Hi folks, hope you had a relaxing last week! Between being stressed about the upcoming U.S. elections and then getting some unpleasant side effects from my COVID booster, I took the week off from modding and blogging. Now I'm back and I discover...

 

THIS

 

Fun fact, Patrician ENB was actually what this build was supposed to use when I started it ages ago, but at that time it wasn't available for SSE and couldn't be readily ported. This is a huge monkey wrench that is going to require a heck of a lot of work to integrate, but it's a good monkey wrench. Honestly, it's calling into question how much longer this shakedown run is going to continue as its likely I'll soon be pulling the plug and moving back into the development cycle so I can swap out the lighting, weather, etc., in order to support Patrician. What we're probably going to see in the days ahead is a pivot of the blog over to Fallout (I've had a few mods backlogged for a while and I also need to make some edits to NPCS Travel so NPCs stop invading Concord)

 

My goal for the next few days, ideally to be wrapped up this week, is to finish the already-identified cleanup items for the current build and clear some minor items off my to-install list. That'll start tomorrow. For today, I want to wrap up the script cleanup activities I've been doing recently to try and knock out the worst offenders, then otherwise table that part of the project for now (script cleanup in SSE is going to be an ongoing project for a long time due to the large number of deficiencies I've identified in the mod stack as I've started scrutinizing the logs in more detail).

 

We'll start by updating Faction Warfare and then going into the game to make sure the update doesn't do anything weird in the vicinity of the heroes guild - if you remember, I had to edit that region when I installed the earlier version, so now we need to make sure that patch hasn't doing weird stuff to the new version. That visit to the game world should have the side effect of generating a decent papyrus log, and analyzing that will be the second phase of today's activities.

 

 

The new version of FW is still a little too big to compact, but that's no surprise. It's common for plugins to get bigger on a new build (this is actually a looming issue with the current version of Toy Story), but it's quite rare that they get more streamlined. Still, it happens sometimes so always a good idea to check. The mod returned one error, but it appears to be benign. It also had two ITMs, but didn't require any UDRs and didn't have any bad edge links. 

 

 

Conflict resolution checking revealed two conflicts, one with the main follower quest and one with the calm scroll. The latter just required me to merge changes from USSEP with Mysticism Magic Overhaul, so that was pretty easy. The follower quest edits were more extensive, and required merging with NFF. We are going to have to check to see if there's a script conflict here, because if so we probably need to merge and recompile that script.

 

 

 

Fortunately the follower edits were an ITM-like record that was just forwarding data from the USSEP; when we copied NFF as an override, you can see all the conflicts got marked as yellow, meaning that all the edits are prevailing through to the patch in this configuration.

 

 

Fortunately, none of this mods pex file are conflicted, which means that NFF vs. FW conflict above shouldn't require any script edits. However, as you can see below, many of the pex files have unsafe file names (CK default TIF__04...... names) so we may find ourselves coming back here in the future.

 

 

OK, so I think we've done a successful update here! Let's hop into the game and take a stroll down to the heroes guild (or whatever the place is called... it's been a while). 

 

 

By now you're familiar with my standard testing protocol - rather than teleporting directly to the location I prefer to spawn in a test character and travel to the area (when possible). In this case we're not going to be testing any combat behavior so we'll turn off AI detection and also turn on god mode. 

 

 

Consistent with recent runs since we fine-tuned the multithread support and pruned out some of the sources of script lag, the walk through Helgen was smooth and didn't have any issues. Frame rate was hovering around 60 during this time. On the topic of frame rate, I've been brainstorming on how to reduce draw calls without reducing quality of life. Adding occlusion planes to the cities is probably part of the answer, but I'm also looking at maybe pulling out Populated Skyrim Hell Edition. I have a lot of other mods adding new NPCs, and this one in particular is probably one that I can live without while also reducing the strain on the system. That's an experiment for a different day however.

 

 

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, the guild hall is now much more friendly from a compatibility point of view. On the other, well... I liked the curtain wall and battlements it used to have. You can see a small portion remaining (from the compatibility patch) on the right. So I'll need to go into xEdit and clean up that remnant. There may be navmesh issues around here too, though the NPCs seemed to be OK. I'm only going to mess with that if I encounter issues in the future.

 

 

Well that's interesting. It appears that what we saw up there with the hall was all from an old compatibility patch. FW seems to have removed the in-world presence of the faction hall. From an immersion point of view, this is good, even if I'm going to miss the neat little fort it added. You can see below that all these are now showing up as injected records, so they aren't part of the underlying mod anymore.

 

 

This also means that we don't need that patch... the whole reason for it was compatibility relating to the fort. Let's pull the patch and visit again.

 

 

Goodbye, faction hall. You were easy on the eyes, but it's just as well that you go. It's bad enough when mods add in-game control panels and stuff, but a literally fourth-wall-breaking castle in the middle of the map was too much, no matter how good it looked at a distance.

 

Now let's take a look at the Papyrus Log. First we'll look at the one that I got when I hopped into check out the removal effects from that patch. This should be fairly short and limited in scope to scripts that were already running when I saved the game (i.e., no initialization and only minimal new activations).

 

Of course, we start out with a long list of missing files. As you know, the only way to really resolve these is to go through one at a time... and a lot of these are false alarms from "soft dependency" features in various mods.

 

 

Next we've got a huge stack of bad binding attempts for Triple Triad Skyrim. While I normally frown on mods that insert lore from other franchises, in this case I installed TT specifically to cut down on papyrus false alarms. However, we're still getting these hits, and I think the issue is that 3C (Lucien) depending on an earlier version of TT. Updating Lucien has been on my list for a while and I think we'll take care of that today.

 

 

Other than needing to fix a couple corrupted edge links, Lucien was an easy upgrade. I was actually expecting issues with its CC patch, but that seems to be implemented in a way that doesn't require lots of compatibility patching, so that's good. We'll go back into the game to test this integration before we wrap up but first let's continue scrutinizing the existing log.

 

A bunch of various crud followed that appears to be cases where the PEX files don't match up with the data in the VMAD part of the plugin records. At some point we'll want to go through these one at a time and determine how to proceed. Some of these may be from asset conflicts (i.e., the pex is from one mod and the VMAD is from another) that need to be harmonized, other things may be unimplemented or deprecated features causing false alarms. 

 

 

A significant part of this spam is stuff relating to tt_skyrim_modcardscript, which is again from TT. These don't appear to have form IDs from Lucien, so I suspect... hang on!

 

 

What's this? It looks like Buxom Wench Yuriana is overriding TT's main script. In fact, BWY is overriding two of Triple Triad's scripts, which may have something to do with the issue here.

 

 

Let's restore the "official" scripts by hiding the ones in BWY. If that mod geeks out we can always revisit it, but I suspect this is a case of older scripts getting inadvertently bundled with the mod... and now causing issues with the parent mod. 

 

 

Interestingly, BWY also overwrites three of the TT meshes. We'll let those prevail in case its like that for a reason, but let's hide the two scripts for now. We can investigate them in more detail if BWY runs into issues in the future as a consequence of reverting these, but I doubt that'll happen.

 

Next we have some issues with Death Consumes All and Maids Deception, along with some more false alarms from soft dependencies. None of these are likely to relate to our immediate issues and we'll leave them be for now. Both mods need to be checked for updates, among other things, before screwing around with their scripts. The DLC4 (Death Consumes All) errors in particular continue for a while. If they persist after ensuring the latest version is installed, we'll also want to make sure that this isn't related to some kind of soft dependency on that author's other mods - scrutiny of the PSC should case some light on that if needed. 

 

 

Hunting in Skyrim is returning some interesting errors that revealed some undisclosed soft dependencies for that mod, which I'll want to investigate further. I'm always happy to discover obscure new content.

 

 

 

Along with these messages we're starting to get a lot of mod initialization messages, so we're past the initial 'startup' stage and into active gameplay now. I did notice this hidden in the stack, which was mildly annoying. Curator's Companion is one of those mods that I count on to work without me screwing with it, and if I find more signs that it isn't functioning at 100% I might have to consider dumping it. As-is, the advent of the Hall of Insanity means that CC is no longer quite as indispensable as it was before. 

 

 

Now that's an interesting packet of errors...

 

 

This will require further examination at some point, because I believe I recall this mod doing its script injection properly before. If it is in fact failing, then we'll need to replace the scripted injection function with outfit and inventory edits (I might do that anyway, just to reduce the script load). 

 

As we keep scrolling, we encounter a bunch of errors relating to ESF Companions and Wet Function Redux. Both mods are already on my list for other reasons, and we'll need to scrutinize their scripts at the same time. WFR is actually kind of on probation as with my current ENB setup its visuals aren't really adding a lot, but I'm going to withhold judgement until Patrician is up and running since it may look better in that environment. 

 

 

Here Sexlab Survival reveals some dependencies that had flown under my radar (the three 'does not exist' errors). In the future, I'll need to assess if I have enough slack in the animation registry to add these assets.

 

 

These are followed by another wave of property and binding errors, and I'm starting to wonder if these issues are pointing me towards the frame drops I'm seeing on some cell boundaries. Specifically, I'm wondering if these quests are running and re-running, eating up CPU time, trying to process targets who are never going to work because of defects in the scripts. If so, fixing or removing the defective elements should help. 

 

Here, Lucien reminds us that he has support for a ton of content that I haven't installed yet  Have patience, Lucien, I'll get around to most of these eventually. Fun fact, by the way, Sexy Bandit Captives apparently has some code that interfaces with Recorder that integrates her in to that mod's quest line. Too bad that mod was kind of a mess last time I looked at it, it's got a lot of potential.  

 

 

Mildly annoying: mods looking for the old SkyUI esp file (instead of SkyUI_SE.esp) for soft dependency hooks. These are unlikely to be performance issues, but need to be scrutinized eventually in case they're preventing MCMs from loading properly.

 

 

Faction Warfare is still throwing some errors, so I'll need to look into that at some point.

 

 

Lots of Devious Devices errors. That'll eventually require more effort, but I'm not going to touch DD until I've exhausted the lower-hanging fruit. 

 

 

Meat Farm (not pictured) is still in there too, but I've been advised that it's going to receive a major update in the future that'll fix its script errors. We can ignore that for now.

 

That takes us to the end of the Papyrus Log. I'm not seeing too many critical action items in there, other than the stuff we already addressed like TT and Lucien. There is definitely room for a huge amount of streamlining and improvements, but that'll be a project for another day. 

 

Not a lot of screen shots today, but I hope you still found this deep dive into the papyrus log interesting. In the days ahead we'll wrap up with our unresolved issues for this build and then look to pivot into integrating Patrician ENB (and also giving Fallout 4 some love).