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Solving a few issues in Harrowhark’s playthrough
I alluded to this in the post I put up yesterday about Harrowhark’s latest session, but wanted to call this out separately here: I got a solution to my missing MCMs!
User Grayblood on the Nexus Mods Discord helpfully pointed me at the Menu Maid 2 mod, recommending this as a way to fix my missing MCMs rather than trying to use Jaxonz’s MCM Kicker. Menu Maid has several dependencies, but I had most of them already except for Powerofthree’s Tweaks. So I installed both Menu Maid 2 and Powerofthree’s Tweaks… and just like that, boom, my missing MCMs showed up.
However, this wasn’t the only problem I’ve now solved in Harrow’s playthrough.
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Issue with no controller buttons on screen SOLVED
A little while ago today I did a post lamenting a problem I was having with my Oblivion install on my Steam Deck showing me keyboard prompts on screen rather than controller button prompts. I am delighted to report, as of this post, that this issue is solved.
A helpful user on Mastodon (all hail @blake@fosstodon.org) told me that the issue was that the controller config I had on the Deck was sending keyboard inputs, not controller inputs. And that what I had to do was to change to a configuration that sent controller inputs instead.
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No controller button prompts on screen in Oblivion
EDITING TO ADD 1/22/2023 8:25pm, for anybody that lands on this post: I’ve actually found a solution to this issue. Please have a look at this later post.
So once I got Oblivion running on my Steam Deck, I thought I’d try to do the same thing with it that I did with Shenner’s run in Skyrim: i.e., go ahead and mod it, but very lightly, sticking to just bug fix mods, or ones that provide critical enhancements to just improve the game’s quality of play on a modern device.
However, I’m running into an issue I need help with.
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How to do game captures on the Steam Deck
One of the few things I like about the Nintendo Switch more than the Steam Deck is that the Switch has a built-in button for doing video captures. I hit that button, it records the last 30 seconds of what just happened on whatever game I’m playing. Super convenient! And I can yoink the resulting video right out of my captured data, right up to my computer.
While running Shenner’s playthrough, I really rather missed having that ability. I really like playing on a laptop, but don’t currently have a way to do video capture set up on my Win11 VM. Nor, until last night, did I have any way to do it on the Deck.
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My current modding setup on Steam Deck (Updated)
This week I was contacted on Twitter by a user with the handle Shadark. (Hi, Shadark!) This person was going down the same path I’d done, trying to get Skyrim Together Reborn running on the Steam Deck. We got to talking on Discord, and I agreed to provide some screenshots of what my current setup is.
But during that conversation, I realized it might actually be better to do so here on the blog. Shadark found me googling for help about modding on the Steam Deck. But if anybody else needs this information, I figured it would be nice to have a cohesive walkthrough I can point at!
Previous posts of mine were more scattershot, and contained a lot of experimentation. So here’s a more up to date post, pulling relevant bits of data out of previous posts and presenting them in a more coherent fashion. Hopefully this will be useful not only to Shadark but to any other Steam Deck players who might be interested in modding Skyrim on their devices.
Since Shadark was specifically interested in Skyrim Together Reborn, I’ll be talking about that some in this post, but my setup is not just for that mod. If STR is not a thing you want to try playing, feel free to disregard the parts of this post explicitly related to that, which is section 9.
This is in-depth geekery so I’m putting it all behind the fold. (Dreamwidth folks, if you’re reading this via crossposting, as near as I can tell the post came through okay over to Dreamwidth. It looks okay from my DW account. If it does not look okay for you, let me know.)
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In Which Gyllerah Explores Summerset and the Game in General
The three people in my household aren’t quite ready to play ESO completely together yet, so for the moment, I’m just working on exploring Summerset, practicing with ESO’s unfamiliar UI, and seeing if I can get the lay of the land before we seriously start questing.
So this is a double session post, but it’s very exploratory and has no real game action yet. This is entirely practice!
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Update on my ability to play ESO on my Mac
As I mentioned in my earlier post about starting Gyllerah on ESO, I filed a support ticket with Bethesda about how the ESO launcher crashed out on me as soon as I hit the Play button, when trying to run natively on my new Mac.
Unsurprisingly, their primary answer to this was “sorry, we don’t support the game on M1 Macs”. They likewise also had to tell me that they don’t support playing in VMs, either.
I was not surprised by this answer. There is an announcement Bethesda put up that basically says the same thing, and I’d already seen that announcement. And speaking as an SDET who’s had quite a bit of experience with software development, even if I haven’t worked on something as huge and complex as a worldwide MMO, I can see where they’re coming from when they say it’d be a huge deal for them to try to rework ESO’s code base to make it support ARM machines.
(Further extensive geekery about this behind the fold.)
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Skyrim Together Reborn on the Steam Deck
Editing to add 11/6/2022: This post is getting a little traffic still, so if you’re looking for tips about how to run Skyrim Together Reborn on a Steam Deck, please have a look at my more recent post where I give a thorough walkthrough about my setup.
This is a followup post to others I’ve been doing lately about getting Skyrim Together Reborn, a mod that allows you to play Skyrim as a group with friends, working on my Steam Deck.
Which has been a challenge. The mod is only officially supported on Windows, as I was advised outright on the STR Discord. And right now I’m not running Windows on the Deck. I’m not likely to change this any time soon, just because as I understand it, you can’t dual boot between operating systems directly on the device. And I’m not in a hurry to wipe SteamOS off the thing.
But since I’d gotten other Skyrim mods functional on the Deck, and since the Deck is currently my most powerful gaming device*, I wanted to see if I could make it work at all.
Deets behind the fold.
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Additional update re: modding Skyrim on the Steam Deck
As of yesterday I figured out a couple more things with my mod setup, so here’s a few more notes about that. This is a followup to these previous posts:
More behind the fold.
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Modding Skyrim on the Steam Deck update
This is a followup to last night’s post where I put out a call for help resolving problems I was having getting a modded Skyrim setup going on my Steam Deck.
I’m pleased to report that the situation has now been resolved! Many thanks to the user named Baguette on the Skyrim Together Discord server, who gave me some helpful tips.
So here’s a post about what those tips were, and what I had to do to get the Deck ready for modding.