Skyrim Modding Diary - 24 January 2022
Welcome back, everyone. Yesterday we went in and address a number of minor issues that I've observed over the past month. We also dusted off one of my long-neglected modding projects and finished it. You might be wondering why I posted it on the Nexus instead of the Lab. I normally post my SFW stuff on the Nexus and NSFW here - this way I don't have to worry about drama or censorship on my NSFW content, while benefitting from the Nexus' excellent cross-referencing features for my 'safe' material.
Today we've got a few things we are going to work through. I have some smaller mods that I want to integrate today, notably a really cool beating heart mesh and a new Northbourne NPCs release. I'd also hoped to be able to present a teardown and rebuild of Wild Mountain Dairy Farm to get this 4000+ record mod ESL flagged; however, after finding additional technical challenges I've had to delay that project for more analysis. Instead we'll add some more life to the frozen northeast of Skyrim.
We're starting today with 1,205 mods installed, 1,271 plugins, and EF as our last load index.
Beating Hearts - But Only For Daedra
I recently came across this mod on the Nexus. The concept is great and it looks like a very high quality little add-on. However, I only want the Daedra hearts to be still beating. Normal human hearts can still be dead.
A quick look at the file contents reveals it has no plugin - its a direct asset replacer.
Now, we could address the human heart issue right here by just deleting the humanheart.nif file, but I'd rather preserve the integrity of the mod in case I need this asset for something in the future (like a specific heart in the game that I do want beating).
What we'll do instead is go into the MO2 information screen and find the human heart asset. There's a "hide" option in the context menu that will rename the file so that it doesn't get used by the game. We'll click that.
Now only the beating daedra heart will be in the game.
However, we're not done! The Daedra heart has a conflict with the ENB lighted version that also exists, and we don't want to lose that feature. We'll grab the ENB light version from the Nexus and then compare both nifs in nifskope. We can see that not only is the ENB version more complex (with the glowing nodules added) but what's not visible in this screen shot is that the poly count on the heart is higher, so I fiddled around a bit with trying to port the beating motion instructions onto the ENB version... but sadly that was beyond my current skill level. So I went for the easier fix of copying the glow data from the ENB version onto the beating nif.
And here it is in-game:
The ENB glow is more intense than it was with the high poly mesh it's designed for, so I'll probably loop back at some point to try again at getting it working, but for now we've got the beating effect and we've got the glow & textures from the ENB version. That'll work for now.
Making a Unique Character Unique Again
Quite a long time ago (near the start of this build effort) I integrated the Peacekeeper Armor into the leveled lists for Vigilants of Standarr. However, some time later when I was installing Death Consumes All, I discovered that this mod's unique companion, who is not affiliated with the Vigilants, also uses this armor. I've had an eye out for a while for a nice alternate armor set, and today I noticed this one up on the Nexus front page. My first thought was that this would be a great fit for Mjoll the Lioness, but she's already got a custom outfit. Then I remembered that I needed a new outfit for Livia Salvian, and I decided to use it for that purpose. (Incidentally, it looks like Peacekeeper Armor has gotten some updates last year, so I've added that one to my list for further attention in the future)
First off we need to update DCA and make sure it doesn't have any conflicts or issues, since that mod has gotten some updates since I last worked on it. What we see right away is that DCA has a lot of conflicts. Some of this is repackaged assets which we'll just go ahead and hide, but there's at least one script conflict and - perhaps more importantly - lots of voice file overwrites.
After filtering out the noise, we have one vanilla voice line that both this mod and Amorous Adventures try to overwrite. All the other voice conflicts are just between this mod and the vanilla files, which is fine. That leaves five conflicted vanilla scripts where at least one other mod is being impacted. We'll need to go through those and possibly do a merge & recompile on them. However that'll be the subject of a separate blog - it's been added to the to-do list.
xEdit revealed 150(!) ITMs and some corrupted navmesh edge links. Cleaned those. No errors or deletions. Conflict checking came out more or less clean. Most of the conflicts present had already been patched from the previous installation. The one remaining conflict was between DCA and JK's Winking Skeever, and since the edits did not conflict each other, I just merged the records in my override patch.
Now that DCA is more or less up to date (except for the whole issue with the scripts), we can move on to customizing the outfit. The armor mod is not just ESL flagged but is an actual ESL, which is rare and kind of odd, but it doesn't pose any technical problems. The mod was mostly clean (just 1 ITM) and free of errors. I did observe it contains a cheat chest which I removed.
Rather pleasantly, the mod already has an outfit record, which saves me a lot of time. The weapon is a little trickier, because Livia has a custom magic sword; however, it doesn't have a custom model. So we'll give it the model for the sword that comes with this outfit, but we won't change its stats at all since it's already balanced for the scenario as-is.
Livia's outfit doesn't contain any unique items, so we'll just redirect her OTFT to the one that's already present in the new outfit mod.
Let's see how she looks in game:
I don't know how I feel about that (randomly applied) face paint, but the outfit looks good!
More Northbourne NPCs!
I'm a big fan of the Northbourn NPCs series. With the release of a new module for Hjaalmarch, it's time to update my NPCs a bit!
Now I already have a lot of NPC replacers, so we'll need to exercise some care when it comes to asset load order. You can see here how my NPCs are laid out below: large scale replacers first, then more targeted ones in order of priority, then individual NPC replacers at the bottom. There are two mods we care about navigating near initially: Vahdin and Beards of Power. In this case, I want Northbourne to lose to Beards of Power. The question is Vahdin, because I want some actors from both.
For sure, I want Vahdin's take on Idgrod Ravencrone; on the other hand, I want Northbourne's Jonna.
The question is, what mod do I want to serve up the other NPCs. I like Northbourne's take on Alva, but don't have a strong feeling on the others. While not gorgeous by any means, I like the originality of Vahdin's take on Lami. It's not entirely clear how many other actors are getting served up by Vahdin. So I think we'll let Vahdin win, but we'll go in and hide its facegen for Jonna & Alva, and make sure they also win in the records.
Now we'll go and resolve the conflicts - there'll be a lot! As a rule of thumb, the order of precedence is: General Replacers -> Northbourne -> Vahdin/Beards of Power -> Individual characters.
We may also run into an occasional hard stop such as actors with the BBW race from Uncommon Races of Skyrim, who will always use their unique appearances from that mod. Obnoxiously, this mod is not ESL flagged, so we'll need to address that also.
Here's our conflicts NPCs, not too long a list. However, we need to go through each one carefully because we can't just copy over the whole record willy-nilly. There will be lots of other conflicts in terms of stats, outfits, script attachments, you name it - so we are only looking at the appearance data.
In some cases we won't do anything - here we have Aslfur, a Bears of Power actor. We'll let him keep his BOP appearance and just let Northbourne lose gracefully.
By contrast, Gestur here is going to use the Northbourne appearance, and so we need to go in and update the conflict resolution patch to include his face data.
With all the records updated, let's see how it looks in game.
Everything looks good, and no dark face bug observed anywhere. Mission accomplished!
Fleshing out The Pale
I've been watching Axis1211's mod list with interest for a while, and since Wild Mountain Farm is a no-go for now we'll incorporate some of them into our world instead. While Winterhold is going to be my main focus when I focus on this tomorrow, we'll warm up today with Hamlets of the Pale.
This mod is not compacted, and it contains facegen, so we need to use the facegen ESLify tool. I'm told there's a better tool out there for this now, but I'm used to this script so I'll stick with it for now. I can also see that this mod adds children, so we need to be aware that we may get dark face issues related to to RS Children and TKAA's changes to the child race. We'll address that in due time however.
With that done, we'll move on to cleaning and conflict resolution. The mod was clean, with no ITMs, deletions, or errors, and conflict checking revealed minimal problems - though I realize that before my next playthrough I'll definitely need to regenerate LOD and recheck occlusion data, since all this new geometry will otherwise have pop-in problems. There are also some landscape conflicts with update.esm, so we'll need to keep an eye out for anything unusual.
We have a navmesh conflict at Tamriel 7, 17 (9BC89) that we'll need to look at in the CK. The good news is that it isn't a hard conflict. This can be solved by welding the village onto the part of the mesh that has the Lanterns of Skyrim stuff. However, I'm going to hold off for now on this because this area is also going to contain Dunpar Wall. If the conflict between the two is too extreme, I may trim out Dunstead Hamlet - so I won't put in navmesh time just yet.
The three hamlets are at Loreius Farm, Bronzewater Cave, and the location above near fort Dunstad. Let's examine them in game.
As expected, the kids have the dark face bug, so we'll need to regenerate their facegen with the proper assets loaded. Dunstead otherwise came out fine except for one bit of terrain intrusion that we'll patch out.
Loreius Farm looks good; none of the Hydragorgon characters appear to be blocked by the huts. A Bondage Furniture World tie-up point intrudes one hut, and we'll need to move that in the CK. Finally, Bronzewater Cave's settlement looks great, with the only issue being pediatric blackface.
So to review our next steps, we need to...
- Disable one problematic tree
- Move a BFW furniture item
- Fix three children so their faces look right
The tree is easy - just a simple patch on the record to make it initially disabled. For Loreius, we'll disable the vanilla tree and replace it with the BFW one.
That just leaves the kids. The reason they have black face is because RS Children overrides and replaces the generic child assets. This makes the fix a little easier since the main thing we have to do is just go in and rebuild their facegen with the RS Children assets loaded. For insane reasons only Bethesda can comprehend, mod-added BSA files won't load in the CK, even if the relevant plugin is loaded, so we do need to unpack the RS Children BSA files first; I keep a separate development version in MO2 for this purpose.
With that done, now the faces load in the CK and we can generate the facegen files.
That face won't win any awards for good modeling (after all, this is just RS Children rendering the "potato head" child from vanilla) but she no longer has the dark face bug!
One Village Mod is Good... Will Two be Better?
I mentioned earlier that I also want to install Dunpar Wall, another settlement mod. Reportedly, this mod conflicts with the Dunstead Hamlet (the snowy one) in the previous mod. Let's take a look and see just how bad the conflict is.
So that's... going to be a bit of a problem. If we want to keep Dunstead (and I have to admit, the place has kind of grown on me), we're going to need to relocate the hamlet in its entirety. There are a couple of potential options in the general area, which you can see below.
We'll continue with this tomorrow and see if we can't get both of these settlements to live together in harmony.
That's it for today! We had a pretty good run, despite technical difficulties with Wild Mountain Farm and with Dunpar Wall. Tomorrow we'll revisit Dunpar Wall and see if we can relocate the people of Dunstead to a less congested location. See you then!
We ended the day with 1,212 mods installed, 1,273 plugins, and a last index of EF.
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