Skyrim Modding Diary - 08 March 2022
Hi everyone, welcome back. Today is going to be another relatively light day as far as modding work goes, but let's see what we can knock out as we work towards launching the next playthrough.
We're starting the day with 1,451 mods installed, 1,480 plugins active, and a final load order index of EB.
Patches, Lights, and Animations
I've been really impressed recently with the rash of new ENB particle lighting mods - even though they're trickling out, the cumulative effect is excellent. You can see some of this in action on yesterday's blog with the Blackreach ENB screenshots - all those various glowing plants, minerals, and other things the product of half a dozen different mods all working together. Today we've got two more of those lighting upgrades, along with a couple of other patches and a new DAR module. Specifically:
- Particle Light for ENB - Fire Traps
- Saints and Seducers Flora ENB Light
- Fjona The Bard
- Sensible Sleepwalking
- Simple Draugr Stagger
I wasn't expecting any big surprises here, but you know what they say about Murphy's Law...
So we need to look at these two scripts. We'll open both source codes up in Notepad ++ and compare them side by side.
XPO makes the edit at line 133, which adds a logical test to see if the player character is in an XPO prison scene. All the other changes are from Sensible Sleepwalking. So what we're going to do is patch the XPO code into sensible sleepwalking's script source and recompile it.
We'll put this recompiled script in our holding folder for script patches. This is seated low in my load order to ensure these files win conflicts.
Fortunately, all the mods were nice and clean - even the patches didn't have conflicts in them (except for where they amend their masters), so once we got the new script deployed, we were all done!
Patches and More, Redux!
After getting the new mods above installed, I did a quick review of what their authors had produced in the past, and I found a few more patches that I want for my game:
- Thugs, not Assassins
- Windhelm Segregation
- The Dragon Bridge
- Four Skull Lookout iNPC patch
- Potema's Minion Fixlet
- Particle Lights for ENB - Nordic Ruin Candles
- Particle Lights for ENB - Staff Enchanter
- Particle Lights for ENB - Wisps and Witchlight
- Particle Lights for ENB - Light Orbs
- Jarl Sitting Animation Replacer
These supplemental items are generally pretty clean installs - there's a script conflict in Thugs, not Assassins, but the author provided a patch for it so I didn't have to recompile any of it. The Dragon Bridge does have a conflict with other Dragon Bridge mods that we need to examine to make sure it isn't creating an eyesore.
The other mods were generally clean, though Four Skull needed navmesh edge link cleaning. Thugs, not Assassins needed script property and alias patching to avoid errors - this is in part because it needs to read a global value from Timing is Everything, a mod which I compacted for ESL flagging and thereby changed the form ID for the global. You can see the corrected form ID below, which we'll patch into the script.
With the xEdit work done, let's see how that bridge looks in game. Either way, we'll be back to do some ESL flagging.
Looks good!
Why Did The Bandit Cross The Road?
To get to the crucified.
Hydragorgon Slave Girls adds a number of incarcerated bandits in different forms of restraint. Unfortunately, the way the mod implemented this is a little janky and more often then not, the bandits just stand around rather than showing their tied up poses. What we're going to do today is to take some of these actors and change them over to use a different technical approach that should display their animations with much greater consistency.
These "vignette" AI packages you can see below are at the root of the issue. For whatever reason they just don't do what they're supposed to. The workaround is to use an actual furniture item rather than an AI based idle animation. We'll go ahead and copy these (for reference) to a working file and then start building our replacement strategy.
We'll start with the Darkwater Crossing package. It only applies to a single NPC, so it's a good place to begin. First, we want to copy the idle marker and the NPC to our working file.
We're also going to grab a reference from Ambient Slaves, which implements the furniture the way I want it to be implemented. Here's the essential differences:
Hydragorgon drops an idle marker and then uses AI to make the NPC animate. AS puts a furniture item and uses a linked reference on the actor to get them to use the furniture. So let's tweak this idle spot.
In the time since Hydra's AI was written, a number of different crucifix variants have made their way into the ZAZ animation pack. Let's visit the ZAZ test cell and look at our options.
These are the nailed/roped crosses with the "pose X" interact text. One thing I'm aiming to do is to not keep reusing the "cross with horn" furniture item that Horrified Female Prisoners seems to prefer, so these variants that have other poses are relevant to my interests.
Pose 1 appears to be the classic "Jesus Pose" which works but isn't my first choice.
Poses 2 and 3 are similar to each other, and are both workable, but again - nothing super special. I've seen other variants that look better.
There are some other variants that also don't have the metal horn. The actual poses are quite similar to the ones we saw before (the one below is pose 2)
These are the "bulb" crosses - not really to my taste.
There are a couple more execution items - notably WCN Cross and WCN Impale. The cross is hard to assess because it breaks the camera when the player uses it, but the impale version seems like it has potential
We have some gallows, but the open eyes/actively struggling captive would quickly stop making sense if you see the same victim every time you walk past, but these "struggle rope" posts, where the victim's feet are on the ground, might work better.
So it looks like we're just going to be picking randomly from the crucifixes and maybe throw in a few impaling poles here and there. We'll also throw in some of the struggle poles, but those have enough of a footprint that we need to place them more carefully.
We'll start by changing the baseform on the reference to list a crucifix (I'll use the WCN one so we can see its animation). Next, we need to add the furniture as a linked reference to the actor's ACHR record:
Lastly, we'll remove the package from the NPC record.
Now let's see how it looks in game.
It looks good for a moment, then the prisoner dismounted. However, I saw this behavior in the test cell also with the player, so I suspect what we're seeing here is a defect with the cross and not the game instructions. Let's try again with a different piece of furniture.
That's better!
So anyway, that's the procedure for retrofitting these Hydragorgon furniture items. It'll take a while to work through them all, but between now and the start of the next adventure I plan to do the whole bunch and probably also share the file with the edits so others can also benefit from this work.
That's it for tonight. I'll be back tomorrow to keep moving forward with these projects - see you then!
We ended the night with 1,467 mods installed, 1,489 plugins active, and a final load order index of EC (since I haven't compacted the Hydragorgon working file yet).
Edited by gregaaz
4 Comments
Recommended Comments