There were a couple of things in play. First and most embarrassingly, I'd forgotten to set up the new body slots on the Smurf Average SOS part, which was preventing it 25% of the normally distributed parts from working right. Second, I had failed to take into account the scripting used by the male and female color matching functions. Fixing the female hair was really easy, as it's all configured through an external xml file. The male hair was trickier, in part because of functional differences in the script. For example, its script is sensitive to the relative location of the hair ARMA in the overall ARMA list. Another thing that came out in the discussions was that my meshes for the male bits might be out of date, so I updated all those assets to the latest versions on the Lab. 

 

While the effect is more subtle on male characters, if you look here you can see the difference: the actor on the left has color matching enabled, while the one on the right doesn't yet. The color is also kind of camouflaged by the fact that the skin texture has non-color-matching hair on it, but that's something to address in the future. There are options to achieve this but they require a little bit of assembly. The color match on the futanari, as you can see in the second picture, is more distinct.

 

 

So what's left for us to do? First we have a little bit of cleanup - we need to give the Draenei sisters the exhibitionist faction so they don't constantly play cover animations. Then, we need to look at BD's hoodies. They have their own distinct magical effect for their animation swaps, and we'll need to create a version that merges with the hair recolor function for them to be fully supported.

 

Essentially what we want to do is take the normal BD Hoodie effect and add to it the scripts and additional characteristic of the color match effect. So first we'll start by copying the BD Anthro effect to an overide file so if soomething goes wrong we won't have messed up the original record. Then we'll put all four of the relevant scripts (BD and color match for male and female) into a working file.

 

 

Now let's look at what is involved in each effect. The main differences are in the scripts and keywords, unsurprisingly, but there are also some magical effect properties we need to think about. Initially, we'll let the anthro effect dictate the settings, since it's a more active effect, but we might have to revisit some of that if the coloring is inconsistent or weird.

 

 

Now let's see how they look in game. Looks good on futanari. Male is again kind of muted, but we'll run with this and see how it looks as the game proceeds. 

 

This is an NPC enemy mod that adds a number of new opponents to dwemer, falmer, and draugr dungeons. I'm not sure if we'll actually be installing it tonight, but I want to at least review the mod and understand its contents since the mod page is a little vague. It also has a TAWOBA patch which looks promising, but getting TAWOBA working to my satisfaction is a whole project in its own right, so one thing at a time!

 

Right off we can see two points of concern: first, the mod isn't packed right, and second its for CBBE.

 

 

We'll start out by setting the correct data directory so the files aren't a mess. Fortunately, this is pretty painless in MO2. 

 

 

Next, we want to look at the assets. There's no conflicts, which is good, so that just leaves the parts themselves. Curiously, the mod seems to come with its own body meshes. By the context, these files appear to be for the dwemer enemies. They point to vanilla textures. 

 

 

If this is the extent of CBBE requirements, it may be possible to convert these in outfit studio and, in the process, make them bodyslide compatible for greater variation. The Draugr folder contains one body that seems to use the vanilla draugr textures and thus is likely a vanilla body, while the rest are more CBBE based meshes. These all seem to be TAWOBA mashups, so for these I think the goal will just be to replace them with TAWOBA BHUNP parts and phase out these custom versions (maybe keep textures if they're unique). The various additional body pieces in the Dwemer section appear to be derived from Ring Summon Faithful Gear Knight and are probably functionally agnostic when it comes to body type. One or two of the Falmer outfits appear to be unique, non TAWOBA options, but the rest are just CBBE TAWOBA Falmer Bikini mashups. Again, it's really sounding like the TAWOBA patch might be the path of least resistance. It'll be more work up front, but it'll be much more broadly applicable, not just enabling this mod but also letting us get rolling with Enemy Variations 4 and the remaining canonical Wenches mods. Having TAWOBA working will also simplify my long term plans for greater outfit variation.

 

OK, so while its promising this mod isn't going to be landing in my load order tomorrow. Before we move it to my WIP folder, let's take a look at the contents of the plugin. FWD itself is an uncompacted ESP file with about 600 records. It's a strong candidate for compression, though it'll require facegen reindexing and it needs to wait until I'm ready to also install the TAWOBA patch. Leveled list structures within the mod seem to be thoroughly thought out and designed to provide a high level of randomization, which I like. I does however flood some common leveled lists, which I don't like so much. Similar to FEMALE, this mod will require some attention to get it to blend more seamlessly into the game world.

 

 

So... long story short, we won't be adding this one to the world yet, but it looks like when the time comes it'll make an interesting and comprehensive addition. It's definitely gated behind TAWOBA however, for now.

Before I wrap up for the night, let's take a quick look over the latest postings on the Nexus. It's no big surprise to see Lux Via and Seasons of Skyrim continuing to dominate the front page. I'm pretty excited myself about Seasons, and hope to get it integrated as soon as it matures to the point that I'm confident it'll play nice with my system. As I understand it, DYNDOLOD is already working in support for automatic snow static generation when mods don't have one natively provided, which is great.

 

I also see that Detailed NPCs is continuing to get new content, so we'll need to schedule a Detailed NPCs day for some time before i start my next playthrough. I'm quite happy with the material I've installed so far from that mod. 

 

Looking through the rest of the 24 hour list, we've actually got a lot of promising smaller mods here that I think we can get loaded up. Specifically:

 

• Yellowshrub01 4k 2k texture overhaul
• Helgen Reborn level and quest requirements
• DAR Defeat Animation Variants
• Rigmor Weapon Replacers
• ENB Light for Deathbells
• ENB Light for Swamp Fungus
• Particle Light for Stahlrim

 

These mods are all replacers that shouldn't require much work, and I'll only cover them here if I run into complications. And, after doing so, I can report that they all went smoothly except for the deathbell, which depends on paywalled content (boooooo!). Fortunately, I found an alternate mod that does the same thing for free.

 

There are also two mods that I want to look at and that might be worth installing.

 

• Dynamic Combat Animations
• Ryn's Ritual Stone

 

Even though it posed some challenges to me, I liked Ryn's overhaul of Valtheim Towers, and I'm interested to see how his ritual stone came out. The combat animations mod also looks very promising, but currently it appears to just be a framework mod. I'll leave that be for now until I have the time to really sink into it. But let's check out Ryn's Ritual Stone.

 

The mod has no conflicts, and it's ESL flagged, so that's a good start. No errors, though a lot of bad edge links that I had to clean with the script. No deletions or ITMs. Conflicts were almost wholly limited to landscape edits, which I'm only going to address if they impact gameplay or visuals.

 

 

And here's how it looks in the game world: the exterior looks nice, with the entrance, despite being somewhat hidden from the road, still pretty clearly telegraphed with a stone arch. The mod adds a small camp midway up which looks good other than some extremely minor static intrusion with a tree (probably the result of mesh replacers not exactly being the same size as the vanilla ones). Finally, the part at the summit is largely left alone, which should help with compatibility. All in all I'm very pleased with this mod and it appears to be a "keeper" right out of the box.