The Together Team

Developer update #4 (24-12-2023)

24 December 2023

Update

https://www.reddit.com/r/SkyrimTogether/comments/1acvkej/comment/kjxvsjr/

Hey,

so it’s been a while, but I’ll be dropping another update soon, 1.6. It’ll be ready somewhere at the start of January. For anyone wanting to jump into the mod, I’d recommend waiting for 1.6, since it contains some major improvements that drastically improve the gameplay, particularly in combat. Anyway, as a sneak peek, here are the shortened patch notes.

Best,
Robbe (cosideci).

Patch notes

• Overhauled combat targeting system
• ESL mod syncing (Anniversary Edition support)
• Calendar sync and calendar progression (dragons can now spawn in the wild!)
• Fixed crashes related to dragons
• Fixed wrong damage calculations
• Waypoint sync (blue markers on map)
• Fixed book reading bug
• Fixed SetTime command crash
• Fixed nightvision effect syncing
• Fixed rare memory leak
• Fixed quest start code
• Added a helper button in the debug UI (F3) that stops all combat in the area (in case a player accidentally agros an entire town for example)
• Added a helper button to reveal other players. Pressing the button (F4) toggles between revealing other players (Similar to Detect Life)

Developer update #3 (22-05-2022)

22 May 2022

Hey everyone,

This will be our last development progress update before our initial, 1.0 beta release. We will talk about that more later, in a different post. This is the last big feature update. After this, we will focus on adding some miscellaneous features, fixing some critical bugs and getting things ready for our initial beta release.

Best,
Robbe (cosideci).

Quest and dialogue sync

The headliner here, as some of you might already know, is quest sync. We have already shown you a video showcasing us playing through a large part of act 1 of the main quest. Since, we have also implemented dialogue sync, including syncing subtitles, and the player’s dialogue choices through chat.

As for the gameplay of questing itself: what you’ve seen in the video is roughly what you can expect on the beta release. You will have to “massage” the quest sync system a bit. You will have start a new game, join up with your friends after leaving Helgen, have one person create a party and be the quest leader, and follow said quest leader. This quest leader is responsible for taking quests, looting quest items, doing quest related puzzles, and talking to quest actors to make story choices. As the quest leader, you should try and enter areas before your friends do, to make sure you are the “host” of that area. It is not recommended to switch quest leaders mid playthrough.

On another note, not all quests will work all that well out of the box on the initial beta release. The sudden possibility of quest sync has opened the mod up to a whole new range of technical problems to solve. We are hoping that people will step up to help out with that when the mod goes open source.

UI

The UI is steadily making progress. We will be reusing the front-end of the old Skyrim Together UI. Dragonisser has been hard at work to improve upon what was already there, like creating a settings menu, fixing the party UI to work with the new party leader system, adding “teleport to player” buttons, a list of players connected to the server, etc. The UI you see here is still a work in progress.

Player death handling

When a player dies, it goes into a bleedout state. Instead of dying and reloading a save, the player will spawn at the start of the dungeon if it dies in a dungeon. If it dies in a city or in Skyrim, they will simply spawn somewhere nearby, similarly to how it works in GTA Online. On death, you will lose X% of your gold, where X is a configurable setting in the server side settings file. It is set to 0 by default.

Stability

We have worked hard to make sure that the mod is as stable as possible. While it still crashes every so often, the amount of crashes have reduced significantly compared to 6 months ago when we officially started doing crash fixes. Back then, we often could not play for more than 5 minutes before crashing. Now, we have played for several hours with only 1 to 2 crashes. We have determined that the current level of stability is acceptable for an initial beta release.

Party XP sync

To simulate vanilla’s leveling progression, we have decided to synchronize skill XP gains with your party. Here’s how it works. Let’s say players 1 and 2 are in a party, and player 1’s primary combat skill is one-handed, and player 2’s primary combat skill is destruction magic. If player 1 hits a draugrs with a sword and gains 5 XP in the one-handed skill, then player 2 will gain 5 XP in destruction magic. This system only syncs XP gained in combat skills.

We are unsure whether this feature is necessary, or wanted even. This will be a great thing to test on a larger scale when the beta releases.

Horse sync

Horses are synced fairly well now. Other players can be seen riding horses. They are still some visual bugs present, like horses moving without moving their legs, but we do not expect to fix those before release.

Mounting dragons is also synced, though the player lags behind a bit when riding it, so that looks somewhat funny.

Beast form

The transformations and animations for both the vampire lord and werewolf beast forms are now synced. When a player goes back out of beast form, their forms should be reverted back to their humanoid player character for all players.

Server settings

We have a implemented a bunch of server settings that will be useful in customizing your server to what you prefer. Here are a few prominent examples:

• Game difficulty
• Pvp
• Gold loss factor on death

Mod policy

The server now maintains a list of mods that the user should have installed. This prevents desync between players with different mods. The load order is also enforced. If a player is missing certain mods or has too many mods, the server will kick that player and inform them through a message displayed in our UI. This feature is of course optional, but for the most stable experience, we do recommend that you do not disable this feature.

Dragon sync improvements

Dragons have had some simple (but significant) improvements. They now sync when they travel large distances. You will now see dragons flying off hundreds of meters away with your friends.

Mod support

We have been hard at work to make sure that Mod Organizer 2 properly loads the mod. SKSE can also be properly loaded again.

Address library integration

Given the recent “Anniversary Edition” fiasco, we have decided to use the “Address library” mod for Reborn. You will need to install this mod to run Reborn. We will of course have both video and written instructions on how to do that on release.

General UX improvements

We have made improvements in the general user experience of the mod. For example, when launching the game for the first time, the “Find Skyrim.exe” selection menu has been improved. Another example is versioning. The user is properly notified when they try to connect to a server with an out of date version of the mod.

Developer update #2 (11-03-2022)

11 March 2022

Hey everyone,

It’s been a few months since our last update, but we’ve been busy, and we have a lot to show you. Before we do so, though, we want to clarify some points of order.

Firstly, we have decided to release Fallout Together after Skyrim Together Reborn. The plan was originally to develop them at the same time and release them on the same date, but due to the small size of our team, this is proving to be more challenging than we thought. Therefore, we will finish Skyrim Together Reborn first, and release Fallout Together after that. Currently, Fallout Together is not too far behind Skyrim Together Reborn, but it does still need some work.

Secondly, we are happy to announce that most of our major planned core gameplay features are in! This means that we will be spending our time polishing the mod, fixing bugs, fixing crashes, tweaking gameplay elements where necessary, and building the launcher and in-game UI. With that, we are officially in the last phase of development before we can release 1.0. As always, keep in mind that this does not mean that we have an estimated release date in mind.

Lastly, we would like to officially welcome Dragonisser to the dev team! Dragonisser is a long time moderator for the mod, and has done some UI work for reborn in the past. She will be building the front end of the UI.

Now, onto the progress update itself.

Stability

Since most of our core features are done, our internal testing team has been hard at work testing the mods for bugs and crashes, and we have been fixing them accordingly. We are happy to report that this process is going well, and that stability is rapidly improving.

Magic effects

Last update, we mentioned that we had synchronized magic effects. After testing the system, we noticed that it had some problems, and certain effects didn’t sync. We have made some major improvements in that regard. Most magic effects are now synchronized between players. One examples are the Slow Time shout. Healing other players through spells also works now.

Unpaused menus

Menus are now unpaused natively in the mod. Whenever you open a chest, open your quest journal, open your magic selection menu, the game will not be paused anymore, akin to the Skyrim Souls mod.

New inventory system

We have completely revamped our old inventory system. With this new system, the server will have a lot more control over individual players’ inventories, what enchantments they have, whether they are upgraded, etc.

ES parser

This is a more technical issue, but this might be exciting for modders. We have developed an in house esm/esp/esl parser that can load core and mod files onto the server. We plan to add a server-side scripting API in a post release feature update. The game records can be exposed to the API, and the sky will be the limit on what modders can do with that.

Thank you for your continued interest in our mod, we are excited about what comes next :)

Best,
Robbe (cosideci).

Developer update #1 (3-12-2021)

3 December 2021

Hi folks,

These patch notes describe what we’ve accomplished this past month. We were able to do quite a lot in November. I can’t promise that the patch notes will always be this big, since the current dev team only consists of 2 developers (including me), but we’ll at least try to keep you up to date semi regularly. Whenever a new developer update goes up, I will post it in the #dev-updates channel on our Discord server.

Best,
Robbe (cosideci).

Showcase

Magic projectiles sync

Fus Ro Dah sync (very important ;) )

Object animation sync

Arrow sync

Features

• Projectiles are now synced in Fallout 4
• General improvements to arrow sync in Skyrim
• Magic projectiles are more accurately synced in Skyrim
• Magic effects are now synced in Skyrim
• Summoning spells are synced better (no duplication)
• Object animations are now synced (dragon claw door, puzzles, etc.)
• Sneaking is now synced (other players will not detect you anymore)
• Major improvements to equip sync in Skyrim (drawing weapons is synced more consistently)

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a handful of crashes
• Fixed a handful of gameplay bugs
• Fixed a performance bug

Tweaks

• General improvements to Skyrim animations
• Added F2 key to unlock the UI

Technical stuff

• Reverse engineered AI detection code
• Reverse engineered MagicTarget system
• Reverse engineered Fallout 4 magic classes
• Tooling to seamlessly upgrade the mod to any future updates to Skyrim AE

Anniversary Edition and Progress Updates

9 November 2021

Hey everyone,

As many of you may know, Bethesda is releasing Skyrim Anniversary Edition soon. As the SKSE developers have already pointed out, this will break many mods (including ours), since they will be forcing this update on Skyrim Special Edition too. Not to worry, we do have solutions for every edition of our mod.

First, let’s start with “old Skyrim Together”, also sometimes referred to as “the Harbor edition” or “nightlies”. This is the discontinued version of Skyrim Together. It has not been updated in over 2 years. It is still available to download, however, and many people are still playing it. We will not be updating this version of the mod to work with the anniversary update. Fortunately, there is a solution for those who want to keep playing this version of the mod - there is a Nexus guide on how to revert your copy of Skyrim back to the current version.

Secondly, there’s “Skyrim Together Reborn”. This is the rewrite of the Skyrim Together mod, which has seen a lot of progress this year (more on that further down this announcement). We will be updating this version to work with the anniversary edition. This should have no impact on people playing Skyrim Together right now, since Reborn is not yet released.

Lastly, we wanted to give a little update on the progress we have made on Skyrim Together Reborn and Fallout 4 Together (collectively also known as Tilted Online). Since our last announcement, we have been working on syncing projectiles, which are now synced in both Skyrim and Fallout 4. Furthermore, magic spells and magic effects are synced too. Force has implemented a new launcher for Skyrim and Fallout 4. He is also working hard on our new UI for both the launcher and the in-game HUD.

In terms of gameplay features, we are fairly happy with what we have so far. In the coming months, we will be focusing on polishing existing features, improving stability, and trying to make the gameplay as solid as possible. One way we’ll be doing that is by looking into how we can make questing as smooth as possible. We have already had some discussions about this with the community. If you have any suggestions in regards to this, or if you have any ideas on features that the mod should include, we have created a new Discord channel (#development-feedback) where you can talk to us and the community about it. Please do try to keep discussion in this channel on-topic.

As always, please remember that the mod will be ready when it’s ready, and we can not give any estimations as to when we will release the mod, even though it might seem like the mod is practically finished (yes, we see you guys reacting with “soon” emojis in git-dev :p). You can view the list of completed features and planned features here, though this list is subject to change.

Much love, The Together Team

P.S.: here’s a little sneak peak into projectile sync. It syncs pixel perfectly on all clients! :)