Let's start by looking at which mods we have on the docket for today. Here they are broken up into categories:

Older mods that I need as prerequisites for future projects

• Stormcloak Noblewomen 

Animation updates

• Dialogue Animation Remix

ENB Light add-ons

• Spiders of Solstheim
• Spectral Warhound Eyes
• Elytra

Graphics improvements

• FYX 3D Farmhouse Walkway
• FYX 3D Dock Ramp

Equipment expansion

• Orcish Weapon Replacer and Standalone

Patches and Refinements

• SLEN "You Don't Need a Break" patch
• Creatures Lift
• Delay Bleak Falls Barrow (and patch)

Landscape/Worldspace improvements

• Ryn's Guardian Stones
• Ryn's Tower Stone
• Dark Anchors, Ruins, and Dolmens (and patch)

Today we'll start with the 'easy' stuff (the graphics and lighting add ons) and then tackle some of the more complex items as time permits.

Let's start with the six graphics, animation, and lighting mods. Ideally, these should be fast and pretty effortless installs, but let's find out if they all live up to expectations.

Download and initial setup was pretty painless - I had to grab one additional mod (Spiders of Solstheim Transparency Fix) and a native patch for the Farmhouse Walkway mod to support Simplicity of Snow, but everything was easy to find and clearly labeled.

While all of these mods had asset conflicts, nothing was unexpected - that is to say, they were only conflicting the textures and nifs that they were supposed to replace. Only two of these mods contained plugins, both of which were already ESL flagged. Both plugins were also clean and unconflicted, so they didn't require any special work in xEdit.

All in all, that was a pretty painless installation cycle!

We've got two new Ryn2g mods on the docket, which I don't expect any problems with. I also learned today about a new patch for Dark Anchors, Ruins, and Dolmens - a mod that's been on my 'low priority' list for a long time - that removes the map markers. This was one thing that I had expected to need to do myself, so someone already doing this lets me bump up the priority of installing that mod. We'll grab all three and see how they go.

Hmmm, this patch for Dark Anchors is concerning me a little with it not being compacted. The underlying mod was switched from a full-size plugin to ESL flagged in its latest release, and I hope I'm not going to find that the patch was compiled against the non-ESL version. Let's find out.

Weirdly, it's not riddled with errors! It seems that this patch was compiled against the current ESL-flagged version, but not ESL flagged itself. 

It also turns out that the mod doesn't have any records outside the ESL reserved range, so all I had to do was add the ESL flag to its file header. All's well that ends well, I guess?

Further examination revealed that the patch also contained deleted records that I undeleted and disabled, so I think this might just be a case of the author doing all their work in the CK and not following up with cleaning and finishing work in xEdit. Probably just an inexperienced mod author, and since the mod otherwise seems to be fine I'll chaulk it down to this being a learning experience for the author.

As we're accustomed to with Ryn's mods, the navmesh edge links were a mess and we had to clean them. Otherwise, there weren't any other errors or other changes of concern.

As far as conflicts go, the Ryn stuff is mostly landscape - plus edits to the doomstone that likely need to be patched against Shout Like a Virgin Evolved. There's also some navmesh edits we'll want to look at before we wrap up. Dark Anchors has a number of conflicts with Aspense Ablaze where we basically just need to merge AA's baseform and sizing data with DARAD's positional edits.

In the end, we had four Navmesh conflicts that we need to investigate:

10601c    Rigmor vs. DARAD
101B91    Dwarfsphere vs. DARAD
F0673        Rigmor vs. Jarl of Ivarstead vs. GuardianStonesReCovered
EBC13        Jarl of Ivarstead vs. GuardianStonesReCovered

But first, let's see how these new items look in the game.

Looking good!

As we discovered in the last segment, we have some navmesh that we need to look at and possibly patch. This will probably the last segment for this blog - but let's see what the scope of work is going to be. 

First we've got our three-way conflict on F0673. These navmeshes all appear to be functionally identical, and I believe the issue is with different edge link numbers on the far right side. We'll clean the edge links in all three files and otherwise not worry about these much. If we notice problems in the future we can always come back and make a patch, of course. EBC13, seen below, appears to be the same situation. Incidentally, wastes of time like analyzing these navmesh "conflicts" are a good illustration of why authors should clean their edge links. It won't neccessarily prevent a conflict, especially if the adjoining mesh adds wholly new triangles on the edge, but it'll at least reduce these situations.

10601C has a more noticeable difference - the Rigmor version is missing preferred pathing for the north-south route, whereas DARAD does have it. Before we decide what to do next, we need to look at vanilla to see if the addition of the preferred pathing was a change made by DARAD or if the change was a removal done by Rigmor. As you can see below, the north-south road is from vanilla. Since there aren't any other noticeable differences between these navmeshes, we'll clean the edge links on all three mods, then let Rigmor's version win before forwarding it to teh conflict resolution patch.

The final conflict is between Dwarfsphere (Project AHO) and DARAD. Let's see what we've got there... interestingly, the DARAD page actually highlights it's visual synergy with Project AHO, which makes it seem kind of odd that there's an unpatched/unresolved navmesh conflict. Assuming there's no door links in play (something we need to check for on the other navmeshes as well), then we just need to clean the edge links and then let DARAD win the conflict. Since DARAD is the last-loading mod, it probably doesn't need to get rolled into the conflict resolution patch.

The cutout area, incidentally, is part of the sulphur spring pool, and its likely punched out to keep NPCs from getting stuck in the new geometry.

Now let's go back to xEdit, clean all these mods' edge links, check for any orphaned door links, and then do any patching we need to do.

OK, and you can see here that the edge links were a mess in some of my older mods - mods I installed before I learned all the cleaning tricks I know now. This should hopefully resolve a lot of the current issues. While this didn't lead to any records getting deleted as ITMs, I suspect it will greatly reduce the level of conflict. Now let's check each of the four navmeshes for orphaned linkages. For the first one I looked at, you can see that the edge link and door link categories are both green, so no conflicts there. The triangle differences are expected since that's the change to preferred pathing that Rigmor made, and we'll forward the Rigmor version of this navmesh to our conflict resolution plugin.

This does leave behind some small differences, notably in vertex Z axis coodinates, likely reflecting where the ruined bits cause the walkable area to be a little higher up. This is a good example of something we could leave be, but since the issue seems limited to the vertex coords, we can go in and patch this as well.

You can see below that the only vertex conflicts are in terms of the Z axis (and there are no new vertices added).

Now we're at all yellow, the benign conflict indicator where all changes have been forwarded.

After letting DARAD win, the conflict with DwarfSphere only leaves behind a couple of edge link related mismatches. Arguably, what we'd want to do is load up Dwarfsphere and DARAD in a working file and then refinalize this navmesh to ensure that it carries forward both the DARAD punchout and also the Dwarfsphere edge link adjustments. Honestly, I'd normally skip this step, but for the sake of the blog lets do it so we can see what the outcome looks like. We'll come back to this later.

F0673 has an orphaned door link, so we must patch it. Since we previously decided that Guardian Stones would win this conflict, we'll start by copying that data as an override into our working file. Why not directly into the conflict resolution patch, you ask? Finalizing in the CK will ensure that the "other side" of the door links also get updated.

The triangle differences are all about Become Jarl of Ivarstead removing internal edge link data. The Guardian Stones mod also changes some of these, and we're going to let it's take on this prevail, so we'll allow these red conflicts to remain.

EBC13 is the same situation, just without the orphaned door link. We'll just let the Guardian Stones mod win without any patching as it's not needed.

Now we just need to go back into the CK and open up our working file. We'll finalize each of the two navmeshes and then save the file. This went quickly and didn't return any errors, so next up we'll clean the edge links on the working file, clean the file itself for ITMs, copy the navmeshes and any associated door edits to our conflict resolution patch, clean the edge links in that file, delete its Navmesh Info Map, and finally regenerate the map by opening and saving the patch in the CK with no edits made.

As you can see above, this is why cleaning after making navmesh changes is important! I went into the CK with about 15 records, came out with 70, and of that 35 were straight-up ITMs and most of the rest were orphaned top level cell data. The CK did add three legitimate navmesh edits (the other side of some edge link changes) and those we want to keep. The rest was garbage. 

But after that little bit of extra work, we have some really good navmesh coverage now for these new areas!