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Bethesda Modding Diary - 28 June 2022


gregaaz

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Welcome back, everyone. Anyone curious what this mysterious new evidence that's going to be revealed this afternoon is all about? It'll be interesting to find out. In the meanwhile, let's finish integrating Immersive Jewelry and The Gemstone Collector. As you might recall from a while back, we've gone through and addressed several specific conflicts between the two mods and also between these mods and Legacy of the Dragonborn. Now we want to address some of the more straightforward conflicts such that these mods can fully inter-operate.

 

Starting mod counts:

 

  • Skyrim
    • Mods installed: 1720
    • Plugins active: 1669
    • Last load order index: E9
  • Fallout
    • Mods installed: 491
    • Plugins active: 551
    • Last load order index: A7

 

Trivia Trek

Spoiler

Since our Fallout mod count hasn't changed since last time, we only have two numbers to look at today.

 

NCC-1720 - U.S.S. Lafayette

U.S.S. Lafayette is an unusual case of a ship that lost its name in the Class 1 procurement shuffle but later got it back. As originally authorized, 1720 was to be built as a Bon Homme Richard subclass heavy cruiser, including the Command Cruiser enhancements pioneered on U.S.S. Excalibur and also planned for BHR herself. At some point during construction, the Federation Council planned to cancel NCC-1722, moving U.S.S. El Dorado to contract 1724 (Saratoga) and the Saratoga name to 1720, to be built without the Command Cruiser package. Lafayette would be reserved for a future Class 2 ship. 

 

However, it soon became apparent from the experience of the original Constitution class cruisers that the Council's judgement that the Bon Homme Richard subclass was over-ordered was premature, and the changes to 1720, -22, and -24 were all reversed. Lafayette had a short and rough life. After launching in 2250, she was critically damaged during the Four Years War in the early 2250s and struck from active service. During this interim, two other ships bore the name Lafayette. First, an earlier incarnation (the Engle class NCC-1003) was reactivated and used in, among other operations, the defense of Starbase One in 2256. Subsequently, a Larson class destroyer (NCC-4397) carried the name.  In the early 2270s, the 1720 contract was reactivated and Lafayette was rebuilt as an Endeavor class heavy cruiser in 2275. Lafayette almost immediately clashed with the Klingons in the Battle of Adanerg in Y167, and it's likely that her second incarnation was similarly short-lived as circa 2288 a new U.S.S. Lafayette was in service under NCC-7033 - this time a Miranda type light cruiser/heavy frigate design. 

 

NCC-1669 - U.S.S. Crecy (ex-Cooper?)

We don't know much about NCC-1669. In the Mirror Universe, this ship was I.S.S. Cooper, a Malachowski class cruiser that we can infer had a Prime Universe counterpart based on the events in Star Trek Discovery. Beyond this, we don't know much about this ship. Superficially, the Malachowski class closely resembles the Anton class and both were Class 2 cruisers, albeit with different operational focus and propulsion. Beyond that, we don't know anything about the history of this ship. However, by Y180 (early 2280s, possibly 2283), 1669 was in dock waiting to be (re)built as a Chicago class "heavy" cruiser. After the near-loss of U.S.S. Agincourt revealed the risks involved with only fielding a single drone bombardment ship in the fleet, the Federation Council authorized a second such ship. Rather than convert another Class 1 heavy cruiser, -1669 was instead completed in a unique configuration to fill that role. 

 

Since we know so little about Cooper and Crecy both, it's hard to say why Starfleet chose to rename the ship, though the new name seems clearly intended to match Agincourt. There was a previous Crecy, NCC-4312. She was a Larson class destroyer and had a fairly lengthy service period before eventually decommissioning. We don't know what 1669's ultimate fate was, but considering the Federation Council's hesitancy to authorize bombardment ships, and Crecy's limited non-military applications, there's a decent chance she was decommissioned during or just after the broad reduction in interstellar tensions between 2293-2296. If she managed to ride out that period, then her unique capabilities mean she was probably involved with the Federation's response to the Andromedan crisis of the early 2300s, though by this point she was probably fast approaching obsolescence.

 

Looping Back For Conflict Resolution

Spoiler

OK, so at this point we have already cleaned Immersive Jewelry and The Gemstone Collector: Mystic Legacy. We've reconciled the two mods' approach to copper crafting, fixed potential issues with leveled list overflows and flooding, and fine-tuned TGSC's integration with Legacy of the Dragonborn.

 

What's left is to do conventional conflict resolution on those two mods so that we can fully integrate them into the game. Hopefully our existing patches have covered the vast majority of issues, but let's work through this and see what we find.

 

image.png.538d9179fc6f8849a83d6cdad9f62caf.png

 

Things started out smooth enough, until I hit the leveled lists. Now I was sure I had already fixed the leveled lists. But no, it seems that if I did, then I somehow misplaced the working file because those changes are nowhere to be found ? so we'll be going back to that later. Let's do everything else first, however.

 

OK, well that was time consuming but otherwise not too bad. The big sticking point is going to be those leveled lists, which need to be split off into a working file and carefully run down through to create the branching file structure. This continues to really irk me because I clearly remember doing this before. On further investigation, however, it turns out that I was just letting my imagination run wild. It was a different leveled list overflow scenario, involving alchemy ingredients, that I was thinking about.

 

image.png.e87b256ca15bc534fdc0061e90990a19.png

 

So I guess we need to go fix those leveled lists!

 

Multi-Branch Leveled Lists for Gems

Spoiler

We've done multi-branch leveled lists twice before: once for books, and once for ingredients. We've also done it a bunch of times for creatures. In all these cases, the goal is to do two things:

 

  1. Not have any one leveled list exceed 255 entries, and
  2. Avoid a situation where one mod floods out the leveled list by adding a ton of its own items so we never see other mods' contributions

 

We're going to do this again for gems. To start, we'll copy all the relevant leveled lists to a working file. 

 

image.png.13c274c2e87fbbcae12c473b178d75e5.png

 

First we want to look through all the relevant lists and do ordinary conflict resolution on any of them that don't need the branched approach. For example LItemIngotIron50 doesn't need branching as it doesn't conflict with any other mods. Others, like LootGoldChange don't contain any conflicts that are at risk of causing flooding or overflows. In both cases, we'll resolve these just like normal conflicts and then remove them from the working file. Here's what we end up with at the end:

 

image.png.141fced3f203ca1fc7489d7971ac5c2d.png

 

As expected, we see Books, Alchemy, and Gems. We also see a few jewelry categories such as circlets that are approaching the overflow level. We'll now knock out each of these. For lists that we've already done once, all we need to do is create the new branch(es) and add them to the list. I was about to use Uncommon Ingredients as an example, but it seems I already did this for Immersive Jewelry. That's probably how I got these two crossed in my brain - no action required there. That still leaves 20 lists that we need to manage, however. Let's take Book1 as an example.

 

This list has six different mods that feed into it (we don't need to count vanilla Skyrim because it's contents are more or less duplicated in all of these). What we're going to do is click on each column and choose "copy as new record" and append "Branch1" "Branch2" etc. to the end of each. Then we'll put those branch lists into this record and remove everything else. Since they are weighted equally, the end result will be an equal chance across the board of getting a vanilla book, and a variable chance of getting a mod-added book based on which branch gets randomly selected. This'll preserve the primary content without drowning out any one mod's contributions. Since Cloaks and LOTD have a patch already that combines them, we'll use that patch instead of the individual columns, resulting in us actually getting 4 branches instead of 6.

 

image.png.4e71ed086e9eeb248abb8710f4f31308.png

 

When we're finished, the leveled list will look like this:

 

image.png.1c780d2878b17e1e7a3f9858dabb7cb1.png

 

Now we'll repeat this for each list in the working file and save the resulting edits to our leveled list conflict resolution patch. Incidentally, if you're wondering about why this is important, take a look at the GemsAll list:

 

image.png.32fc65dabe4751243870c0a03296c82e.png

 

Two of the lists have 69 entries each, slightly more than vanilla... then IJ has 179 (!) entries. But TGSC only has 7, because it shunts the player to sublists. If we just merged these, IJ would dominate with its large number of entries while TGSC content would almost never show up. Using the branches, each interpretation of the gems list has an equal 25% chance of getting used, ensuring visibility for their content.

 

Checking On The Job

Spoiler

OK, and after working through those we were able to eliminate a couple more where there wasn't enough divergence to justify a fully branched list, so all in all we had about 16 lists to branch. With that done, we can save our work and now we should be fully integrated. Let's visit a few vendors in-game to see how their stocks look.

 

image.png.7a43ea8667b6dc0811f374379b6fb51f.png

 

ScreenShot1881.png.d96a163703fbe37d76f042791bf1e4d9.pngScreenShot1880.png.23cbc1182b2b5b543521d413fbef78a2.png

 

Here we can see items from both NeV-P Extreme Minerals and Immersive Jewelry both showing up in merchant inventory, so it looks like our leveled list integration is working correctly!

 

Some Lighter-Weight Content

Spoiler

Now that we've put that to bed, let's install a few lighter items that I've had queued up. Specifically:

 

 

The first mod, being a DAR plugin, was painless to install and didn't have a plugin - so that part was pretty easy. Same for the control cube, which was a simple texture and mesh replacer. Both of the other mods came out clean - though I had to update KS Hairdos for the Afflicted one - and I was able to compact and flag the Afflicted Makeover without any complications. The neutrality mod doesn't have any conflicts, so that was easy enough, and it just left the actual record edits within OP's makeover.

 

In that, I found one edit that I didn't like, and that might cause some complications:

 

image.png.6026f74f9c69a68673add0a96f1fbeda.png

 

This right here, in the race record. The author removes the special custom skin for the afflicted and substitutes the normal skin. I get that the purpose of the mod is to make the afflicted look nicer, but I don't like the way they did it. However, I'm a little concerned that this means the facegen doesn't use the associated afflicted head textures.

 

image.png.1071aa8b7f66b8456b0d46ff2457688d.png

 

And... well, see for yourself below:

 

image.png.b4803919ec6196a180cc97791ee439ac.png

 

So I need to go through the facegen nifs and patch in the correct texture. There's a tool out there to automate this, but I don't feel like tracking it down right now so we'll do this manually.

 

OK, with that fixed we have one final thing to do - this mod adds some new outfits, and we need to make sure they are properly using my improved leveled lists. And as you can see below, they are indeed referencing the existing DA13 lists, which in turn will push to the lists with my edits and the edits from Ascension of the Afflicted. Let's see how these actors look inside the game!

 

image.png.a89fdaac7ea541f0feb587bd65b626f0.png

 

ScreenShot1883.png.5cb5082642850ec4999a2cc128c334e8.pngScreenShot1882.png.92a66466a55c078b48ff9be0f09dcd90.png

 

Looks good!

 

Something a Little Lighter

Spoiler

I approach silly mods with... care. I think comedic content has an important place in my game world, but it's also one of those things that can easily break my immersion. HRodebehrt has a whole series of silly food-related mods that I have some ideas for integrating, but I'm approaching them somewhat carefully because they need a lot of work to fit in the way I want. Today, I'm going to do the easiest one to integrate: NecroPizza. Normally this mod starts automatically when the player reaches level 3. I'm going to change the a little - instead, it'll start after completing Sheogorath's loyalty quest. 

 

This mod and its RND patch are both clean and free of asset conflicts. They also don't have any record conflicts inside their plugins. So all we need to do is alter the start conditions for the content (which begins with a courier delivery). Here you can see the default settings for the story manager node:

 

image.png.7121db2c721f09b6ec49674103bc0cfb.png

 

Now here we are after adding the new condition:

 

image.png.4a194e26a7051b7c10d9d79568bc735c.png

 

That'll stop the silly business from beginning prematurely :) 

 

And yes, I do have a plan for Sausages of Solitude

 

I think that's it for today. See you again soon!

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