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Bethesda Modding Diary - 15 July 2022


gregaaz

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My mod project for this weekend  

5 members have voted

  1. 1. What complex mod should I tackle this weekend?

    • Heart of Skyrim (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/47123)
      0
    • Sexy Bandit Captives (https://www.loverslab.com/files/file/4423-sexy-bandit-captives-%C2%A9-wip/)
      3
    • The Great Town of Ivarstead (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/34505) integration with Become Jarl of Ivarstead (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/39298)
      1
    • The Morning Fire (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/83213) and Candy Shops of Skyrim (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/9488/?)
      0
    • ClefJ's Morthal (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/49546)
      0
    • Focus on the Clean Start Protocol (add quest conditions to mods so they don't start up immediately when rolling a new character)
      1

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  • Poll closed on 07/16/2022 at 04:04 PM

Welcome back, everyone! I was very disappointed to discover that, despite producing enough content to have a new episode every week, Paramount has somehow managed to schedule six weeks with no new Star Trek episodes! Fortunately, The Orville is still airing new episodes on Hulu, but I'd really got used to a steady stream of new Trek. Today is going to be a light modding day, because I've got a lot of conflicting demands on my time, but I do still want to make some progress at least. By the way, I've put a little poll up. This is just a quick one, but I'd love to see some input into what you would like to see me tackle this weekend.

 

Hull Number Review

Spoiler

 

  • NCC-1730 was originally planned to be U.S.S. Intrepid II as part of the 4444 appropriation and probably would have been built as an Achernar subclass heavy cruiser. However, Intrepid II was instead assigned to an Oberth class science ship for reasons that remain unclear. After this, 1730 was one of several ships considered for Bunker Hill, but ultimately commissioned as U.S.S. Soryu in 2275. She launched in the Endeavor subclass configuration, before refitting to CB configuration in 2288. She refitted to CX (or received a partial X-Refit) in 2297. Soryu served until 2322, when she was decommissioned and scrapped.
  • NCC-1782 was orginally planned as U.S.S. Hajj as part of the Achernar class bulk authorization. Like many high-numbered Achernar contracts she was repeatedly delayed, but she was finally constructed as a Constitution (II) subclass cruiser in 2275, U.S.S. Konigsberg (that name originally planned for a canceled fast destroyer). She upgraded to CX in 2299 and served until she was scrapped in 2323. Records indicate that NCC-1782 was also planned for a new construction CX, U.S.S. Masada, to enter service some time in or after 2393. She was presumably named after the fleet tug of the same name that was hijacked by Elasi pirates in 2269. It's unclear if CX Masada was ever actually built and if so, what her contract number was. 
  • A quick note about X-Tech refits (CX, etc.): I recently learned that the Star Fleet Battles module X1R: X-Ship Reinforcements contains rules for so-called partial X-Tech refits, where a non-X design receives some or all of the X-Tech systems. In many cases where in the past we've talked about ships getting an X-Tech refit, they may have in fact received one of these partial refits. For example, Defiant II probably stayed as a BCS with partial X-Refit rather than sacrificing her fleet defense shuttle squadron to go to the HVX configuration. Short of a very comprehensive survey of the refit history of known non-X ships, however, it's hard to really draw a clear dividing line on which ships got full X refits (we know canonically, for example, that at least one CB was refitted to a full CX) and which ones got partial refits. 

 

 

 

Freeing Up Space

On the Skyrim side, we're back up to load order index ED, so we need to free up some space before we proceed. Not counting mods that might be candidates to split into several smaller files, we have 120 plugins that are technically capable of being compacted and ESL flagged. That's just over 50% of our load order. After we eliminate the mods that are most likely to cause headaches (such as Sexlab), as well as mods that I know I need to do patching or integration work on and want to keep uncompacted for now, we're left with 29 candidates for compacting. I would like to do at least half of these today (spoiler: I found a new quest mod and got side tracked cleaning and installing that, so I only reclaimed a net of 5 load order slots).

 

image.png.363a94eeef46f190ae5e0e1794724698.png

 

The Easy Ones First

Spoiler

Let's start by review these for low hanging fruit. Devious Devices for Him, for example, should be safe to compact down without any special prep. That mod only has a small number of unique, low-risk records so we can crunch it down without much effort. It's also a terminal mod, in the sense that while many of its DD overrides get used for various purposes, nothing is overriding its native records.

 

image.png.e166ee5ee927439e9446628f3c1385cb.png

 

Beards.esp is another good candidate. It contains only 17 records, all of which are head parts. While its possible that some future mod will reference these headparts, the scope of potential conflicts is small enough that mitigation will be easy.

 

Legacy of the Dragonborn Add-Ons

Spoiler

Cheesemod for Everyone and Good Brother are both mods that haven't been updated for a long time. In the past I delayed compacting because of LOTD interactions, but as you know if you've been following this blog, that's subsequently been resolved. However, Cheesemod at least has some patches for other mods I use which I haven't grabbed yet, so we'll go and take care of those first so our new form IDs can flow down. Fortunately, the only patch I didn't have already was the one for SkyTEST and it was a very clean install. 

 

Cheesemod has facegen, speech, and an SEQ file so we'll need to convert all of that over in the process of compacting it. As I mentioned a couple entries back, I'm not satisfied with the current state of ESLify Follower, so I'll be using the older but more stable Facegen/Voice ESLify tools.

 

image.png.7a387af4e4b6fc87f88a9b8b63ef4539.png

 

Next, since this mod has novel cells, we need to check them for edits that would force us to put them onto our special holding plugin. 

 

image.png.97be20d70940f45d4420b1cf819f6b83.png

 

As you can see, however, the only novel cell is untouched, so we can leave it as it. We'll add the ESL flag for this file and then copy its Dragonborn Gallery patch to our special holding area to ensure it doesn't get overwritten by future DBM updates.

 

Now let's repeat this process for Dark Brotherhood For Good Guys. This mod doesn't have any sensitive files, so we should be good to go right out of the gate. Interestingly, the DBFGG patch for LOTD doesn't actually touch any of its unique records, so we don't strictly need to move it to our override control folder. We'll still do so, just to be safe. 

 

image.png.250e0d3be8ee2a34bb8541976b82df77.png

 

Spooky Ghosts and Ancient Artifacts

Spoiler

Reliquary of Myth is another mod that I had left uncompacted before as a result of LOTD interaction. Let's take a look at it and see if its a good candidate.

 

image.png.aaa6dece85ac6510da625b62c652eb5c.png

 

As you can see, this mod just got an update last month, so its still being actively developed. We'll leave it alone for now. Ghost of the Deathbells is the next one I want to look at, and while it has sensitive files there's nothing that should complicate compacting it. 

 

image.png.33936e23a4c2b129932531e8178c1bf4.png

 

This one didn't have any novel cells, so after we finished converting the voice and facegen files and generated a new SEQ we are all set.

 

The other uncompacted "artifacts" mod I have is Tournament of the Ten Bloods a.k.a. Artifacts of Boethiah. This one hasn't been updated since 2020, so I think we're safe to compact it.

 

image.png.58a7cb5988d26963ab25bed538787736.png

 

This one has a few patches for me to grab, so let's get those integrated first. One question also is do I want to install this mod, which patches into TOTTB? She sounds like a pretty well developed character who would make a good addition to my world. Let's give her a shot.

 

An Unplanned Quest Mod

Spoiler

There's a little bit of two steps forward, one step back going on here because Dawnstone has a few uncompacted ESP files, but I think one of them should actually be easy to crunch down, which'll just leave the main quest mod. Her main quest mod is 14400 records, which is the kind of thing I actually want to use my full-size ESP slots on, so that's fine. As expected, the other file (with only 32 records) didn't contain anything sensitive so we can compact it right away.

 

image.png.573d13d129f0d4eee8394e7fa79bc604.png

 

There's one error in the main mod, so let's see if we can sleuth out the correct alias ID.

 

image.png.163078e75617802e2acd16ca22d7e95c.png

 

There's no alias that logically matches this based on context, and review of the script appears to show that this alias does nothing, so we can leave it be for now. I also don't see any bug reports on the mod page relating to this. While I'm not thrilled with having busted stuff in the game, this appears to be harmless.

 

>GROAN< and of course there's deleted navmesh. A ton of ITMs also. Loads of busted up navmesh edge links, though that may partly go away when we fix the deletions.

 

image.png.99273aa17bfbd2661898c86a0a4e0065.png

 

At first glance, it looks like what happened here is that the author made edits to two adjacent meshes, and the CK merged them then deleted both the vanilla ones automatically. That part isn't the author's fault, though they should have fixed it before publishing. Based on the large number of other dirty edits I saw, I'm a little concerned that perhaps the author didn't clean this mod in xEdit at all. I also noted a suspicious edit to the marriage quest that I need to look at it in more detail, as it seems to have possibly reverted major content changes from Hearthfire.

 

image.png.ddc7f28a7beddf1f42d34df46b4357da.png

 

Here you can see the little mini navmesh (03039df8) that's been absorbed into the new mega-mesh. What we are going to do is change the "new" mesh to the form ID of the big one that preceded it and use the "trim and drop" method to take this small one off the map. Here you can see (with the new mesh hidden) the residual triangle from our trim job dropped well below the Z axis.

 

image.png.9c095c5d5cb3c616b48ef5e24e7016a1.png

 

We'll wrap up in xEdit, then try fixing the edge links again. Unfortunately, Aurlyn has just pages and pages of corrupted edge links, so something is deeply screwed up here... or not. See, I was running the wrong script :( Let's try this again with the cleaning script rather than the diagnostic script!

 

Much better, now its actually fixing them! Moral of the story? Double check which script you're running ? 

 

image.png.a37e92be62b61278a2f2f44ffd248a0e.png

 

Now we can move on to conflict resolution. Overall, it wasn't too bad - while it had many signs of dirty CK editing, I didn't run into anything that would have been terribly game breaking. There were some strange navmesh conflicts that required attention, and there was of course the marriage script, which was a weird "intentional ITM" mess that I'm probably going to have to handle as an action item all on its own. Adding insult to injury, the author did not provide the source code for their edits to the relevant vanilla scripts, so I am going to have to decompile them.

 

It's not super convenient to compare decompiled PEX files with source code, but it sure looks like the two vanilla scripts packed here are just the vanilla scripts with no changes, and the edits to the quest are ITMs/wild edits. We'll be allowing USSEP to prevail and hiding the two rogue PEX files. Further review of the file confirms that the quest data is ITM.

 

image.png.6b74a5c187f36fa9b8140f8455ccb11a.png

 

Whew! What a pain. Hopefully this quest will prove to be fun when I get around to playing it. 

 

Finishing Up With Boethiah

Spoiler

Now that we've finished up with all of that, let's finish compacting Tournament of the Ten Bloods. This one needs facegen and voice adjustments, but no SEQ file regeneration. This mod has a single unique cell, and a somewhat unexpected one - the persistent worldspace cell. We'll need to redirect this to the holding file. I also need to go back to missives and make sure that it's persistent worldspace cell doesn't have any overrides, just to be safe.

 

image.png.830b7c1d13eb4c2c1e75f936adb9a565.png

 

That took a little conversion work, because certain other records also have to move to the holding file, such as weather, image space, and encounter zone data, in order for me to fully copy the relevant file instead of just having it be an injection record (which I consider a bit riskier).

 

image.png.d363ce7462d8d0c7d49f99a07b0aae8e.png

 

Now that we're done with that, we need to copy our overrides. In addition to the LOTD stuff, we also need to grab the Lux patch since it was extensively edited to get it to play nice with the cell move. We'll put it in the same override folder that I set up for the LOTD patches, however. Once those are all copied over, Artifacts is in a safe, compressed, and playable state, and we can move on.

 

Well, I was going to tackle Skyshards and its LOTD patch next, but my wife has informed me that hobby time is over and it's dinner date time now, so I'll be heading off for some yummy food. See you all tomorrow and don't forget to vote for my weekend project!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by gregaaz

1 Comment


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I got to admirer your patience. If I had run across those Dawnstone problems, I would certainly just have ditched it. It hardly appears like it's a cornerstone mod for anything in your setup and while it looks like an interesting mod I've been eyeing a few times myself the last post by the author I found is well over a year old, so the mod might be abandoned. I'm also always a bit irritated if a mod author feels the need to fill my gaming directory with his screenshoots.

That said, it looks like the LE version comes with the source scripts, so if you plan to fix this for good, those might be handy. Interesting decision though, take out the source scripts for the SE version, but leave the screenshoots in. :P


Vote wise the sexy captives seem to be winning, which suits me well, been looking forward for that ever since you mentioned you will do a spotlight for it. :)

 

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