Dwarven Modular Automaton + Automated NPCs

[ampa12]

12 minutes ago, TheQueenofTraps said:

Not to be rude but could you please specify which Shrine of Dibella and/or Falmer cave we need to go to in order to get to the Facility.

There is a location directly next to it called juniper tree ruins.

The ventilation shaft is right to the left of it.

 

I have a problem with the location itself, I can't actually enter it.

When I enter the ventilation shaft, it works fine, I land in the water, my companions spawn on land, but as soon as I want to go inside, the game locks up, and when I try to reload the save, the game crashes.

 

This is on a current save, where I had DMA installed before, I have sextreme loading screens installed, and when I try to load the autosave in the ventilation shaft, the game crashes as well.

[TheQueenofTraps]

2 hours ago, AVS said:

Look in the area south of Old Hroldan, on the road between Whiterun and Markarth. There will be a Dwarven surface structure with a new statue and a strange priestess there. Find one of the nearby routes to the top of the cliff behind it, and look for another bit of Dwarven decor near it's edge. The 'safe' entrance is there. If you want to fight for it, look for the cave just a bit upriver from the shrine. 

Thanks, I found it.

Anyways, this quite impressive to say the least.

And aside from slight drop in frames, it works quite well on SSE as is.

[MstrN]

Holy shit, that's amazing. Is that cute ponygirl looking for an adventure? Shame I'm on SE. Although...

 

I threw CAO at it, and it works in SE! Mostly. There's still several things that end up visually broken in a very bad way...

 

I'm usually not very bothered by framerate drops, so I gave them no thought at first, but then I tried to investigate visual artefacts... Holy shit. You might want to look into reducing the population of those brass statues scattered all around the place, or their poly count. They're about 150k triangles per body, which works if they're alone or in pair in otherwise empty loadscreen, but trying to render enough of them at once might actually kill an average GPU, and make everything below the best stutter.

 

And yes, B6-13 is looking for an adventure. Lass, you're going to see the entirety of this war-ridden frozen wasteland local nords call Skyrim!

 

Either way, I wish you luck going on!

In attachment: worst offender I stumbled upon, a pair of flowers in "DMAz - SB008 Modified Brass" that has same amount of triangles as the entire Dibella figurine next to it. Which is pretty heavy too for it's size in-game. Whole mesh has a little over 260k triangles, almost ten times of entire CBBE body.

 

Spoiler

 

[Relevant Halo]

I remember downloading this mod when it first started and I'm amazed how much progress has been made. Do you have any plans for independently customizable limbs eg. left arm is different than right arm?

 

If that's not possible, how difficult would it be for me to get one of the existing nif files (such as a set of arms) and seperate them into two objects, one for each arm?

[JKmeanace]

On 1/16/2021 at 11:43 AM, ampa12 said:

There is a location directly next to it called juniper tree ruins.

The ventilation shaft is right to the left of it.

 

I have a problem with the location itself, I can't actually enter it.

When I enter the ventilation shaft, it works fine, I land in the water, my companions spawn on land, but as soon as I want to go inside, the game locks up, and when I try to reload the save, the game crashes.

 

This is on a current save, where I had DMA installed before, I have sextreme loading screens installed, and when I try to load the autosave in the ventilation shaft, the game crashes as well.

My game crashes as well. The mod is a bit too big for my computer to actually run it.

[ZorinBlitz]

I get CTD, when im trying to enter the facility in cave. What i have to do to make it work? More memory allocation?

[RoxDox]

Also getting a CTD trying to enter the automation facility ( I Believe that is what its called) from the ventilation system. I feel a mod like this should be developed for SE I've come back to LE to try this and a few other updated mods and my god LE runs like hot garbage when you load a few intensive mods into it. I have a 500 plugin SE game that has crashed twice yet can hardly play LE with 50 plugins. 

[L1357]

Same here I can enter the Ventilation shaft just fine but when I try to enter the automation facility I'm stuck at the loading screen.

[AVS]

I rise from my grave! Briefly. 

 

On 1/16/2021 at 2:43 PM, ampa12 said:

I have a problem with the location itself, I can't actually enter it.

When I enter the ventilation shaft, it works fine, I land in the water, my companions spawn on land, but as soon as I want to go inside, the game locks up, and when I try to reload the save, the game crashes.

 

On 1/16/2021 at 8:34 PM, MstrN said:

I'm usually not very bothered by framerate drops, so I gave them no thought at first, but then I tried to investigate visual artefacts... Holy shit. You might want to look into reducing the population of those brass statues scattered all around the place, or their poly count. They're about 150k triangles per body, which works if they're alone or in pair in otherwise empty loadscreen, but trying to render enough of them at once might actually kill an average GPU, and make everything below the best stutter.

 

On 1/30/2021 at 4:46 AM, ZorinBlitz said:

I get CTD, when im trying to enter the facility in cave. What i have to do to make it work? More memory allocation?

 

 

Yeah, I did get a little bit unrestrained with all this. The main culprit for the crash-on-entry is actually likely to be the sheer number of NPCs that the game is trying to dress with what are also unusually complex outfits when you first enter the room. That by itself can take a bit of time, and if you're using a lot of scripted mods that affect NPCs on top of that it might push the memory demand over the edge. This mod doesn't have any scripts itself, but I can't really account for what other mods might be doing. And the complexity of the statues certainly adds to the load of rendering everything in the room. 

 

That said, I didn't expect it to be this CTD-happy. My system is three years old now and was the lower end of mid-range at best for its time, and the only real noticeable effect I've run into while testing this is that it takes slightly longer to load into the chambers than an average room. Outside of that it's all been working fine for me. I do also use ENBoost to optimize and expand the game's available memory, though, so I would definitely recommend starting with that. Both for these rooms in particular, and just if you're running a heavily modded LE game in general. I also did a quick edit to the .esp file to significantly reduce the number of statues to see if that helps, so if those of you who have been having trouble loading the areas could give this a shot and let me know how it works, I'd appreciate that. 

 

Dwarven Modular Automaton.esp

 

I'd also ask you to try using AddItemMenu to grab the Translocator spellbooks for the individual rooms and seeing if you can enter the Quarters and the Stables that way, to see if they're more responsive than the main Facility cell. You can also get into the Quarters through the not-exactly-hidden backdoor to the main exit, by jumping up and hitting the button at the back of the Dibella statue at the shrine across from Old Hroldan. 

 

I'll also point out that the rooms aren't exactly the point of this mod, and only really exist as a warehouse for all the Automated I ended up making. You can also use the console and 'help subject' or 'help automated' to grab individual followers from the pool even if the rooms aren't loading. 

 

 

And on the subject of error-testing, anyone have any feedback on the Automated Player add-on? Confirmation that it's working as intended would be appreciated, given that I still have no clue exactly why it works. 

 

 

On 1/17/2021 at 3:55 AM, Relevant Halo said:

I remember downloading this mod when it first started and I'm amazed how much progress has been made. Do you have any plans for independently customizable limbs eg. left arm is different than right arm?

 

If that's not possible, how difficult would it be for me to get one of the existing nif files (such as a set of arms) and seperate them into two objects, one for each arm?

 

Unfortunately the game's system requires that the hand and feet models be paired, so there's no real way to make, say, the right hand and the left hand independently equippable items. Any mis-matched pairings have to be built as their own models and in-game items, and accounting for all the various pairings results in a large number of additional parts, as I found when I attempted the concept with the -BAF- element of the Dwarven Cyborg Collection. Given that DMA is already enormous I have no plans to do something similar here, but if you want to make your own mis-matches it is a pretty easy thing to do using Outfit Studio. Just open the models you want to use in there and delete the arms you don't want, using the masking tool with mirroring turned off to separate the meshes if the left and right arms are on the same model. Once you've got that done you can either save over an existing arm model that you don't mind losing if you just want to get it into the game quickly, or save your model with a new name and make a quick mod just for it. 

 

 

On 1/16/2021 at 12:55 PM, Aki K said:

I am a very big fan. Would you, in a future update (I understand this would probably take some time), consider making a version that allows for easy access to the textures for color changing purposes?

 

I have an older version and I painstakingly tried to adjust the dwarven textures to be a bluish color but didn't understand stuff and it ended up a failure for me (I didn't want to change the in game textures for regular dwarven stuff. My goal was to give my player character a more "alien robot" feel.)

 

The problem here is that the DMA parts are built out of the existing Dwarven models with their existing Dwarven texture paths. Changing them to use a customized texture without altering all of the Vanilla Dwarven things in the game would require redirecting the DMA parts to new textures. And that's a fairly doable thing! It's how I got the Type XXX skins to work, and simply requires opening up the texture info block in NifSkope and pasting in the new paths. The thing is that you have to do that for each individual mesh in the model. And many of the DMA parts are made up of dozens of individual meshes. And there are hundreds of parts in DMA as a whole. Changing literally thousands of texture paths is not something that I have any intention to do. Just doing a few hundred to get the mask effect onto the Live faces nearly drove me nuts from the tedium. It would literally be easier at this point to approach things from the opposite direction and re-path the textures for all the Vanilla Dwarven models, and that is also not something that I'm willing to do.

 

That said, if there are specific DMA parts that you want to alter like this, it would be easy enough for you to change their pathing. Just grab one of the existing 'steel' Dwarven retexture mods, extract those textures to their own folder instead of overwriting the Vanilla textures with them, and point the DMA model's texture paths at that folder using NifSkope. Doing it for a set or two isn't that hard. Doing it for everything... 

 

 

 

[L1357]

Ok I threw my old skyrim version overboard and started using the SE Version (now I can actually enter all the parts of the facility) Sometimes there's a Texture glitch but nothing truely noteworthy.

That being said... Holy cow, you did an awesome job on this. Hats off to you. Now all we need is a questline to go with this mod and I bet a LOT of people would be over the moon (myself included).

I know you said creating a quest is too much work, so why not try contacting or "outsourcing" someone to make it? Just food for thought.

[ampa12]

Quote

I'd also ask you to try using AddItemMenu to grab the Translocator spellbooks for the individual rooms and seeing if you can enter the Quarters and the Stables that way, to see if they're more responsive than the main Facility cell.

 

I tried that, loading took a long time, but it actually finished, but whenever I entered it through the ventilation shaft (worked about 40% of the time, and always crashed at some point) I had a normal frame rate, when I actually entered the quarters, my game dropped to the low 20s to mid 10s.

Another minor bug, one of the bikini sets has a missing texture, it just appears purple.

I'll try the new esp and share my experiences.

[AVS]

On 2/21/2021 at 7:09 PM, ampa12 said:

Another minor bug, one of the bikini sets has a missing texture, it just appears purple.

 

Oooooh, crap. Evidently I did not actually re-path those from the prototype model's textures before building the final versions like I intended to do. Thanks for catching that, I never would've noticed. I'm gonna add a patch with properly filed textures and updated models to the downloads on the main page. 

 

 

[NIND (jimmyyu)]

2 hours ago, AVS said:

 

Oooooh, crap. Evidently I did not actually re-path those from the prototype model's textures before building the final versions like I intended to do. Thanks for catching that, I never would've noticed. I'm gonna add a patch with properly filed textures and updated models to the downloads on the main page. 

 

 

Oooh dear with the new equippable modesty, do I need to start over with the CBBE conversion?

[Antonslavik]

So I have Stable Load Order about 65 mods but I get a CTD everytime I enter and of the Automation locations. So I had a question, is the Dwarven mech suit involved in any quests?

 

[Tortex]

There's a script included with xEdit that can batch change texture paths now. "NIF - Batch Textures replacement." Can just point at a DIR and set the paths (odd for check, even for change to) and set it to go. It's pretty good. (Only found it after a few hundred hours doing facegeom stuff manually in nifskope...)

[Crystal_Emily285]

idk if Im missing something or not but all the heels and legs that are meant to make me taller slightly clip into the floor up to just above the toes so mine and npcs height doesn't change when using them
but when i used the reduced nexus version before downloading and replacing it with this version the heels worked as they was meant to but this version doesnt i hope someone can help me 

[Crystal_Emily285]

other mods that have heels work like they are meant to but this mod's  heels and other feet/ legs that are meant to make you taller dont work can someone please help

 

[The Lord]

Should you continue the development of this mod and ever come around to implement some quests, here are some suggestions:

Spoiler

1. Introduce the player to the mod's content in a non-intrusive way, e.g. saving a (largely) normal looking Dibellan priestess from Bandits (think of World Interactions: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:World_Interactions), finding a note in a tavern talking about a nearby Dwemer ruin (think of Radiant Quests: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Radiant), exploring such a ruin, etc.

2. Also, you may want to introduce the player to the different body parts and types step by step, e.g. have them start with only one type of torso, hands, feet, etc. for either the mechanical or the XXX bodies (whatever they prefer at that exact moment; they can always switch stuff around later) and then work their way “up”. For instance, you could start with only “scrap” parts for the XXX bodies or the very simple ones of the regular mechanical bodies. Then, have them learn about the indivudal components as they go on. Collecting (special) parts could then be a recurring quest/task for the player, if they are interested in further diving into that.

3. Spread out Automata "Hideouts" across all the different ruins, some collapsed and not inhabited with merely a few parts still laying around, others with maybe a single guardian etc. Having everything in one place is good for the main quest hub, but it tanks performance and makes you wonder how such a busy "ruin" managed to stay (largely) undetected for so long. It can also be very confusing to find your way through at first, having everything at a smaller scale and only later finding the hub or slowly rebuilding it makes it easier to get into navigating the place.

4. Have one major quest line be about the assembly of automata as followers/NPCs (for all those not wanting to be an automaton themselves) and another for the transformation of a player into an automaton. Maybe a cave-in near one of the automata sites, a Falmer ambush, old Dwemer traps or something similar mortally wounds the player (or incapacitates their legs, arms, etc.) and they are picked up by one of the wandering automata or a scholar studying the automata and saved from death, having some or even all body parts replaced.

5. Make the collection of the special faces that mimic actual in-game characters such as Jordis or Lydia into a quest, i.e. the player needs to meet these characters first, then, copy their looks. You could even allow for full mechanical copies of NPCs who can not normally be your followers (think of Jarl Elisif or Mirabelle Ervine) to be used as automata companions. If you feel especially sinister, you could maybe even replace such an NPC with an automaton if it suits your needs (although that is probably a bad idea for any major quest relevant NPC due to the high likelihood of breaking something, but it might work for the Housecarls after you recruited them, for instance).

6. The Dwemer are noted by Vivec to only have Gods of “Reason” and “Logic”: “But our brethren, the Dwemer, scorned the Daedra, and mocked our foolish rituals, and preferred instead their gods of Reason and Logic." (https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:The_Battle_of_Red_Mountain) You could read that as them “worshipping” Reason and Logic as though they were Gods or akin to Gods (early Greek mythology has similar concepts alongside the much better known classic pantheon of Zeus and the other Olympians), or that their Gods were all related to these two concepts. “Dibella” would, thus, have to be integrated into this framework and either identified with one of the two or be related to one of the two (e.g. perfection of form is sometimes linked to specific mathematical formula and geometrical shapes, see 17^th century gardens, city plans, etc.; this is one sense in which “Dibella” could be reinterpreted as a Goddess of Reason and Logic). Of course, this is only relevant if you actually want to make it conform to the lore, which is not necessary and only really interesting for immersion purposes (I doubt most people even know above line from Vivec).

 

More importantly and aside from these suggestions, this mod's concept and base system with all the different body parts, faces, etc. is reaaaaally cool. Good job!

[MOVED PINGER]

i tried porting it into CBBE 3BA body and failed miserably.

 

Can i get any advice on converting BHUNP based XXX bodyslides into 3BA? Cuz whenever I try to crop out 3BA meshes into amputee parts and meshes were crunched into hedgehog like manner. Tried to ask my local contacts but they also said its no good. Can i have your official support on such effort?

[Bystander01]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TaG7l8EkEs-JjSIFrVosULhVRAJSexMb/view?usp=sharing

Here's the conversion to 3BAv2

Had to modify 2 textures to fit the body

Let it overwrite

[MOVED PINGER]

well now that i found quality 3BAv2 bodyslides... now im in direct concern of how to deal with incompatible textures of uunp and convert them into cbbe one.

 

i just dont have good photoshop skills so grinding my way toward textures probably only result in rendering entire DMA folder into mess...

 

So yeah i need your help again. any tips on converting those textures into SSE 3BA ones?

 

Also there was some kind of mesh storm within Automaton facility... whenever i angle my camera to certain direction some kind of messy stretched grey meshes blunder my screen and distorts my framerate... any possible culprit of such problem? i think hair wig physics caused such problem...

[CuriousAlan]

I like this mod so much!? I wonder if it has any posibility to add rubber texture face masks for each expression？Or can I do it by myself? I'm sorry my English is bad but hope you can understand me

[Crystal_Emily285]

the panties texture is missing as its just a red !  and i dont know how to fix it any advice?

i looked into the files and it turns out all the A-bra and A-panties in the Type X file have nothing all are 0KB the only 2 with anything are the variable.Tri bra and panties but they dont seem to be used or somethings wrong and preventing them being used
even the bikini fix download doesnt seem to do anything

 

ok after further checking i found the following issues i need help with

1. all the A- panties have a world and inventory model and textures  but has no equipped model and texture

2. some hairs either stretch out all over the screen or have texture issue being just bright single color mostly a cream white

 

 

if you know how to fix please reply 

Edited January 17, 2022 by Crystal_Emily285

[venomr]

On 1/15/2022 at 6:26 AM, Crystal_Emily285 said:

the panties texture is missing as its just a red !  and i dont know how to fix it any advice?

i looked into the files and it turns out all the A-bra and A-panties in the Type X file have nothing all are 0KB the only 2 with anything are the variable.Tri bra and panties but they dont seem to be used or somethings wrong and preventing them being used
even the bikini fix download doesnt seem to do anything

 

ok after further checking i found the following issues i need help with

1. all the A- panties have a world and inventory model and textures  but has no equipped model and texture

2. some hairs either stretch out all over the screen or have texture issue being just bright single color mostly a cream white

 

 

if you know how to fix please reply 

 

 

Red ! usually means missing model. You can go into creation kit and point the panties model to a different nif file. 

 

Are you using an LE mod on skyrim special edition?

[MysticDaedra]

With full SE and 3BA compatibility, this mod would be a requirement for every playthrough for me! Only thing I wish it had was some form of "forced" change/transformation/"automaton-ification". Definitely following in case of future updates!