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Skyrim Modding Diary - 26 February 2022


gregaaz

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Happy Saturday, everyone. As we get ready to transition into our mod cleanup case study on Monday, today we'll be focusing on cleaning up some lingering items that need some attention. We'll also be doing some work on unannounced content related to the upcoming third adventure - though probably not too much today. 

 

We're starting with 1,405 mods installed, 1,458 plugins active, and a final load order index of E8. Why did this go up overnight? Because when I did my grass cache a few days ago, I forgot to turn Animated Clutter and my SAW Overflow Files back on! :O 

 

What's New On The Nexus?

Spoiler

Not too much new content today. We'll just be grabbing TB's Better Stars and Constellations, but there's no guarantee we'll keep it as I have other mods that touch on this content already. As it turns out, however, after installing the mod we can see that it's filling a gap we were using vanilla assets for. So that's a good acquisition!

 

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Some Little Tweaks to YPS

Spoiler

YPS Immersive Fashion is a great mod, but one of its weak spots are its kind of lackluster pubic hair textures. Stages one and two are fine (these are the sparse/stubble textures), but 3-5 are not very details and frequently struggle with color matching. So we'll redirect those to the more detailed textures from Nordic Warmaiden. Are you curious, BTW, why I'm linking the LE versions? It's because we need to get (and then optimize for SSE) the UUNP textures for both Nordic Warmaiden and also YPS itself, since currently the CBBE based body overlays don't quite line up right.

 

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We'll use Cathedral Asset Optimizer to change over the texture formats of both the source mods. This should also fix the issues we've seen in the past with Warmaiden belly hair not lining up right with the navel.

 

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With those in place, now we need to update the slavetats JSON file for YPS with the updated textures we want to use. While we're at it, since Kirstia is blond, we are going to change all the body hair textures from Warmaiden over to the fair versions.

 

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With those changes made, we are going to "save as" this JSON file to an override entry that we'll put in my late loading patches section.

 

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Let's see how this looks in game:

 

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So that's not the texture I was expecting. And indeed, the papyrus log is not showing me what I'm expecting either:

 

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I'm going to reach out to the mod's support thread to see if they know of a solution, but in the meanwhile I'm going to do a dirty workaround - I'll just replace the 'official' textures with the ones that I want to make use of. I'm also going to copy things in a little more agressively with the textures than I first planned, so only the stage 1 stubble will come from YPS - everything else will come from Nordic Warmaiden.

 

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So that works, though the hair color effect is extremely muted. This works for now, but I'll have to revisit this in the future to see if I can get results that I'm happier with.

 

Colorful Barkeepers

Spoiler

I've been sitting on RyanReos Milk Apron for a while since it depends on me setting up gendered leveled lists for the barkeeper outfit. Before we launch into a new game, I'll take care of that now. I'll also incorporate some color variants for the basic outfit as well.

 

Before we do anything special, first we'll create the gendered outfit/leveled list variants. If you remember how we did this for the wench outfits, this is going to seem very similar. At this time we only have gendered variants of the body clothes, so we'll limit our work that aspect. This also proved a little easier and faster than the wench/merchant outfits because in vanilla, the barkeeper outfits are fairly constrained - and most of the modded instances I found are either from Immersive Wenches (all-female list) or for generic things like improved roads where they have to use the unisex file. This meant that all these lists required a lot less digging than they might otherwise.

 

We are also going to make a Female Class 5 list which will only contain the Milk Apron costume once its live. I'm not ready to go in and fully implement this yet, but I have a couple of actors for whom I want to assign that outfit (some Trouble of Heroine NPCs for example). 

 

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With all but the Class 5 stuff done, we'll install the Milk Apron. It's already ESL flagged and its a very small file, so unsurprisingly there weren't any problems during installation. We'll ignore the silly COVID mask which doesn't really fit in with the world aesthetic, so what we are looking at are the five color variants of the apron. Now, on their own these will flood the leveled list and skew the percentages, so what we'll do is create a sublist with an equal chance of distributing each item. 

 

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On the general female list, we'll only enter this sublist once; consequently, 20% of female barkeepers will wear the milk apron as it's written right now (this may change when we loop back for the color variants). The Class 5 list will only have the milk apron sublist, and the Thalmor Meat Inspector will specifically always have the black apron. 

 

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Finally, let's get those color variants in. If you remember what I did with the leather armor variants, this is going to sound familiar. We'll start by changing the folder name for the textures.

 

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Then, we'll create some texture sets and hook them up to the ARMA records (which in turn we'll hook up to the ARMO records). We'll do this for the normal and the modest version. We'll probably also go back and do a Class 3 version from this mod.

 

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Now this actually balances the numbers compared to the milk apron, but that's only a temporary state of affairs. What we're going to do is put each outfit type into a sublist with its color variants.

 

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Now let's look at that LE mod. It's textures only, as you can see below. So we're just going to repeat what we just did for these new outfit variants, though we'll only be doing the vanilla mesh, as this one will look strange on the modest version.

 

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OK, those are all created and populated to the leveled lists. Now let's visit some bars and see how the new outfits look!

 

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Well, both of those projects took a little longer than I planned, but we got good results in the end. We'll keep working on getting everything polished up, as I found a few more rough spots that I plan to work on tomorrow.

 

We ended the day with 1,412 mods installed, 1,459 plugins active, and a final load order index of E8.

 

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