Welcome back, folks. Now that we've gone through Groot's Solitude in MO2 and xEdit, it's time to see what we need to do in the CK. We'll start out by taking a tour of the city, starting at the outer gates and working our way down to the Blue Palace. What we're looking for today are any overlapping meshes, blocked passageways, or visual irregularities (Z fighting, texture issues, etc). This stage is important because it helps us plan out the best way to fix the issues, rather than just tackling each thing one at a time in a disorganized way. To keep the screen clutter under control, I'll be putting the in-game screen shots in spoiler boxes for each section.

 

Solitude Exterior - Gate Area

We'll actually start at the docks just to make sure nothing got changed or moved down there, then walk our way up to the outer gates. While we can see another Ambient Slaves boat getting stuck in terrain, which we'll need to mover at some point, otherwise things are looking pretty good down here. As an aside... the transparent ENB water with the Depths of Skyrim water grass looks gorgeous! Also note how No Grass in Objects successfully suppressed grass generation under the refugee tent at the crossroads (though it didn't get the chair - perhaps activators aren't being picked up the way statics are).

 

Right before the gate there's a bit of a landscape break, but Clockwork meaningfully edits this area so it probably premature to worry about it until I install that mod and reevaluate what it does to that section. Just inside, we can see that there's a lot of tree intrusion going on here, probably a simple multi-mod interaction. I'll note the form IDs for later; the intruders are a mix of trees from Enhanced Vanilla Trees, the official update patch, and Groot's Skyrim itself (clipping because EVT changed the mesh sizing). We'll generally be disabling these records except for the trees from Groot's, which we'll move or resize. There's also an executed Stormcloak soldier who we need to move now that this area isn't just an open courtyard. Some minor landscape breaks are visible in the courtyard that we'll need to address later.

 

 

Before we move into the city proper, we'll disable the non-GS trees in our conflict resolution patch.

 

 

On further consideration, let's also take care of resizing those three GS trees. If you've followed my technical blogs in the past, you know we'll start by using "copy as override" on all three of the oversized trees and moving them to a working file. We'll also add the Enhanced Vanilla Trees mod as a master to bring in its assets.

 

 

Now let's open up our working file in the CK. We'll start by reducing the scale of the mesh to see if that meets our needs without more intrusive changes.

 

 

Now here it is after rescaling:

 

 

This looks about right in the CK. Now we'll go back to xEdit and copy the three edited trees into our conflict resolution patch. We won't copy over anything else, since any other records in the working file are just wild edits created by the CK. Removing and resizing these did also reveal a few more trees that needed attention (including, oddly enough, a boulder balanced on top of one house's roof!), so after merging in the changed records I went back and did some more work of the same sort. 

 

 

Now, let's see how they look in the game world:

 

 

That's looking much better. Cleaning up this area revealed a few more minor issues like the partially hidden window you can see in the first picture, but we'll revisit that and the other landscaping issues much later in this process. Likewise, we'll be back to move that ZDD static - I know from past walkthroughs that there are other items from that mod we also need to move. 

 

The Market District

Now let's head inside and tour the first area of Solitude, containing the Winking Skeever, the town square, and the market. Groot's adds another street to this area, so we're going to find some significant conflicts, I'm sure.

 

The street from the gate to the arc isn't impacted. We will need to remember to punch a hole in the navmesh so actors walk around the sundial and moondial, but that's a much later part of this project. Moving on to the market square, we have a ton of static intrusions covering up Prison Overhaul statics. Ironically, if you remember the last case study, we had problems with those statics there as well. It's just a popular piece of real estate, I guess.

 

The north side of the market square, including the changes added by Meat Farm, seem to be generally OK. The Meat Farm pole needs to be moved very slightly so it isn't intruding into the market stall, but otherwise that area appears to be fine. The east side stalls also look fine, though as you can see the new NPC from this mod has dark face bug. I expect that I'll see this for all of the new NPCs this mod adds, since it did not come with any facegen files. Finally on the south side, the Ambient Slaves boot appears to be OK - but we'll need to check it in more detail after cleaning up. 

 

The big problem, as you can see from all the floating statics, is the entrance to the Imperial Physician's practice. The wall that his door is located against has been substantially changed by this mod, and he no longer fits there. We will be moving the entrance to a different building, since this location is no longer viable for him. There are a number of unused doors added to this district by Groot's and I anticipate I'll use one of them; and with it, move some of the distinctive exterior design elements to the new building.

 

 

The town square has a bunch of small issues we need to address. The big tree in the center looks fine even though I suspect it's slightly bigger than intended. I expect that I'll leave it be, however. There are a number of statics associated with the wall that used to be just behind the execution place which all need to be moved; prisoner shackles from Public Executions, an executed Stormcloak from ZDD, There's also an idle marker that's currently sunk into the ground and a unique sword that needs to be put on the table now located further back from the execution spot.

 

There are a couple of fairly subtle landscape tears in the corner of the town square, which we'll address late in this project. Likewise, there's an unbacked texture near the town square that's visible when walking towards the Winking Skeever. There's also an invisible wall at the door from the town square staircase to the battlements.

 

If you followed my earlier preview of this mod, you know about what I'm going to mention next - there is a cairn that needs to be rotated 90 degrees so a projecting rock doesn't block access to an alley, and the alley itself us a Winterhold college texture on its floor that we need to change.

 

 

 

The Residential District

I didn't see any conflicts involving Castle Dour, so let's move on to the northern district of town. The most immediate issue is the serious conflict between Books of Skyrim and Groot's. I'm undecided on exactly how I want to approach this, but currently I'm inclined to disable all the Books of Skyrim geometry and then move the door to one of the unused doors - either in the market district or in the part outside the gates. The hall of the dead and its adjoining graveyard appear to be fine, no edits needed there - though in some areas I'm noticing frame drops so I may need to add some occlusion planes before I'm done. 

 

The residential district appears to be generally OK; there's a small tree intrusion that needs to be disabled, moved, or resized. In the far northwest corner of the district there's some floating flowers that we just need to fine-tune the Z coordinates for. There's a floating tree in the Dragonborn Gallery courtyard that I believe is actually due to a static it sets on being disabled, so it might not be a problem in its own right.

 

 

Finally we have the new additions that this mod adds to the street which runs parallel with the way to the Blue Palace. We have another Winterhold floor we need to retexture; right next to it, there's a rock we need to rotate 180 degrees to hide an open part of the mesh. Right behind that area, there's a tree growing out of paved stone floor that looks weird. We'll disable it. Finally, the same area has a landscape tear that's only visible from the back side of the gate. 

 

 

I saw no edits to the Blue Palace courtyard, so I think that concludes the grand tour. In recap, here's the outstanding issues that I found:

 

Hex Floor needs different texture
EA02BB62
EA003036

ZDD Statics that need to move
3800702C
3800806B

Meat Farm pole in market, needs to move slightly
C301A331

Pubic Execution shackles
FE1DC863

Unique sword "Justice" needs to be put on table
440089A2

Major Conflicts
* Imperial Physician entrance
* Books of Skyrim

General Notes
* Rotate Cairn 90 degrees EA02BAAA
* Landscape gaps in SolitudeExterior01
* Landscape gaps at corner of town square
* Partially buried window just to the right of the gate house
* Conflicts with XPO furniture including the X-Cross
* Marketplace - big tree seems to be occluding NPC idle markets - need to move them.
* Marketplace - big tree needs to be rescaled
* Executioner idle marker at town square
* Battlements invisible wall
* Move, disable, or resize 43F23 (small tree intruding through a wall)
* Floating flowers including 10D2BB
* Rotate EA078A14 to hide open part of mesh
* Disable EA06433A
* Landscape tear near EA078A14
* Facegen

 

We'll start addressing these tomorrow, beginning with the two major conflicts. It might take a couple days to get everything just right, but the end result should be pretty impressive!