Just a couple for today, though that includes a new Ryn2g doomstone.

 

• New Night Mother
• Ryn's Lover Stone
• Bleak Falls Barrow - No Ice Meshes

 

The Night Mother mod is replacing an earlier, less sophisticated version, which for now we're going to uninstall. However, I'll be keeping an eye out for opportunities to use that other mod in a different context. It offers up a particularly slender take on the night mother who might be usable as a corpse to stick in a coffin or something.

 

 

The other two mods have no asset conflicts, and their plugins are already ESL flagged. No errors, which is always good; likewise, no deletions or ITMs. As I've become kind of accustomed to, Ryn's mod has corrupted edge links, which I repaired using the script. Impressively, the only record conflicts were some top level cell records in the Lover's Stone mod, which made it pretty easy to integrate.

 

 

Lets visit the relevant locations and see how everything looks!

 

 

By and large, we're looking good!

There are a few issues we need to address, however, none of which are directly related to these mods:

 

• Devious Strikers NPCs are displaying modesty cover animations when they aren't in combat. We will need to give them the exhibitionist keyword to suppress this behavior.
• The ENB Green Water bug has persisted through the ENB upgrade I did, so we'll need to tweak the settings to fix this.
• "The Ruins" has a conflict with the Creation Club Homestead at FE4C6807 & 08000BC0

 

 

Devious Strike was easy to patch, so no problems there. 

 

 

For the water, I updated Water for ENB to its latest beta release (including repatching, which did reveal an undressed conflict between WFENB and Luminousity, which I patched out) and then went into the game to adjust settings in the ENB control panel. As it turned out, that proved unnecessary, since for the moment at least everything now looks good.

 

 

Finally, let's address Ruins and that creation club mod. I just need to move the gate a little further down the road and then adjust the navmesh.

 

 

Hang on... what? The Ruins doesn't update the navmesh to account for the huge gate it adds? What a bizarre design decision. I'll have to keep an eye out for other potential problems of this sort. I also observe that the CC mod doesn't add navmesh, but it seems to use collission bounding boxes to make "fake" navmesh rather than editing the main mesh.

 

Here's the new location below:

 

 

And here's the adjusted navmesh.

 

 

With that done, we'll clean our working file (removed 11 ITMs, almost all navmeshes) and then backport it to the appropriate conflict resolution patches. Finally, we'll go back to the CK and regenerate the Navmesh Info Map for our navmesh conflict resolution patch (delete the NAVI record in xEdit, then save the plugin in the CK to regenerate).

I've used Sexlab Defeat for ages. I frequently cite it in discussions of NSFW mods that are still worth using in a SFW playthrough (obviously with all the sexy stuff turned off in the MCM) because it has so many great features. I've tried alternatives, but they all either fall way short in terms of features, or they don't work, or both. Yamete! has been recommended to me a few times, but I've been skeptical in the past. However, this mod has reached a more mature state now and it has some features that are attractive to me. While I am deeply unconvinced so far about gating some of the features, I appreciate the fact that they're gated behind story. So in our next adventure, I'm going to give this a try instead of Defeat.

 

First we need to uninstall SL Defeat. As you can see, we have leveled list conflicts we need to clean first.

 

 

Running the "Report Masters" script reveals the record we need to roll back:

 

 

And with that done now we can clean masters on our conflict resolution patch to remove the SL Defeat dependency.

 

 

Now we can remove Defeat without impacting any downstream files. We'll also remove the associated sound pack. Next we'll install the latest SSE version of Yamete!

 

Yamete! reported one asset conflict, but it turned out to be a false alarm - it was a license file that would not impact actual gameplay. I hid the file and moved on. The plugin is an uncompacted ESP with 1,495 records. The mod contains facegen and SEQ files. It also contains assets that contain hardcoded references. For a mod that was last updated just this January, I'm not super thrilled that the author isn't offering a native ESL flagged version. I'm not going to pass judgment until I've fully assessed the mod but this isn't really a great starting point. 

 

 

Notwithstanding my grousing though, let's hop into xEdit and see how clean the mod is. I'll hold off for now on compacting it until I can decide if its worth the trouble. 

 

• No errors
• No corrupt edge links
• No deletions
• 20 ITMs, consisting of 8 top level cell data entries and 12 navmeshes.
  • This is a meaningful defect - users who don't clean and patch their files might get degraded performance from these ITMs.
• Only one conflict, which is a neccessary top level cell record (adds location and music data); patched in.

 

Coming away from cleaning, nothing here is a hard turnoff, though the navmesh ITMs are kind of a warning sign; much like the issues with my current case study, I get worried when authors clearly didn't clean their own work prior to uploading, since cutting corners in one area might be a sign of cutting corners in other areas. But still, I'm not going to pass judgment until I can experience the mod in game. 

 

Let's take a look at its MCM controls before we wrap up. We'll assess its gameplay experience during the next playthrough. First though, I need to rebuild my animation registry since both this mod and Defeat contain their own animation data.

 

 

Well, that's an ominous warning in terms of compatibility with Alternate Perspective... Hopefully this is just referring to the way the vanilla intro partially locks the player's controls, but we'll have to keep an eye on this going forward. 

 

 

Uh...

 

 

Fortunately, it proceeded to load. Overall, I'd assess the MCM as "workable." There are clear deficiencies compared to SL Defeat, with some key features seemingly entirely absent (though possibly gated behind the mod's story -- still, the lack of MCM controls is concerning). Additionally, the focus of certain features is narrowed so that it's residual function is solely fetish content (dropped-item stripping, for example) compared to SLD's broader approach. 

 

To be honest... my gut reaction is to just uninstall this mod and go back to SLD, but I'll keep to my original plan and give it a fair shake in game. For now though, we've got this mod in a stable situation so we can move on.

Finally, let's proceed forward with the Hydragorgon work. Last time we successfully tested my planned technical approach, so now it's time to start rolling it out. Here's what we're going to do.

 

1. We have all the packages copied into a working file; we'll go down the list of packages and convert them over.
   • Cages and other non-lethal bondage will get similar ZAP items; crucifixes will get either crosses, impaling poles, or the auto-asphyxiation arch like we used in the test case.
2. When we clear a package, we'll remove it from the working file and copy the edited records to the file that'll eventually be our permanent patch
3. We repeat these steps until all the vignettes are converted to real furniture

 

To recap from yesterday, here's what we're doing:

 

• Changing the Baseform on the object reference (REFR) record from an idle marker to a ZAZ furniture item and adding the Pama Object Alignment Script
• Removing the Package from the actor (NPC_) record 
• Adding a Linked Reference to the bondage furniture to the placed actor (ACHR) record

 

The combination of these three actions gets the results we want.

 

Now, let's tackle our next package, which is located at Dragon Bridge.

 

 

This one has one actor mapped to it and it's connected to Crucifix animations.

 

 

Dragon Bridge is located in Haafingar, which is 'culturally Imperial,' so we will indeed crucify this poor soul, and we'll do it using nails. Now here we have the records staged for editing (with the Ambient Slaves reference data for quick updating).

 

 

 

Package #2 is another crucification, so this time we'll use Pose #1. However, I'm going to loop back and use the dark wood instead of the light, since the battlements from Great City of Dragon Bridge have a pretty dark palette to them. And... package 3 is also a crucifix. Clearly Dragon Bridge is not the place to get arrested for banditry!

 

 

Let's go check out Dragon Bridge!

 

 

So this is like a good news/bad news situation. The good news is that all three of the crosses are working correctly. The bad news is that two of them are conflicting and stuck in geometry. Here's what we're going to do.

 

• The orc bandit is going to switch out to the struggle rope since she has a lot of room
• The Jesus Pose bandit is going to change out to the cross type that the orc used to have
• The Post 2 bandit is going to get relocated to a different area

 

After we do the baseform updates, we need to hop into the CK to change the actual furniture positions.

 

As a side note, I'm going to be significantly turning down the change of SPID distributing bandages to these prisoners, as far too many of them are receiving them. The lack of diversity and the somewhat low quality of the (vanilla) asset just aren't a great look.

 

 

 

OK, we're getting closer. Just need to swap out that bondage chair for one that actually works. I think the takeaway from this exercise is that I'm going to be spending more time deconflicting the mod than actually doing the xEdit work, which goes pretty fast. That's not a bad thing, as it gives me the time to ensure everything looks good from an artistic point of view.

 

 

Third time's a charm, I think!