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About this blog

Greetings everyone! This page contains my various Bethesda blogs. At the time of this update, it contains my troubleshooting playthrough series, my Skyrim modding diary, my mod cleanup case study series, and my Shout Like a Virgin beta test blog. You can access all the entries from the sidebar on the right side of your screen.

 

Playthroughs

I've recently exceeded the 1000 mod threshold, and it's time to start periodically doing brief playthroughs to ferret out hidden conflicts and other bugs. In this series, we'll do shorter, more focused adventures where we try to tell an interesting story and also talk about what problems we ran into them and how we addressed them.

 

  • Charley's Story: Charlotte Ellison survived a nuclear war by spending more than two hundred years in stasis. Now she has to survive in a very new world, facing very new threats. A Fallout 4 playthrough.
  • The Spider's Web: Kirstia's search for answers has taken her to the island of Solstheim. Now she must uncover the secret of The Teacher - also known as Mephala - and continue the journey to master her powerful magical heritage. But can she survive as her enemies, new and old, close in? 
  • The Curious Case of Forrien Hlaalu: A year after she returned to Northpoint, Kirstia is back in Skyrim and looking for answers. The strange events that occured during her search for Sybil Fjotra continue to trouble her, as does the ongoing influence of the strange gods of the Forsworn. After a chance encounter over drinks, a wizard from the College of Winterhold sets her on the trail of a scholar who may have the answers she needs...
  • The Search for the Sybil: Exiled from Skyrim to the remote land of Northpoint, Kirstia Bjissen has fallen on hard times. Just as she hits rock bottom, a voice speaks to her and charges her with a sacred quest that will take her back to her native land - and likely into danger. Can Kirstia find the new Sybil of Dibella before her past catches up with her?
  • Shout Like a Virgin: Miraculously saved from death, Monilee of High Rock finds herself in Skyrim, a land riven by civil war and harboring dark secrets. While she tries to build a new life in this foreign land, she's haunted by half-remembered dreams, and in chasing them she discovers her role in the turning of the ages. However, Monilee has not gone unnoticed by powers outside the mortal realm. Used as a pawn in the struggle between Nocturnal and Dibella, it will take all her wits, endurance, bravery, and stubbornness to reclaim sovereignty over her body and her soul.

 

Modding Diary

This series tracks my modding projects in-between playthroughs and case studies. The main focus will be on the technical processes of cleaning, editing, and integrating mods into a large load order configuration, including managing emergent multi-mod interactions. 

 

Modding Case Studies

This blog reviews the tools and techniques that authors and end users can apply to make their mods as stable and compatible as possible, as well as how end users can integrate complicated mods into a large load order setup. In addition to coverage of well known techniques such as automatic mod cleaning, this blog delves into more complicated issues such as navmesh repair. 

 

Entries in this blog

1900 Mods Build Part 7: The Good Kind of Wrench

Hi folks, hope you had a relaxing last week! Between being stressed about the upcoming U.S. elections and then getting some unpleasant side effects from my COVID booster, I took the week off from modding and blogging. Now I'm back and I discover...   THIS   Fun fact, Patrician ENB was actually what this build was supposed to use when I started it ages ago, but at that time it wasn't available for SSE and couldn't be readily ported. This is a huge monkey wrench that is going t

1900 Mods Built Part 6: Sanitizing Scripts

Today's going to be another quick one. I started out by removing SV Mods Menu, which on further analysis didn't appear to be working correctly and which was contributing to papyrus load disproportionate to its benefits. Next, I reviewed the log from yesterday's playthrough and noticed an immediate issue:     There's a lot of this, and almost all of it is coming from Immersive Decay. It looks like when the author ported the scripts from the original mod, they retired some fun

1900 Mods Build Part 5: Small Improvements

This one and maybe the next couple after are going to be shorter entries, as I've got a bunch of things on my schedule for the rest of this week, but I wanted to make sure I put at least a little time into this project.    Yesterday we trimmed out some mods that were using up a lot of resources in exchange for relatively light contributions to the build. Later, I did some experiments with multithreading and made some significant progress in reducing FPS instability during combat. 

1900 Mods Build Part 4: Bye Bye Birds

So I slept on the conclusions from yesterday and I think I'm going to go ahead with all three of the major targets I saw in the stack dump. For now what we are going to do is:   Fix the two specific NPC related issues we observed Remove SkyBirds Remove Immersive Decompose Remove Torch Remover Update Meat Farm   At first I was tempted to just pull out Sky Birds and see how that impacted things, but on recollection I realized that both of the ot

1900 Mods Build Part 3: Streamlining and a Diagnostic Hike

Hi folks, hope you all had a nice weekend! Mine ended up a little "special" because after two years of keeping it on life support, the dishwasher that came with my house finally "died the death"  and left us in a situation where we either had to fork out multiple hundreds of $$$ to fix a many years old appliance or knuckle down and buy a new one.     After some research, I ended up picking up a new "adult toy" and finally got it installed right before bed yesterday. Now I ge

1900 Mods Build Part 2: Diagnosing Crashes With Limited Data

So yesterday our shakedown run of 1900 mod Skyrim ran into a snag when we started to encounter mysterious crashes in the vicinity of Riften. Initially we weren't getting crash logs at all, but after very carefully approaching the site we were able to get some crash logs suggesting an animation or AI-related crash that seemed to be linked with combat events. At the end of yesterday's session, I regenerated the LOD as well as the animation register, and this morning I tried loading into the area i

1900 Mods Build Part 1: Starting the Shakedown

Hi folks! I just wrapped up an 85 hour Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough and now I'm refreshed and ready to get back to modding. After a bit of work on my Skyrim backlog, I looked up and saw...     That's right, I've finally broken 1900 mods in my load order! I don't know if I'm exactly in the mood for a totally new playthrough, but I'm definitely overdue for a shakedown run. I want to make sure everything is running the way I intended, and if that fails I want to localize the issu

Sci-Fi Lore Special Edition: The Monkey In The Middle, or: Gundam Wing happens in UC 0094?? (Part 1 of 2)

So in our last long-form lore post, we talked about the implications of Ɐ Gundam for the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise, and in particular how it moves the "alternate universe" shows back into the main chronology. We explored the clues contained in the various series about their positioning and built a tentative chronological viewing list. For the most part, the alternate universe shows appear to necessarily exist in discrete periods of time. Two programs, however, coexist to a degree with the mai

gregaaz

gregaaz in Long-Form Gundam Lore

Sci-Fi Lore Special Edition: The Historical Revelations of Ɐ

Hi folks, it's been a while since I've done a long form lore post, and with the impending release of The Witch From Mercury this weekend, I thought the convoluted world of the Gundam franchise might be a good place to start. While not as widely viewed in the west as Star Trek or Star Wars, I suspect that most sci-fi fans are at least aware of the existence of Gundam, and many people in my generation were exposed to some degree to its 1990s entries (especially the very successful Gundam Wing) dur

gregaaz

gregaaz in Long-Form Gundam Lore

Mob Trouble (Charley's Story, Chapter 46)

I spent the night on Piper's couch. As shacks go, the Wright place was warm and dry, and it stayed that way even when rain started pounding on the corrugated roof. When morning came, the rain was still pounding down and we took our time enjoying a breakfast of beans and venison sausage along with some half decent coffee.    While we ate, we talked through our options. I'd seen and heard enough the day before to know that Diamond City security wasn't going to help us with searching for

gregaaz

gregaaz in Charley's Story II

Fourth Estate (Charley's Story, Chapter 45)

"Danny, please, we're friends! Let me in! Nat's waiting for me!"   The woman, wearing a dull red leather coat and a matching hat, seemed to be getting increasingly anxious as she pleaded with the intercom. Before long, it crackled back. "Sorry, Piper, but Mayor McDonough says you can't come in. I think you really got him heated up with that last story."    She let out a little screech then, before blasting back, "Daniel Sullivan, you---"   Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up,

gregaaz

gregaaz in Charley's Story II

Vacation Time (Charley's Story, Chapter 44)

"You need a vacation, Charley."      Leave it to Trashcan Carla to state the obvious when I wasn't ready to admit it. I'd come back to Sanctuary after leaving things in Preston's hands back at Concord. I wanted to supervise finishing the buildings in town that we'd left incomplete after all the focus shifted to encircling Concord. Certainly we had the materials to do it now, since the ruins of Concord were a literal treasure trove of every sort of rare salvage you could imag

gregaaz

gregaaz in Charley's Story II

Punishment Suit (Charley's Story, Chapter 43)

If you'd posed a hypothetical - you capture a soldier and a raider, which one do you execute? I'd have said that raider, for sure. But in the end, it was the other way around. I let Preston handle the trial... a dark cloud had fallen over my mood after the torture session and I found myself questioning, well, everything.    To his credit, Preston did things right. He gave prisoner a chance to testify, he laid out the facts of what we knew about their offenses, and he made sure everyone

gregaaz

gregaaz in Charley's Story II

Bethesda Modding Diary - 19 September 2022

Welcome back, everyone. I've been a little busy lately as we have a house guest staying with us, but I wanted to cut out some time today for hobby stuff. After grinding my teeth in frustration for a weeks now, I've concluded that my custom nif files were indeed hard-deleted and there's no getting them back, so today we're going to rebuild out custom pubic hair files for Fallout 4.    Just like last time, we'll be building this off of this mod. The reason is twofold: first, the plugin f

Bethesda Modding Diary - 08 September 2022

Welcome back, folks. Today let's try and wrap up Solitude Men's Club and Man Those Borders. Behind the scenes I went through and did some more corrections and analysis of the Papyrus log, where I found a very large number of errors related to Skyrim at War. At some point in the future we might have to dedicate a whole issue to cleaning up those errors but for now we'll let that lie. I also corrected some more errors that were essentially the same as what we saw last time - leftover references to

Bethesda Modding Diary - 07 September 2022

Happy hump day, everyone! As I talked about yesterday, I'll be investigating a number of Papyrus errors in the background today while I work on other things. We'll also work on cleaning up the bath house mod we installed yesterday and maybe install some new stuff if time permits.    Papyrus Errors   More Statues   Well, I wanted to work on the Men's Club exterior and some of my MTB navmesh issues but I'm going to kick that down the curb for now. I'll be back soo

Bethesda Modding Diary - 05 September 2022

Welcome back, everyone! Let's keep pushing forward with our goal of optimizing and preparing for our next playthrough. I'm not going to mess around with the MCMs much today, but let's tackle some more Papyrus errors and also install a few more mods. Since I got a late start today, I'll hold off on doing any of the navmesh and landscape work that I need to do. Gotta have priorities.   Scripts Time   Clearly once I have my papyrus log adequately cleaned to the point that it's

Bethesda Modding Diary - 02 September 2022

Well, that was fun. I was going to start on a new chapter for Charley's story, but I was like "oh, well before I load it up I'll fix this custom nif I did a while back that didn't quite work right." Then I discovered that it seems I accidentally deleted a large number of custom clothing and armor meshes by accident and I can't find them in the recycling bin. So that's on hold for the time being until I can either find the missing files or reconstruct them  Moral of the story? Don't leave loose f

Bethesda Modding Diary Special Edition - Real Estate Recon

Hi folks, it's been a while! Star Citizen 3.17.2 is really solid and it's been eating up a lot of my free time. On top of that, my wife and I have recently started watching the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise in chronological order. It turns out that almost all the Gundam blu rays were on sale on Amazon, so we were able to fill in the gaps of what isn't streaming right now. Finally, I discovered and briefly binged Frostpunk, which I highly recommend. Long story short, I've had a lot of competition

gregaaz

gregaaz in Miscellaneous

Programming Note - Upcoming Star Citizen Patch

Hi folks, I just wanted to check in with you and let you know that I probably won't be posting blogs for the next few days. As I write this, we're waiting for a major patch to drop for Star Citizen that will introduce many new features. This drop will also be coming with a progress wipe, so in addition to trying out the new content I'll also need to be doing some re-work to renew my bounty hunter licenses and so forth. As a result, that game will be my main focus at least through this weekend.

gregaaz

gregaaz in Miscellaneous

Skyrim Modding Diary - 25 July 2022

Well, it's Monday again. Temperatures are down a bit compared to last week, but its still unclear if we're getting rain. I certainly hope so... I'm ready for some cool breeze. Today's probably going to be a quick one. I have a bunch of low impact mods to install. I've also got a couple of JK interior mods that I want to integrate, but my it remains to be seen how much of that I'm going to actually get done.    Today's Numbers     Housekeeping   OK, that was

Skyrim Modding Diary - 24 July 2022

Welcome back, everyone! Today might be a quick one, but at a minimum I want to knock out a couple of NPC mods that I've been dragging my feet on and a more recent NPC mod that I want to pluck a specific piece of data out of for my world. I have a lot more on my plate, but its just too hot today for me to really sink a ton of time into modding!   Number Games     Just The One Face, Please   Checking Out That Russian Mod   How'd That Get On My Pho

Trek Lore Special Edition: NCC-1800 and Federation Survey Evolution

So, as you might recall from our last modding diary, we briefly reached 1800 mods! That dropped to 1799 when we uninstalled SBC, but its still an important accomplishment. Before our numbers changed, I was thinking about the lore write-up for NCC-1800 and it became clear that really discussing this ship in an intelligible way requires discussion about the United Federation of Planets' survey ship evolution.   One small note - some of the early lore on this topic comes from Space Flight

Modding Case Study: Sexy Bandit Captives (Part 2 - Navmesh Repair)

Hi folks, and welcome back. If you're in a hot part of the world right now, I hope you're keeping cool and comfortable - make sure you hydrate! In the previous entry in this series we walked through the initial cleaning and evaluation of Sexy Bandit Captives 0.98g. While the primary cleaning experience went mostly smoothly, this mod had a lot of deleted navmesh and also had many red flags relating to the structure of its scripts. You may recall that I also got a little heated about the particula

Gregaaz Modding Index

Hi folks, it's been a while since I started the mod diary series and recently I went to look up a mod... and realized that I had no idea where it was located. So I think today's project is going to be to make an index of all the mods we've covered so far. This blog post will stay at the top of the table of contents on the main blog page and will be kept updated as more mods get reviewed and integrated. I'll also include a brief summary of the contents of each link. All mods will be here in alpha

gregaaz

gregaaz in Miscellaneous


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