How to prevent your rapees from screaming "yes"

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SPOILER INFO
No spoilers. This article describes a very annoying bug in the mod SexLab Defeat   and what you can do about it.
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I have written on several occasions how I admire the amazing sex system created by SexLab Framework and Defeat which provide the user with an incredibly realistic, exhilarating sex experience that makes Skyrim a whole new game.

There is, however, one bug that is very annoying: raped women screaming "yes". The probability of this occurring increases with the duration of the sex act and your level. SexLab seems to think that the higher your overall Skyrim level, the more inclined women are to like you. So it increases the probability of women expressing pleasure during sex, and Defeat fails to correct it. The result is that with your level somewhere in the 50s, a significant percentage of the women you rape begin to scream, I mean really scream "yes" in the final stage of sex. It's unacceptably unrealistic. With possible rare exceptions, women don't enjoy getting raped.

There are several ways to alleviate the problem, none of them quite satisfactory:
1. Reset your sex stats occasionally. SexLab thinks that the more sex you've had, the better your sex skills, and so the more women will enjoy being fucked by you. Unfortunately, when your overall Skyrim level is high enough, your general coolness is already so high that you can reset your stats after each sex act and SexLab stills makes women (regardless of relationshiprank ) consider it an honor to be raped by you.
2. Cut your sex acts short. Needless to say, that would greatly diminish your enjoyment.
3. Switch to one of the blowjob animations. With your penis in her mouth, the woman won't be able to scream. However, I don't want to be thus limited in my choices. It is particularly dissatisfying to have to begin pressing O  and looking for another animation when already in the ejaculation stage.

This utterly nonsensical behavior of my rapees increasingly destroyed my pleasure of sex to the point where I just paused my game, started to search for a solution and wouldn't stop searching until I had found it

It was not easy. I initially presumed that the sex sounds were coded as the so-called phonemes which you can see in MCM > SexLab > Expression Editor. But there are so many variations with different phonemes used by different expressions, and different expression themselves being used in different roles, that one can go crazy trying to understand it. Apart from which, there is no obvious way of telling which phoneme corresponds to which sound. I searched the web for the phoneme symbols. Unfortunately, the information as to their meaning, or where and how they are stored, is just nowhere to be found.

However, the little information that was there gave me the reason to suspect that the phonemes were actually used by the vanilla game as well (don't ask me for what purpose) and had nothing to do with sex sounds. If so, I can't imagine what they are doing in the SexLab MCM. But that's neither here nor there.

I finally found a forum post that said that sex sounds were actually stored as wav  files. I found it hard to believe that anything in Skyrim would use a common file format, but I checked just in case, and it turned out to be true. I found the sex sounds among the files of the SexLab Framework mod, under Sound\fx\SexLab, and they are indeed regular wav  files. There is a number of soft moans "yeah", but I don't think I have ever heard those during rape. The coarse screams "yes" are in the subdirectory vFemaleMoan07\hot . I made backups of the two offending files and then overwrote them with normal sex moans. (Meaning, created copies of two acceptable sound files, giving the copies the names of the two offending files.)

That fixed the problem.



[originally published 2017-08-07]






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Introduction to me and Skyrim 3/3: How?

back to Part 2


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SPOILER INFO
Apart from describing the working of one mod, this article doesn't give away anything that happens in the game.
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Proper modding

I saw it written somewhere that the game of Skyrim is supposed to last approximately 80 real-time hours. That is quite incredible. I used much more than that just for making the game even playable – that is, searching and testing mods.

You will probably see it written in the forums that Mod Organizer is supposed to have a "steep learning curve". Well, yes and no. It is not exactly install-and-play, but I assure you that learning to use MO is far less effort than trying to make things work with that piece of shit Nexus Mod Manager. (That is unless your computer is very slow. MO needs a lot of computing power.)
In order to use Mod Organizer, you have to watch the video series made by Gopher. Now, please note that I have despised all kinds of video tutorials for my entire life. So when I am recommending a video tutorial, it means it must be mind-blowingly good. Gopher's Mod Organizer series is mind-blowingly good. I can't stress enough how vital it is for everyone who is new to the Mod Organizer.
(FYI, the video number 1 is not the first in the series. The first video is titled "Introduction", the second video is number 1, the third video is number 2, etc.)
When I was setting up Mod Organizer, I actually had Gopher's video running. I watched a bit, then paused the video, did what Gopher had done, watched a little more, paused the video, did the same thing in my computer, and so on. I emphatically recommend that you do the same. It can save you very much time and frustration.


So, what about that rape mod?

The rape mod is perfectly real. It is called SexLab Defeat   (or just Defeat   for short). It enables you to mark any NPC as a target by pressing G . (For clarity, I refer to that action as G-assault .) When you approach the target from behind so that she is not noticing that you are there, pressing G  gives you complete power over her (unless someone sees or hears you doing it, in which case the assault will fail and a combat will start; you'll be in a lot of trouble). A menu will open with the choices "Inventory", "Tie Up", "Kill", "Rape" etc. If you click on "Rape", the two of you will get naked and have sex in one of the positions provided by a corresponding mod.
The same applies when the target is asleep, except that then, strangely enough, the G-assault is always successful even in plain view of other people.
In case you mark the target with G  while she is either seeing you or otherwise noticing you are there, she will be marked as a target, but before you can actually use her, she needs to be injured to the point where she will cease fighting and get on her knees (a normal occurrence in Skyrim combat). Then you can approach her and loot, rape, kill etc.
(Note: children won't ever get naked and can't be raped. They can however be looted, tied up and killed, if you have a mod that enables it.)

There is another similar mod called Death Alternative , but I am not using it as I'm happy with Defeat .

After 300+ hours of playing, I can tell you that rape in Skyrim looks as believable as can be expected in a video game, right to the victims' wailing. There is room for improvement (like, the victims could cry visible tears as well), but all things considered, it is astonishing. Skyrim rape mods are the definition of "too good to be true", except that they are very true. I still can't believe that the Lovers Lab forum is allowed to operate. I still can't believe that feminist activists aren't standing day and night in front of Bethesda's office with banners demanding that they alter Skyrim so that rape mods would become non-functional. But it is so.

By a funny coincidence, the Skyrim icon looks a little bit like a vulva.  ;-)


Let's get to it

Of course, modding of Skyrim is not limited to sex. The large majority of mods aren't in any way sexual. During my two months of mod research, I ended up testing hundreds of them. There are, for instance, mods for making your character need food, water and sleep. (In the vanilla game, food and drink exist but can safely be ignored.) Or adding buildings and NPC's to a number of locations. Or correcting prices of goods to make them more realistic.

Someone wrote: "I like Skyrim. I just hate the fact that it sucks without mods! Players doing Bethesda's fucking job." I disagree. Yes, unmodded Skyrim sucks. But modding is actually a good thing. Each one of us can practically create his own Skyrim game. Skyrim is like video gaming 2.0. Modded video games compared to unmodded video games – that is like unmodded video games compared to board games.

Take sex, for instance. If it existed in the vanilla game, it would surely have been made absurdly complicated and unpleasant. For instance, all kinds of NPC's would pester you with unsolicited remarks about how important it is to always use a condom, and surely the game would have a rule that if you had sex without a condom, you would catch a VD 50% of the time, and so on. Years ago, I saw a prostitution sim which was all about condoms and gang wars, the actual sex trade being little more than an excuse to shoot your competitors dead.

Anyway, after two months of intensive mod testing I finally managed to create a mod configuration that worked satisfactorily. It was clear that there were things that could have been made better still, but I was fed up with mod testing and was dying to do some actual playing for a change.

So I started a game which I played for 382 real-time hours. (How do I know? Because the real time spent playing is stored in the name of each savegame.) I did not complete the game. I decided to abandon it and start a new one, but I will come back to the reasons later. For now, it is sufficient to say that Skyrim opened up a whole new world to me.

In the other articles in this blog, I am going to cover a variety of topics that I feel deserve to be written about. I also intend to describe the new game I will start after I have tested a number of mods I have found in the meantime. I don't really care if it will interest anyone. I just want to put it all in writing and release it into the world.



[originally published 2016-10-17]






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