User:Kesta

About Me

I've been modding Skyrim heavily for more than 2 years now, and recently switched to Fallout 4. While not as expert as certain other people can be, I consider myself a fairly advanced user and learn every day.

Among other things, I like mechanic and coding, as well as girls, beers, coca-cola, and cigarettes. And video-games, of course !

In real life, I'm a 24 year old frenchy engineer, on the industrial field. I currently work as junior C# developer and researcher on a "Computer Aided Manufacturing" (CAM) software focused on 3D Printing. You think it's cool ? Yes it is. You think it must be fun ? Then you don't know what a compilation error is ;)

Video game wise, I mostly play RPGs now, even if I used to be a competitive RTS player some years ago (W40k:Dawn Of War and Starcraft II). I've also been playing LoL for some times, during the beta and the two first seasons. I've even been an ESL manager a few years ago. I also enjoy re-playing every Final Fantasy often, and the first generation of pokemon. I usually re-beat one or two of them every summer :p

As for my involvement in the modding community, I spend a lot of time providing support and creating various guide for the french community on La Confrérie des Traducteurs (meaning : The Translators Brotherhood). We mostly translate as much good mods available all around the web as we can there. This is also the home for the beta-development and testing of the amazing ESP-ESM Translator. I've been appointed forge-master there (i.e. modding forum moderator).

I'm usually active on the STEP forum, as well as AFKMods, /r/SkyrimMods, /r/falloutmods, and of course on Nexus.

If you're the "What's your hardware ?" kind of person, you'll find the answers you need on my System Specs page.

Modding Guides and Articles

I like writing. What do I say ? I LOVE writing. But I'm not super-great a it... especially with English. Believe it or not, I actually learned English with the modding community, the first non-subtitled videos I ever watched were Gopher's.

Anyway, I've written a couple of contributions here and there you might be interested into.

Boston Atomic Bomb Yankee

The big FO4 project for me. I won't lie, Neovalen's Skyrim Revisited seriously inspired me. This aim to be a high-quality modding guide for Fallout 4, offering the best of what the community have to offer in term of visuals, and every interesting and true-to-the-game enhancement and additions possible.

But no spoilers, if you're interested, there is a complete description on the guide's page. There is also a few side-guides that come with it:

• BABY - Boston Atomic Bomb Yankee
• Fallout 4 Configuration
• Fallout4Prefs.ini Guide (by DoubleYou)
• Mods Testing Page

Utility guides

A couple of guides to use advanced tools to help interested people to take the next step (... see what I did there ? :P ) in their modding adventures.

• xEdit Guide (FO3Edit, FNVEdit, FO4Edit, TES4Edit, TES5Edit)
• B.A.E. Guide
• Archive2 Guide

Technical articles

I wrote / am writing articles here on STEP. Basically my 2 cents (some will consider it's actually more 3 or 4 cents) to help curious modders & mod users to understand what's going on inside their game and mods, or just enlightened insights on some big debates about modding things.

• Plugin Files
• What is LOD ?
• Lighting, Weather and Post-Processing
• Understanding Fonts

Mods

I... make mods. I don't consider myself as a pure mod maker, I'm essentially a tech-boy, who can do stuffs clean and quick. But this is slowly getting into me. You know, modding is a drug, don't believe people who state otherwise.

Skyrim

Standalone Projects

• Easy Wheel Menu
  • A mod that take full advantage of Expired's wheelmenu for Skyrim to make feature from various gameplay mods extremely accessibles.
• RaceMenu Equip
  • A small mod to allow you to check your sheath/draw animations and equip/unequip your gear directly in the RaceMenu

Extensions

• Campfire Extensions
  • Kinda left this aside, the idea is/was to add several new gameplay features integrated in the Campfire's framework Chesko created. For now, there is bedrolls and bear traps.

Collaborations

• Vivid Weathers with MangaClub
  • The best weather mod out there. Simple as that ;) Okay, Manga did 95% of the work... but hey :)

Misc

• K Workshop
  • As I said, I'm essentially a tech-guy, and every tech-guy need some kind of workshop. There, I upload clean merges / patches for various stuffs a bit more complicated than basic actions, user-request, and small mods not worth their own page. And sometimes... betas of upcoming stuffs ;)

Fallout 4

Standalone Projects

• Locky Bastard
  • The super-uber cool mod to shoot locks, kick into doors, or blow up locked stuffs !

Misc

• K Workshop
  • As I said, I'm essentially a tech-guy, and every tech-guy need some kind of workshop. There, I upload user requests, minor tweaks / mods not worth their own page. And sometimes... betas of upcoming stuffs ;)

What are ya working on ?

The eternal question whenever you take a peek into a mod author's life / profile... what could this guy be doing ?
Well, here is the answer ;)

[FO4] Locky Bastard:
I still have a lot of ideas I'd like to include into Locky Bastard to improve the mod, soo... I'm not done yet ;)

[Skyrim] Weather Engine:
THE fucking big project for Skyrim. If you read this, please do NOT tell MangaClub :D He doesn't know yet, and will most likely never come here ;) That's gonna be a surprise.
Weather Engine include a fucking big lot of features for weathers, some already seen in other mods and expanded in term of quality/stability/variety/compatibility/performances such as Lightning or Pseudo-Volumetric Clouds, and some brand news such as tornadoes, particle rains, dynamic puddles, seasons, tree bending during tempests and so on. You can already see a small experimental feature in True Skyrim Snow All of this will most likely have built-in support for Vivid Weathers, if not directly integrated.

[Skyrim] Dynamic Gear:
Basically aim to be a top-notch mod for gear, with features similar to All Geared Up, Equipping Overhaul, Auto Unequip Ammo, Dual Sheath Redux, Unlocked Grip, and a few other ideas of mine.
But there is no point to do that unless I actually manage to get an implementation that's more stable and papyrus-friendly than just installing this list of mods... which is currently not the case :( (yeah, that was expected, those are all great mods by great modders who did awesome job by simply managing to put those features in the game)

[Skyrim] Purity:
Wait whaat ? You work both on Vivid Weather and Purity ?
Mmmh, kinda. Not as much actually. Laast approached me recently about the next version of purity, and need some help adding configuration options into it. Aaand... look like people directed him to me ^^ Since he's a cool guy who make good mods, and a fellow frenchy, I couldn't say no :) And I'm all in favor for both quality & quantity when it come to mod ;)

[Skyrim] Relighting Skyrim:
Oh boy... why I'm even saying this ? Following JawZ request for modders to work on a next iteration of RS, I joined, though I have yet to do anything. New projects keep coming, and I never find time to actually do any lighting stuffs for skyrim :( You can follow dev news on the STEP thread (check the latest pages)

[FO4] WET:
Probably gonna help SparrowPrince a little bit with some edits for WET. We talked a lot, but then again, I haven't done anything consistent enough to say I actually contributed to the mod.

[FO4] Radiant Weathers:
While I'm silently working on WeatherEngine for Skyrim, Manga started to work to a huge weather mod for Fallout 4. I'm probably going to do a few stuffs to spice up the whole thing at one point or another, if not reporting hundreds of color glitches in weather patterns during beta testing :P

[Skyrim] Art Of The Catch:
Nothing official, I didn't even talk to Chesko about it. Please don't do it for me, I'm a grown-up person ;)
Long story short, since he decided to halt the development of Art Of The Catch, I though I could look into a few stuffs for myself and share with him if I come up with something interesting.
I'm actually using this small project to learn more about FNIS and animations creations/implementation in the Creation Engine. For now, the best I did was to mess the animations so bad that my character had its head inside the ground when fishing. It look funny, but that's not exactly what I was aiming for ^^

[Skyrim] Follower... thing:
An other pretext to learn new things. Complexe AI packages in this case.
I'm hoping to get a decent framework to add more depth in Skyrim's followers, like the ability to spare/brawl/duel(magic) with them, to have them crafting and/or enchanting items for you, to persuade them to commit crimes with speech if they don't want to, to go by themselves in town, to go sell their junk to a vendor or buy their own food for need mods, etc...

STEP Wiki Links

• System Specs - Seriously need to buy a new PC >_<
• Sandbox - Just some wiki editing tests