This one and maybe the next couple after are going to be shorter entries, as I've got a bunch of things on my schedule for the rest of this week, but I wanted to make sure I put at least a little time into this project. 

 

Yesterday we trimmed out some mods that were using up a lot of resources in exchange for relatively light contributions to the build. Later, I did some experiments with multithreading and made some significant progress in reducing FPS instability during combat. 

 

First things first we have a couple of little tweaks we need to make.

 

 

The black face issues were from Devious Strike, and we're going to fix these by using templates for those actors' appearances instead of relying on defined facegen. At the same time we're going to install and integrate an NPC mod that got published today and which should help edge out some remaining low-quality vanilla faces.

 

Funny story though... these actors are already templated. So what's going wrong? Is it the template? Well...

 

 

Do you see the problem? In this case, the actor is male, but he's using a female template. So what's going on here? If you remember from earlier in this series, to get the facegen data you need the "use traits" template flag, which is absent here. This actor functions by essentially creating a male version of a female character, and this is actually necessary because of some structural elements of this mod which I uncovered during this xEdit review. Essentially, if I want to randomize appearances for the males, I'll need to duplicate a lot of these records. I'll also need to make changes to the female Strikers for some technical reasons related to how the mod sets up its basic contents.

 

But you know what? Let's do it.

 

So we're going to start out by editing the bottom level template, which serves as a carrier for certain traits that all strikers are supposed to share in common. By the way, all the edits we're making here are going to go into a separate patch rather than my conflict resolution file, so I can share this on the DS support thread.

 

 

 

So what do we need to do here?

 

• We need to add a template - I'm going to use LCharBanditBoss, as it contains both male and female heads and it will also seamlessly hook up with things like Deadly Wenches and iNova Improved NPCs.
• We need to add the "use traits" characteristic to this template so it draws appearance information from the LCharBanditBoss template.

 

With these edits in place, now we need to backtrack through the higher level templates and make sure the appearance will be passed all the way to the top from the template.

 

 

We're going to initially copy all the records to my patch, set a filter for the term "traits" and quickly run through them. Any of them that don't have the 'use traits' flag will need to receive it.

 

 

However, those ones were fine. Pushing one more level, we get to the male versions and as you can see in this screen shot they don't have the 'use traits' flag. We're going to forward these to the patch and then turn on the flag.

 

 

Now I'm sure you can see here that this will certainly result in the Strikers all being a mix of males and females regardless of what MCM settings we allow. Hopefully that won't be a problem, but that's why we do testing!

 

 

OK, almost ready for a test run. But before we launch in, what about that female striker with blackface we saw earlier? Well, hopefully that was just bad facegen and this new approach will fix it right out of the box, but let's double-check for any anomalous details in the records. A quick run though, however, didn't show any red flags, so I think we can move into testing. To facilitate this test, I will enable Strikers for all eligible factions and sexes, and set the Striker chance to 100%. We'll walk through the game with AI Detection turned off and see how it looks:

 

Hmm, well that was a fail. Something I did just broke the mod completely, resulting in invisible characters spawning. So I guess we'll just relent for now and do this the old fashion way - just fixing the facegen   We'll revisit this diversity patch in the future.

 

 

 

Well, that fixed the blackface issue, though there's still some noticeable face tint issues on some of the male actors. We'll revisit the randomization patch in the future - and we may also need to exempt these actors from the SPID for hair decorations, since that's effectively suppressing some of the mask parts for the rubber suits. But the major eyesore is fixed, and that's good enough for now.

 

What about that Oregon Pete mod? The first thing we need to do is see if it'll actually be contributing anything of value. We're going to put it at the top (lowest priority) of my "real" NPC replacers and see if it wins any conflicts. If not, there isn't any point in installing it since none of its content will reach the live environment.

 

 

It actually has a lot of winners, so that's good. Let's look at it in xEdit and do our integration work. I won't repeat all those steps here since we've gone through this many times in the Mod Diary series. I didn't run into any major problems here except for a handful of cases where I needed to do some asset tracing to confirm which mod was winning, as there are some very random mods out there which editing some of this one's overhauled actors. In general, things went smoothly and now even fewer assets should be coming directly from the vanilla game or even from Botox.

 

I'm sure you noticed above that I need to edit a landscape record. When I was testing last night I found some floating statics and determined that Rigmor of Bruma raises up some landscape to reduce the steepness of a hill near Haemar's Shame. Something is reverting that landscape change, so we need to patch it. We can see right away in xEdit that Majestic Mountains is overriding the Rigmor-specific data

 

 

I really wish that we had a reliable tool for merging landscape edits, but for now we're just going to have to forward the Rigmor data. Since its a quest mod, its changes take priority over the aesthetic changes from MM.

 

We'll filter Rigmor.esp to only show landscape record edits, then alter any Rigmor vs. MM conflicts to favor Rigmor. Interestingly, most of the conflicts are with the mod "Depths of Skyrim," and I have a creeping feeling this is something we'll be seeing again. ROB adds some content in the far east of the map, and I'm wondering if the author heavily reworked the seaside landscape in these areas. We'll want to pay that area a visit before we wrap up to see if further landscape edits are going to be necessary.

 

I'm about out of time for today so let's do a quick run down to the east cost area and see if the landscape is messed up. 

 

 

Fortunately, the landscape looks fine so we don't need to screw around with it for now. I think that's it for today! See you all soon