajack list authors, I have decided to move all support for my two lists, TPF and WTP, to my own Discord server. I don't check my support channels on the WJ server often enough as it is. Redirecting all Wabbajack users to the TPF server will also make it easier for me to reach more TPF users (both manual and WJ) with a single ping on the TPF server for updates, polls, etc.

The support channels for TPF and WTP on the Wabbajack Discord server will be closed soon.

Next up

• I have a half-finished modding guide for Mass Effect 2 sitting around, waiting to be completed. I'm 20 hours into a playthrough modded with those instructions without any issues so really I just need to polish up my draft and publish it.
• I started working on an update for Welcome to Paradise (my Fallout 4 Wabbajack list) and already integrated the new FallUI mod with an update to my sorting overhaul. Hopefully the FO4 mood strikes me soon so I'll be able to finish and publish the update.
• And for The Phoenix Flavour I'm planning to add a bunch new retextures and an interface customisation section in the next update. No, customisation isn't making a come-back but there will be instructions at least for disabling some interface mods and swapping out the font replacer because these things are rather trivial.

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Alright that's all. I'll go finish up TPF 4.2 now and publish it later tonight. As usual the manual guide will be up first, then I'll recompile for Wabbajack.

Happy modding!

Phoenix