Welcome back! Today it's time to tackle the conflicted market stalls and other items in the marketplace area. Let's look at our punchlist to see where we stand currently:

 

Major Conflicts 
* Imperial Physician entrance 
* Books of Skyrim 

Town Square
EA02BB62 - Hex Floor needs different texture
3800806B - ZDD static needs to move
FE1DC863 - Shackles from "Public Executions" mod need to move
440089A2 - Unique sword "Justice" needs to be put on table
EA02BAAA - Rotate Cairn 90 degrees EA02BAAA
Executioner idle marker (sunk into ground against the city wall near chopping block)
Battlements invisible wall

Marketplace
C301A331 - Meat Farm pole, needs to move slightly
Wine Merchant Stall, Slave Merchant Stall - both need to move
Conflicts with XPO furniture including the X-Cross
Big tree seems to be occluding NPC idle markets - need to move them. 
Big tree needs to be rescaled

Residential District
EA003036 - Hex Floor needs different texture
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?

SolitudeExterior
3800702C - ZDD Static that needs to move

Landscape Stuff
Landscape gaps in SolitudeExterior01
Landscape gaps at corner of town square
Partially buried window just to the right of the gate house
Landscape tear near EA078A14

Final Cleanup
Navmesh
Facegen

 

Let's start by making a working file. We need to add Meat Farm, Ambient Slaves, and Prison Overhaul (and of course Groot's) as masters and copy over at least the most obviously conflicted items. 

 

 

So! Here we are in the marketplace. Let's start tackling our punchlist one item at a time. First off is the Meat Farm pole. At first I thought bout moving the pole behind the stall and extending the navmesh to cover it, but after I did some low angle views I didn't quite like the way it looked, so instead I moved it over to the opposite side of the storefront and that looked better.

 

 

The new location, illustrated below, has the added benefit of not requiring navmesh changes.

 

 

The pine tree was just a matter of rescaling it to a smaller size and then pulling it out a little bit to prevent it from clipping into the adjoining roof. Rescaling the tree had the added benefit of fixing the idle marker intrusion, so all I had to do was make a small rotational correction to that one.

 

 

At this point I had to save and drop out because I'd forgotten to forward the revised XPO positional data from my earlier Ambient Slaves patch. 

 

 

Now that we can see the XPO conflicts correctly, let's clean this up. I've moved the foliage around the corner as you can see here. Not visible here, I also moved 6433A to a less conflicting area. 

 

 

However, clearing up this junk did reveal a different issue - the big tree was concealing a hole in geometry. The partial turret you can see below is attached to one of the buildings and can't be removed short of creating a new nif. So we need to fine tune our tree placement a bit to hide this and we might have to slide the punishment wheel a little.

 

 

Yeah, we need to move it... the second image shows the new location.

 

 

That just leaves the two market stalls. Let's do some quick recon to figure out where we want to put them. I'm thinking of putting the wine vendor over near this brewery equipment, opposite the new food stall the game adds. Let's see how that works out.

 

 

First we'll hide all the Ambient Slaves stuff so we can select the relevant items more easily.

 

 

Sadly, it's too wide for the first location I wanted to try, so we'll have to attempt something a little different - we'll move both of these stalls to the town square area.

 

 

Here's the new position of the wine merchant, and the slavers (the latter of which are right by the execution area)

 

 

Let's clean our working file but before we patch it in we'll visit Solitude and make sure everything looks OK in the game engine.

 

 

Looking pretty good visually, just need to fine tune the alignment on the wine shack and the associated idle marker. Not really visible here are lots of navmesh related NPC navigation issues, but that's all expected and we'll worry about it that later, once all the object cleanup is done.

 

So for now, all that's left to do is to do one more round of cleaning on the working file and then merge these changes into my conflict resolution patch. Tomorrow we'll finish up the punchlist for static objects and, if time permits, start looking at how to solve the various landscape gaps.