Unholy Darkness

Complete Vampire Overhaul for Oblivion

 

Foreword from the Author

Welcome to Unholy Darkness, a complete vampire overhaul for Oblivion. I spent over a year making this mod, slaving away late at night, weekends and my spare time. My main goal for this mod for the player to actually feel like a vampire, and to experience many thrills exporing the deep dark secrets of the vampire underworld as they discover the powers of their new unlife. It is a dark curse, and so it should feel like one. There are some disadvantages to being a vampire, but also great powers no mortal could ever experience. I want to thank GURUSR for his scripting, Sinblood for his artwork, and the community for their help and undying support, and encouragement. Also for many great ideas which came up along the way.

Introduction

I enjoyed many of the existing vampire mods out there but none of them ever felt complete; something was always missing. I either felt like a human standing in some beautifully placed vampire settings and characters, or I had some amazing powers a wonderul scripter put together, but it lacked immersion, sound effects, and graphical support, and most of all the FEELING that I was a VAMPIRE, a cold killing predator of the night. I played any vampire mod that remotely had something of interest to me, but sadly I would have to uninstall it due to game crashing bugs or unplayable quests, or both. I never FELT like a vampire. So my main goal was to come up with a complete vampire mod which fulfilled all my vampire fantasies in one easy to install package. Here are just a few of the many features:

Fully Voice Acted Quests

Unholy Darkness features fully voice acted quests and NPCs. As I mentioned, I made this mod to FEEL like a vampire, and part of a dark deep underworld and the only way that could happen was with VOICE acting, quests, and new sound effects. Originally I was selling my voice acting and sound effects to help cover file hosting, and hopefully make something for the 2000 professinal man hours that were invested into the mod, but due to potential legal issues, I have made the files all free. However, you will have to fill out an offer from a third party company who pays me for your email address or other information. This money is used to give you the best support I can, cover web site hosting fees, and buy me a cup of coffee when I'm burning the 5am oil working on this mod or upcoming sequels.

Awesome Graphics

Unholy Darkness has a lot of custom graphics. Here are screenshots and videos for your unholy pleasure. Much more to come...

Vampire Lord's Manor with Servant & Guard Epic Battles New NPC Llordril Andrethi

Just Fed

Feed Lust

New NPC - Cinda

Vampire Speed

If you won't give me your blood, I'll have to just take it, by force.

Your thralls can feed too

Chorrol Home Bedroom

Chorrol Home Main Area

Thrall Cages

Vampire Hunters

New powers

There are many many new powers to Unholy Darkness. Not just a bunch of spells either, but many powers which have hot keys, toggle on /off capabilities, custom sound effects, scripts, animations, and graphics to enhance these powers, and more. You can even press a hotkey to cycle through your "jump power" so you can jump on top of a house, or on top of a castle, if you are powerful enough. There are many traditional vampire powers which make you extremely fast, strong, agile, super jumping ability, difficult to see, enchance your personality, water breathing, glamoring npcs into doing your will, immune to disease and falls. Regeneration, healing when feeding, and hardened skin are just a few of the many powers. See a full description below.

New ways to feed

There are many ways to feed now. The old fashioned way (on someone asleep), you can talk someone into it if they like you enough, you can romantically charm someone and take their blood in a kiss, you can feed on dead bodies (until the blood is gone), or you can take the blood by force with force feed, which includes a new animation. You can also drain someone dry if you sneak force feed, killing the victim. There is bottled blood for sale, but it does not have all the same properties as fresh human blood does.

Glamoring. Vampires are masters of deception and mind control. Glamor humans into forgetting the crimes they are about to witness, giving you their blood, following you to a secluded place for a nice feed in a shadowy area, tell them to go to sleep, and much more.

Vampire additions to most of the player homes

Most of the player homes have new additions you can buy, which add a secret vampire haven to the stock homes. The chorrol home is completely transformed if you buy the optional packages, including a blood bath, loaded thrall cage, and secret sleeping chamber. The Rosethorn Hall mansion has a complete Lords manner with servant and guards, dungeon with thrall. The butler Cliftius Gravius will fetch a thrall for you on command, or serve you bottled blood. All lairs come with thrall cages you can lure unsuspecting victims to and hold them captive for when you get hungry.

Vampire dealers

Silian Valodius is your hook up. He is a vampire dealer. He is open all night, and sells items specifically for vampires. He has a dark and mysterious past, gruff voice, and isn't really that friendly. He has three quests for the player to learn about his past and earn his trust. He has rooms for rent with coffins and blood dolls, and whatever else a vampire could want. He can even get rid of pesky vampire hunters and buy your stolen wares.

Vampire Hunters

They are someone you may not wish to ever meet in Unholy Darkness. Vampires are considered evil and will be attacked if spotted, or at least reported to the authorities. If your behavior is reckless, feeding on people in the streets, showing your fangs in public, being seen feeding on someone asleep, or feeding on too many people in a guild will certainly raise your vampire bounty. Once its high enough, hunters will seek the prize and come for you. By laying low for a while, only feeding on bandits or bottled blood for a few weeks should eventually lower your bounty enough to make them go away. Or you can try to kill them, which is only a temporary solution. Or you can talk to a dealer and pay an enormous sum to get your bounty removed.

Voice Acting & Sound effects

What kind of quest is complete without voice acting? How can that ancient vampire scolding you be intimidating if its silent? What kind of vampire moves very fast without a "woosh" sound. When I feed, I want to hear the skin breaking as my teeth "crunch" into the neck. When I jump there should be a wind sound. When I fall 1000 feet, I want to hear my feet hit the ground. When my maker commands me to do something, I want to hear him speak. When an ancient aristocratic arrogant vampire is gloating over his power, I want to fully loath him by hearing the nasty in his voice.

Drawbacks & weaknesses

Now before you go ballistic and start saying these weaknesses suck, blah blah blah hear me out. How much fun is having uber powers without earning them? When a game is beaten, and there is no longer new challenges, it always becomes boring. Each weakness I designed specifically for a game play changing result. You don't want to play Oblivion any more because its the same thing every time. These weaknesses can be overcome, that is the FUN of this mod. There are tools available at the players disposal to deal with all the weaknesses, but trust me a LOT of testing went into the game play of this mod, and even if you don't like the sound of something here, even my worst skeptics have seen the light after playing it, and ended up enjoying the things they though were going to suck, pun intended.

Sundamage. When first turned it is severe, but lessens as your regeneration increases, as well as your vampire age increases. Once you are a week old vampire you can venture out into the sun for brief periods of time if you feed.

Holy Damage. Vampires take damage when inside a chapel. This can be overcome with healing potions, healing spells, and your own regeneration as you progress as a vampire.

Coffin dependency. Vampires need to sleep in their coffin or strange things happen to their mind. Voices, bugs crawling, teeth grinding, and a general insanity will start to kick in if you do not rest. If deprived of a coffin for too long, a vampire can spill blood when feeding, and never be satisfied fully, and they get very irriatating to be around.. This causes them to lose their ability to blend in with society and they cannot mask darkness. Think of it as a womb, not a tomb. A new vampire must return to their coffin to grow. As a vampire ages the time they can be away from their coffin increases, and eventually an elder vampire will outgrow the coffin entirely.

Silian Valodius sells a portable urn which is filled with special dirt. Place it near any bed in custom homes to get the same effects of sleeping in a coffin. This allows people to use custom house mods or sleep anywhere if they can't find a coffin, and get the benefits of sleeping in a coffin.

Garlic weakness. Garlic causes vampires to take damage if close enough to some really strong clusters. Simply activate them and they will burn up and wither and no longer bother you. Eating garlic will not only make your breath bad, but can potentially kill a vampire. Don't carry it around either. Bad stuff. HISS.

Vampires are considered evil, and if an NPC finds out your true nature, they will either flee from you or attack you most likely. Always stay fed so you can maintain your mask of darkness or NPC's will react, badly in most cases. If you are seen enough, or commit vampire crimes, they will hire vampire hunters to deal with you. Play careful and you might live to become an elder or even ancient vampire. Then you can go on a killing spree and most likely not fear the wrath of the game world. Money can make the hunters go away, or the tip of your sword, its up to you, but a new vampire or low level character will have one logical choice when they meet a hunter... RUN.

Quotes about Unholy Darkness

"Right, Bought the soundfiles and downloaded the mod yesterday and received the email around middday.
Installed it and started playing straight away with my level 7 Battlemage, haven't played Oblivion
for months because i got really bored with it and was waiting for this... i think last time i played
i managed to play for like 30 minutes before i got bored and that was in February i think.

My session yesterday lasted for 16 hours lol and all i can say is OMFG, what a mod! It's not Oblivion
anymore... it's something completely different, the way you play the game, the way you have to put
some thought and effort in everything you do. I absolutely love it :)

It's 10 in the morning here now and i'm about to start a new game again lol, i can see me and my gf
having a few arguments in the future about my priorities :)

Awesome job MM, absolutely love it!!!!!!!!!!!! " - Cyco

 

"The nerve of that guy! A few hours after he bit her, the Maker showed up again. He snatched my girl right out of a battle, shook her by the neck and told her she didn’t know how to fight, and sent her off to heal.  Yeah, right.  We’re on a quest, so it’s back to the mage’s guild.  And then the nausea hit.  She doubles over in pain,  can barely walk.  I’ve figured out by now to expect anything from you MM, so I let this play out.  For two whole days she stumbles around the guild hall, doubled over, clutching her stomach with a look of pure misery on her face. She falls down the stairs twice. Once she nearly fell in the fireplace. I watch as mysterious blotches appear on her body, and her stomach shrinks until her navel almost touches her spine.  And then she dies. 

When she returns in undeath, her face is all fangs and fury and hunger.  No other vampire morph has ever made her look like this.  And when she flings that blood-drained woman away and turns around covered in gore, I realize I don’t know my own girl anymore.  Good god, Madmole - - what have you done!  I love it! - BG"

"Thank you for your time and work put into this mod. I'm sure the community and I'm is very appreciative of your mod support (Directed to entire UD Staff)." -Acebane

Requirements:

Latest Oblivion patch
OBSE

Highly Recommended:

Unholy Darkness voice files, Sound effects & Email support.

Quests are just better with voice acting! Why would you want to feel immersed in a vampire mod, only to hear silence during the most emotional and feeling invoking moment of the game, when quest dialogue is spoken? Do you watch a movie and hit mute when the good part is on? I don't think so. While I don't consider myself a professional voice actor, I do have credits for some video games voices my studio has shipped. And while the quality of the voice files could be better, I do think that the mod is greatly enhanced with them. So whats all the fuss about installing the voice files?

As I mentioned in the introduction, I spent a year on this mod. I make games professionally, so spending a year working for free doesn't work out very well. Legally, I cannot charge for mod making, but I can sell my voice files and original content created outside the Oblvion Construction Set separately.. While some might say voice files by themselves are not worth $9.99 I think the mod in its entirely IS. And by purchasing the voice files you will be supporting my efforts in general, and hopefully enabling me to make part two of the mod. And as a bonus to purchasing the voice files, you will also get my undying email support should you have any support issues, questions or comments.

DOWNLOAD UNHOLY DARKNESS HERE. Updated January 20th 2011 to version 1.0 U

Installation Instructions

It is recommended that you start a new character, but some people have had no problems using existing characters.

Installation

Unrar all the files in the download to a temp folder.

Copy Unholy Darkness.esp and all the files /folders to your Oblivion/Data folder

Activate Unholy Darkness ESP and place it last in your load order.

If you have Sinblood's vampire haven, deactivate it, it is included in this mod.

 

Tested Custom Races:
http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=30132&navtag=file/images.php?id=30132&tab=3 xenia vampire race works perfect with unholy darkness. However its completely unbalanced starting out with 100 personality, massive strength and blade skill. I like the face and texture work but unless you want god like ability early on its pointless to use this mod.

Raven elves work well but require the eye fix posted below.

Step 1
If you have a custom race, open the esp that came with the custom race using the CS.

Then procede to step 2.

If you are using a vanilla or stock race you will need to make a new mod with the CS. Just load oblivion.esm and then save as my_race.esp or whatever you want to name it. Then Click on Character the Race and select the type of race you have. Right click and then click duplicate from the sub menu. It should create the same name below it with a COPY0000 extension. This next step isn't needed, but click on it so it flashes and you can rename it. Get rid of the COPY0000 and just rename that part to Custom. So if you were originally an Imperial, name it to Custom Imperial. If you were a Redguard, it would be Custom Redguard, etc.

Step 2
Click on your new race (or custom race) from the Character/Race menu. Now click on the face data tab. Under Teeth Upper box, click on that then navigate to the teeth you want to use under data/meshes/madmole/UnholyDarkness/

You can pick from VampireFangsTraditional or VampireFangsTrueblood (included in final release). Ok it and save your esp.

Once in the game, open the console and type "showracemenu" without the quotes. From there you can change to your new race and the teeth will be changed. Don't close the menus or your attributes will get screwed up. Just save the game now, and then load that saved game and your done.

Eye Fix:

Here is a step by step video walk through of the entire process of how to fix your eyes if they are messed up if you use a custom race. Many thanks go out to speedio for the tutorial. Here are some additional notes from speedio.

"All the tools I used are free to use. Figured it would be a good idea to use tools everyone can get easy.

BSA Commander link: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3311
Gimp Portable link: http://portableapps.com/apps/graphics_pictures/gimp_portable
Gimp Portable DDS plugin link: http://code.google.com/p/gimp-dds/downloads/list

It can be a pain figuring out where to put the DDS plugin. The path to put the exe is "\GIMPPortable \ App \ gimp \ lib \ gimp \ 2.0 \ plug-ins\"
I just know people will ask that question if they havent used gimp before. I had to find out by checking where the plugin folder was in the settings of gimp portable. "

If you are fairly mod savvy and want to skip the video tutorial, here is a general outline of the basic procedure.

If your characters eyes do not look right when you turn into a vampire, then follow step one. If NPC vampires eyes are all messed up, then proceed to step two.

1.) If your characters eyes are messed up, then it is because you are using a custom race or some kind of mod which has changed the eyes of the race you are using to use a dual eye texture and nif. We want to use a single eye texture, and an eyeball.nif which is mapped to a single eye texture. This might require some photoshop skills and CS editing. All you really need is a paint program to crop the eye texture, MS Paint will do this. Or if you don't want to do that, you can just replace the dual eye you are using with any single eye texture.

The first thing you must do is figure out what eye texture your character is using. Go into the game and type showracemenu in the console. Try to take note of what the name of the eye color is your character is using. Don't save the game, just exit. Now load the CS or even photoshop and find the eye texture your character is using. It will have two eyes mapped to it. Using the crop tool, crop it down to just one eye, and save the image. Do the same with the normal map and glow map if they exist. Now go to the CS, load yourand change your race to use the same eyeball.nif that a vanilla race uses. Save the esp. This should fix the problem.

2.) I've added eyevampire.dds to this mod. Vanilla vampires SHOULD look fine as is. If not, you have a mod or OMOD loaded after Unholy Darkness that has altered eyevampire.dds. This needs to be a SINGLE eyeball texture, not a dual one. A single eyeball texture has a drawing of ONE eye on the image, not two.

If you don't like my blue vampire eyes and prefer vanilla, simply delete eyevampire.dds, eyevampire_n.dds and eyevampire_g.dds. Or edit them to your liking.

Unholy Darkness Manual

Read here if you want to know all the fine details of the mod and how everything works.

Controls

There are default hotkeys assigned to many but not all of the vampire powers. All powers are in the spell book as well.

V - Toggles Vampirism or mask darkness. When mask darkness is on, you will pass for a human, and not be able to feed on sleeping people. Press V to bring out the fangs and feed.

M - Toggles a menu where you can configure various options, and re-bind all the hotkeys to keys of your choice.

O - Scent of Blood

/ - Shroud of Shadows

\ - Mortis Shield

N - Eye of the Hunter (night eye)

P - Vampire Speed

L - Unholy Fury

U - Summon Thrall

] Increase Jump height

[ Decrease Jump height

; Decrease Unholy Fury Power

'Increase Unholy Fury Power (costs more blood)

Some key, somewhere - Terrifying Countenance

Vampire Abilities

Vampires have passive abilities which do not have a spell or usuage cost, they just exist. Certain abilities are unlocked through feeding or aging.

Feeding. All vampires need to feed or drink blood in order to maintain their strength and to use their powers. There are many ways to feed in Unholy Darkness compared to only one way in vanilla Oblivion. You can feed the old fashioned way by activating sleeping humans, or you can attempt to force feed on people who are awake by pressing the G button. If successful you will see a custom animation play, and gain some hit points immediately from the victim, while causing massive damage to the target. Force feeding is considered a violent act so do it with caution. It will increase your vampire bounty. The player can also feed through dialogue by charming a person to like them, or once you have fed on someone asleep, sometimes they will yearn for your bite and you can command them to give you more blood. There is also a vampiric seduction power which the player can use to lure a victim into a seductive feed, and finally there are blood potions. Blood potions are only useful for sustenance, and do not advance the player in blood points, nor do they give the player daywalking ability; only fresh human blood can.

Water Breathing. Vampires don't need to breath. They can breath if they want to, but going under water for hours has no ill effects on them.

Fall Damage. Once a vampire is a week old their bones have strengthened to the point where they no longer take fall damage from any distance.

Regeneration. Vampires heal much faster than humans and possess regeneration. Regeneration is greatest at night. Young vampires may not regenerate at all during the day time.

Immune to disease.Vampires cannot catch normal diseases which plague humans.

Resistant to paralyzation. All vampires have some resistance, but older vampires should never be paralyzed.

Nature of the predator. Vampires are predators and as such, lower level predators should naturally fear them. Mud crabs, horses and even wolves might flee a vampire. Fear not, your own horse should not fear you once you have ridden it. But older vampires are faster than horses, so riding one will only slow you down.

Vampire Powers

All vampire powers have a cost to use them or cause the player to get hungry faster. Most are fairly low cost and can stay toggled on without much to worry about. I've tried to list them in the order they become available to the player. Powers are unlocked when the player has drank blood 25 times, 50, 75, 100, 150, 200 & 250, or blood points.. Vampire's also have certain powers that unlock at vampire ages. Vampire ages are 1 through 5, and are unlocked at vampire birth, 1 week old, 3 months old 6 months old, and one year old. Lots of powers grow in power as well.

Mask Darkness

This power hides your vampire eyes, pale skin, claws and fangs from view. Use it any time you are near the public eye, for if your vampire nature is discovered it could cause concerned citizens of Tamriel to call vampire hunters or alert the attention of the guards. Vampires are generally attacked on sight, unless they like you a lot. This power is not available once the player is hungry. Once the player feeds again the power is usable again. Hotkey is V for Vampire.

Force Feed

Don't like someone? No longer must you wait until the victim is asleep to feed. Press the G hotkey and drain their blood and health all at the same time, while adding to your own health! Beware, though, stronger opponents will throw you back. Sneak + Force feed increases your chance for success. Sneak + Force feed on someone asleep will drain them dry and kill them. Force feeding is a violent and evil act so use it at your own risk. It is ok to use in dungeons though on evil characters, your vampire bounty will not increase.

Scent of Blood

Use this power to see life forms. As you progress as a vampire you will naturally see further and further with this power. Default hotkey is O.

Eye of the Hunter

Vampires can see in the dark easily with this power active (identical to night eye).

Vampire Speed

Use this power to move faster. Vampire speed is a toggle power which greatly boosts how fast you can move. It adds on top of your existing speed, so the faster your normal speed is, the faster your overall speed will be with this power active. Like Scent of Blood, this power increases as your vampire gains power. Powerful vampires can easily outrun a black horse.

Vampiric Suggestion

Once a day, a vampire can will a mortal to go to sleep so that the vampire may feed on the target. No hotkey, just a greater power.

Unholy Fury

This power is most useful for combat. It greatly increases your thirst, but it also makes you much stronger, more agile, and allows the player to jump incredible distances. It is so demanding the mask darkness is automatically removed, so beware of using it, your vampire bounty is sure to increase, and it drains your blood pool quickly. The default hotkey is L.

Mortis Shield

A vampire is capable of flexing their muscles at inhuman speeds, creating tiny vibrations on the skin surface which ultimatey and effectively helps to deflect or deter incoming blades and blunt objects. In essense, it hardens the skin to boost the players armor class. This power increases the players thirst a little, but not nearly as much as Unholy Fury. The default hotkey is M.

Shroud of Shadows

Vampires can meld with shadows and move silently. When this power is active a chameleon type effect is added, plus the players sneak ability is greatly increased. The default hotkey is /.

Vampiric Seduction

Cast this greater power onto others and depending on several factors, the target might follow you around hoping for a moment of intimacy. Works on either sex. Once you have them under your command you can speak to them and offer a kiss and feed through dialogue. After the kiss the spell wears off and they will go about their business, if they are still alive that is.

Terrifying Countenance

With this power active nearly anything will fear you and flee.

 

Vampire Weaknesses

With all those great abilities and powers there has to be some drawbacks. It is a curse after all. If you are after a mod that makes you uber with no drawbacks, then you should look for something else, or get the CS out and change some things. But to me, these drawbacks help the experience. I have more fun figuring out how to work around these weaknesses in the game than I do using the powers. Before you freak out about a weakness, look at it as an opportunity to overcome. There are ways around all the weaknesses and many of them fade with aging. Vampires become more powerful as they age contrary to mortals.

Sunlight

The sun is probably a new vampires worst enemy. It does severe damage to new vampires. As you age though, sun damage is reduced, and after a vampire becomes a week old, as long as they have JUST fed, they can walk in the daylight for an hour or two. As they age, the time they can be in the sun increases. Beware though, it can wear off at any time and they only way to stop sun damage is to get indoors or feed on a human again. Unholy Darkness has a new kickash sun damage shader and at 25% health or below, a vampire will light on fire. Note that when you take sun damage your mask darkness is removed. So avoid conversations with others or even greetings to hide your nature if you are taking sun damage.

I personally find sun damage to be a lot of fun. As a player I like to push the envelope of what I can get away with. I've had a lot of fun trying to survive while taking sun damage. But be prepared. First of all at a low level forget it. But at level 10+ you start to get a fair amount of hit points, plus with vampiric regeneration you can survive in the sunlight while taking sun damage for a bit. If you go under water it reduces sun damage a lot, plus the early morning sun or late afternoon sun just before dusk isn't near as harsh as prime time 12 noon sun. Also if its cloudy or raining you can hardly feel it. So under these conditions, and if fed, I will venture out and not so much fear the sun damage. If I get caught in the sun, I'll have a LOT of healing potions handy, and I tend to cast a lot of healing spells, plus run under water or if another region was raining, I'll turn back that way. Or just find a peasant and force feed on them real quick and regain your daywalking power. It will probably kill them, but its them or you. I play an evil vampire and love every minute of it. They are cattle, nothing more. And should a guard question my motives for killing someone, they shall recieve the same fate or worse.

Coffin dependency

Vampires must rest in a coffin or near an urn filled with special soil which can be purchased from Silian. The older the vampire the less often they need to sleep in a coffin. Ancient vampires have mastered their mind and never need to sleep in a coffin. If vampires do not sleep in coffins, they will hear voices or footsteps, or halucinate things, and eventually become so distraught with the sound of footsteps and noises of people talking, that they will lose their focus and not even be able to swallow all of the blood from their victims. This makes it impossible for a vampire to become fully fed. They also become more irritable and their personality becomes irritable, making it difficult to interact with humans. There are also some minor weaknesses which come from lack of coffin sleep. Coffins also remove damaged stats, but may require several nights rest to completely restore a damaged stat. It just depends how damaged they are.

Weakness to Garlic

Vampires are alergic to garlic. If they are near a cluster they will smell it right away. If very close to it, they will start to take some damage and get sick. These clusters can be destroyed though, simply activate them and click "destroy".

Holy Damage

Vampires are considered evil by the nine divines, and as such, no vampire can enter a chapel without burning. If you must endure a quest inside a chapel, take lots of healing potions or wait until your vampiric regeneration is greater than the damage inflicted.

Weakness to Fire

Vampires have a weakness to fire.

Dead blood

You can feed on the dead using the force feed button, but if the corpse has been around for a while, you will throw up and look sickly until you feed from fresh blood, and go into blood cravings.

Console Commands

Vampire speed shader is lagging my computer..

To disable the vampire speed effect if your computer lags too much, set AAHotKeyCastQuest.DisableVampireSpeedShader to 1 in the console

I want the maker to leave me alone...

Stopquest aaamakerquest

General Information


Vampires are creatures of the night; unholy abominations who feed on the living for sustenance. Some vampires try to cling to their humanity while others may become true monsters. That said, it is ultimately up to the player to decide how they want to play as a vampire. In general though, a vampire player should try to maintain secrecy, unless you want to challenge the world. Break laws, feed on as many people as you want, turn others into vampires, and do with this mod what you will, but be prepared for vampire hunters, the imperial legion and even locals grabbing their torches and pitchforks in an effort to cleanse the world of your kind, and you in particular.


Vampire bounty - Vampire bounty is what I use to track how much aware the general public is about the palyer's vampire nature. The more you are seen as a vampire, the more you feed on people, and other vampire activities will increase your vampire bounty. If the bounty gets high enough, vampire hunters can be found. Feeding off of bums and less important people will generate less bounty, but also the quality of the blood isn't as good either. The blood of nobility will give your vampire a stat boost, but beware, noble's have the coin to hire guards should they find unwanted piercings on their necks too often.


Credits

Joel "Madmole" Huenink - Creative design, all world building, scripting, quest design, special effects, shader graphics, writing, animation, meshes & textures, character design, production management, male voice acting.

GURUSR - Advanced scripting, general code management.

Lynne Wurty - Female voice acting.

Sinblood - Sinblood's haven, assets, new furniture and textures.

KNOWN BUGS

I can't become a vampire. The maker finds me and gives me the disease, yet I do not transform into a vampire.
I think this is caused by the main vampire script possibly crashing or locking up. Save your game, reload it and sleep some more, hopefully you'll see the message dialogues come up.

My blood of the noble wont' go away. We're working on this.

Missing voice acting or mismatched lip sync. Please catch this with a screenshot and email it to me.

Troubleshooting & Frequently Asked Questions & Answers

General compatibility issues

In general, you should try to start a new character from scratch to use this mod. If you insist on using an older character, try to pick one that wasn't a vampire before, or one who was cured of vampirism. Also, make sure not to use any other mods which alter vampirism. Try to avoid mods which change the races to use different eyes. OOO & Deadly Relex 5 work fine with Unholy Darkness. We are working on making UD more compatible with old save games.

I said yes, I want to become a vampire, yet nothing has happened yet.

The maker will not come for you until you leave the tutorial dungeon.

My Character doesn't have fangs when I unmask darkness?

This is because the morph is set weak to avoid making "ugly" vampires. To give your character fangs, you have two choices. Edit the CS and replace your characters race with fangs I've provided, or open the console and type set aaaslowprocessquest.vampmagnitude to 100 then press enter. Save your game, reload it, and you may have to toggle vampirism a few times, but you should have fangs then. If you don't like the morpning of your characters face, install scanti's nochange morph, link is above.

My thrall doesn't have fangs or blue eyes, they still look human?

Oblivion doesn't change NPC's appearance dynamically like the player can. Save your game and reload it, they should look like a vampire then. Sometimes, you may have to save your game, shut down Oblivion and then restart it before they will appear like a vampire.

My

How come my thrall can't feed on a sleeping person?

Oblivion's pathfinding isn't always perfect and they might be getting stuck and can't reach the NPC. Other problems could stem from Animation mods. We're trying to resolve this.

I'm getting CTD's when I unmask darkness, force feed or when hunger messages appear.

Any time you transform into a vampire, shaders are applied to your character. Certain clothing mods conflict with this, and can cause crash to desktop when you unmask darkess (which happens automatically when you force feed, or go into cravings). Try changing outfits to resolve the issue.

I'm getting a lot of CTD's.

Make sure you have 2 gigs or more of memory, Oblivion with lots of mods requires a lot more memory, and low memory is the biggest reason Oblivion will CTD. Try removing any mod you don't need, or buying more memory. Some users have reported success by using gamebooster.

Nothing seems to work right. Quests don't work, I cannot transform into a vampire, the menu doesn't activate.

Try starting a brand new character, and make damn sure you have OBSE18 installed. Re-download it, even though you know you had it, and reinstall it. Not long ago, I had version 18, only to find out it was 17.2 in reality.

Everyone's eyes are messed up, all the NPC's.
You must have a mod which has changed out the textures and eye meshes to all the vanilla NPC's to something that uses a dual eye texture. Beautiful people or perhaps elaborite eyes. I haven't had time to investigate these exactly, but some users have reported them as what they thought to cause the issue. Make sure your eye textures for vanilla races are a SINGLE eye on the texture, not a dual eye like Ren's or Beautiful People use.

Debugging

To see debug messages, type set unholydebug to 1 in the console. Then save your game, and load it, you should see a version pop up. Make sure you have the latest version installed.

Where do I get support?
The ONLY way I will support you is if you join my forum and post here People who support the mod and bought the audio files have my email and are welcome to email me directly if I don't happen to visit the forums or miss your post. But generally speaking, the forum is the best way to get support, I monitor it and everyone else there can help too. We have a nice little budding community.