I couldn't just get on with the game comfortable in the knowledge that I've forgotten how to do 3D modelling but that's okay. Because obviously, being me, it isn't okay so even though I have nothing much I "need" to change I was compelled to spend the morning reminding myself.
Turns out it's actually not as difficult as I'd thought, the tricky bit was remembering what I did all those years ago, so I now have a headache anyway! Fortunately, my clumsily hacked together Python script for Blender 2.49 still works, or it started working again once I'd repaired the ancient version of Python it needs; in fact it seems a lot of people have trouble getting newer versions of Blender to write NIFs, the recommendation seemingly being to either use the old Blender or to go via some intermediate program like OutfitStudio.
I did need to experiment a bit to get the right export options, as the game will crash if I don't check the "export skin partition" box. The only slightly painful bit is that, same as with pretty much every other game I've exported NIFs to, they require some cleaning up in order to work, in this case just opening the new NIF at the same time as a copy of the original and copying and pasting the NiTriShapeData and NiSkinInstance sub-blocks for each of the three instances of NiTriShape: and that's the painful bit, the fact that there are three meshes, high, medium and low poly count meaning pretty much everything has to be done in triplicate. But it is doable.
Oh yeah, it also needs an old version of NifSkope (I keep a copy of 1.0.22 for this purpose) as somewhere along the line its XML that describes the NIF format seems to have diverged from supporting Ego Draconis. I tried to figure out what had got broken but I suspect I could've pointlessly spent days on it.
