[WIP] Skykids - Child races & other technical goodies - No more armor patcher! New CotS R2 Race!(6/22/15)

[zixaphir]

 

There is more good stuff coming very soon. Stay tuned!

Good stuff involves finally getting a functional NPC replacer. Here's a taste of that comparing the original face candidates pre-CGE to their updated versions that take advantage of CGE's [really cool] export feature.

faces2.jpg

(I don't know why the thumbnail is so small)

 

Looking into getting some standalone followers implemented as well.

 

There's also some bugfixes in the pipe. Male face specular map is fixed, so no more blockyness, CGE ECE patch is fixed to now work on males as well. I've got some other stuff to look into before that stuff launches in the form of a hotfix, but its coming soon. Monli presets are getting fixed too.

 

 

I notice you're "plumping" the cheeks up in almost every scenario with these faces. Just a suggestion, but perhaps the default face mesh could benefit from having a rounder face by default?

 

[RadioSilence]

Is there a way to make one race a teen, but not the others? I tried to make the monli a teen, but failed cause it pulls it's files from the black hole... lol, I just don't know... I think it pulls resources from the skykids.

 

I tried COTS R2, and that kinda worked, but the skeleton for that is all weird or something... and it messes with all the other races.

I'd like to be able to use this mod, as it has a armor patch, so nothing grows boobs or gets fat...

 

EDIT:

 

@JerWA and en_hawk

You have done some work with COTS R2 a while ago, and I was reading back a ways, but could the skeleton from Skykids be used with it, or could it be updated with the latest XP32 skeleton? I have been messing around with it for a bit now, trying to get a nice looking teen character, but I don't like the really old skeleton. It has problems with first person camera height and such. I know you made patches for it, but those downloads are dead. Now, I am not really asking for you to go out of your way to fix a mod that is really old, just asking if it could be done, maybe a few tips on doing it myself if need be. (Not that I have any knowledge in skeleton modification...) 

 

I tried the spare parts from this mod, but I don't like how the teens look, and it changes everything...

I also tried to change the meshes out for another one to see how it looked, but I would either get flat breasts still, or really awkward looking children... I'd rather keep the skykids as they are anyways.

 

My current teen looks great, except for the hands... they seem to be a different texture no matter what I do... But gloves fix that problem...

 

COTS R2 does not seem to change the child races, just the adult ones... but I don't play those anyways.

I think Skykids are shorter than COTS R2, but I don't mind (Prefer it really)

 

---

 

@en_hawk

Yeah, that is what I am talking about. No rush on it, but it would be a cool add-on I think. Something to add to the long list of awesomeness...

 

[Guest jenny2011]

Is it possible to replace the children only with this mod, while keeping my current TBBP/etc setup for adult characters?

[JerWA]

RadioSilence,

 

Teens are on the long list of to-do already. CoTS changes everything, including the children via a modified (and very old) xvision. You can, of course, not load that esp and then no NPC kids change.

 

I think there is still a lot of stuff higher on the priority list for 'hawk. Is there a race you favor? I could try hacking together the first test teen for you.

 

tusing,

 

Skykids makes zero changes to adults in the game. No armor changes, no skills, no meshes, textures, models... nothing. However, the NPC replacer isn't out yet so right now this mod won't do anything at all for you except add playable races you don't care about. Hang in there, we're closing in pretty quickly for the first NPC release.

 

zixaphir,

 

The default face meshes are purely vanilla resources. The NPCs give us more freedom because face geometry can be exported, and thus used without the underlying mods as a requirement. That said, 'hawk may be able to work some voodoo. He'll have to speak towards that.

[RadioSilence]

RadioSilence,

 

Teens are on the long list of to-do already. CoTS changes everything, including the children via a modified (and very old) xvision. You can, of course, not load that esp and then no NPC kids change.

 

I think there is still a lot of stuff higher on the priority list for 'hawk. Is there a race you favor? I could try hacking together the first test teen for you.

 

I was not using the xvision plugin, so only the adults were being messed with by CoTS. I was using a mix of these mods to make a teen that looks decent.

 

The UNPetite mod looks decent, but I don't really care for the extreme bubble butt, but it does not show to much with armors on. The boobs are only there when naked. They have little to no effect on armors.

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/35748/?

True Daughters of Skyrim has nice abs, but it messes up the face some..

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/45453/?

SG Female Textures looks nice, but I don't like the abs much. I use the optional wet body for it too, cause that looks nice with my ENB.

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/35267/?

In all, this makes the CoTS child look like a teen with better textures.

 

Example of why it needs new textures...

http://www.loverslab.com/uploads/monthly_12_2013/post-232301-0-40930800-1386759860.jpg

http://www.loverslab.com/uploads/monthly_12_2013/post-232301-0-77512200-1386760205.jpg

Credits: evasiadutch

 

 

Only have a problem with the hands atm, texture wise with mine..

 

I'd like the Nord if you'd be so kind as to work on a teen.

 

Sample Pics:

 

 

It's really bright with around 10 glowing arrows all over the place...

[JerWA]

Nobody meshes for UNPetite that I know of. UNP Skinny would likely be the closest, there are lots more resources for that. I suspect either way the mesh will be UNP texture compatible, so I will likely blend my own as an optional.

 

What's used officially is up to 'hawk, he already has teen resources. It's not like we can just go steal a bunch of other mods to glue them into ours... despite that seeming to be the norm these days.

 

I'll try to get something together for testing today or tomorrow.

[negizama]

Hmm, I wonder if there's a way you might be able to add in the weight and breast size properties so we can play around with the age?

[RadioSilence]

Hmm, I wonder if there's a way you might be able to add in the weight and breast size properties so we can play around with the age?

I don't think the Child races really need the sliders, cause they are young, but when/if the teens come out, then it would be nice.

Of course, I don't think the boobs should be much bigger than A cups. Leave the bigger boobs to the adult races. Then again, I think their boobs are to big as it is, lol.

[en_hawk]

Hmm, I wonder if there's a way you might be able to add in the weight and breast size properties so we can play around with the age?

The girls already have weight slider support, however subtle. The teen body in the girl body asset pack has much more flexibility(read: breast size), you can play with that on your own until an official teen race is released if you'd like.

[Koko.Hekmatyar]

See the problem I have with there being no support for NMM which in turn means there probably isn't any support for other mod managers like Mod Organizer is the fact that with Manual installs if you don't like the mod or it doesn't work removing it can be a real pain in the ass.

[JerWA]

Most of it is compatible. The ones that aren't are just pathed wrong. Just re-archive them to start at \data\ and you're good to go.

 

For instance, the core mod, the armor swapper, and the drow should all work fine with nmm. Monli, the alternate male body and the nude patches you need to open, pick what you want out of them, and then rename the top folder data. It really is that easy.

 

Here's an example. Alternate male body. Contains 2 folders:  body+armor and nude patch.

 

Both of those folders contain further folders meshes and textures. Folders you may recognize as being in your \data\ directory.

 

So, two possible fixes. One, you don't want the nude body anyways, delete that folder from the archive. Rename "body+armor" "data" and add the archive to NMM. Done.

 

Two, extract the archive. Copy meshes from one folder into the other. Same for textures. Rename the top folder data and make a new archive. Add that archive to NMM. Done.

 

That same process will work for all of the SK stuff that isn't directly NMM compatible (and just about any other mod as well). The problem is always just that the top level is named folders for options, and NMM doesn't know what to do with that without setting up config stuff. It's easier to just fix the paths.

[Koko.Hekmatyar]

There seems to be an issue with the Apachii hair patches. If I have them turned on the game crashes turn them off no problems at all.

 

Edit: it appears that the problem is with the Female one as the game loads just fine with the male one turned on.

 

P.s. what process would I have to do to make the SG hairs compatible with this?

[en_hawk]

There seems to be an issue with the Apachii hair patches. If I have them turned on the game crashes turn them off no problems at all.

 

Edit: it appears that the problem is with the Female one as the game loads just fine with the male one turned on.

 

P.s. what process would I have to do to make the SG hairs compatible with this?

I'm 99% certain you have a missing master, as you commented about NMM, leading me to believe you use NMM, which has zero support for identifying missing masters or out of order masters(as its crap). CTD at startup is almost guaranteed to be the result of a missing master.

 

The apachii female hair pack is a separate download on the apachii mod page, ensure you have all listed requirements for a given compatibility patch before enabling it. Using a decent mod manager(such as Wrye) that can highlight missing masters and other conflicts of that nature is good general advice.

 

Creation of your own patches is outlined in the technical information section(under the appropriately titled header), which is also pointed to in several places throughout the OP. You could also link to the mod and I can see about making an official patch for it.

[Rez Delnava]

See the problem I have with there being no support for NMM which in turn means there probably isn't any support for other mod managers like Mod Organizer is the fact that with Manual installs if you don't like the mod or it doesn't work removing it can be a real pain in the ass.

 

MO doesn't have the same issues NMM does.  If there is no top level data folder, fommod config, or BAIN config, MO gives you the ability to manually arrange the contents of an archive into a correct installation.  If you want to use an organization tool, there is almost no reason to pick NMM over MO. MO's directory virtualization leaves the core directory pristine where NMM will install on-top of the vanilla, and unistallation using NMM can leave behind stray scripts and behavior files, especially when using FNIS.

 

There seems to be an issue with the Apachii hair patches. If I have them turned on the game crashes turn them off no problems at all.

 

P.s. what process would I have to do to make the SG hairs compatible with this?

 

Crashing like that usually indicates a missing master or out of order master (another advantage MO has over NMM, it lets you know if masters are missing).  You need to have the ApachiiHair.esm and ApachiiHaiirFemales.esm.  And make sure you run BOSS.  If you still crash with those installed, post your load order (use the spoiler tag).

 

To patch hair's to work on SK:

Open Skykids.esm, SK ApachiiHair.esp, and the hair mod you wish to port in TES5Edit.

1) Pick any record from Skykids.esm, right click and tell it to 'copy as new record into...' Then create a new file in the next dialog. The following dialog will ask if you want to add Skyrim and skykids as masters, say yes.

2) In the new mod, delete the record you just copied. That was just to create the file and designate the masters as efficiently as possible.

3) In the file tree, find the Head Part folder of the hair mod you're porting. Right click that and 'Deep Copy as Overide into...' then select your mod in the next dialog, and allow it to set the master in the following dialog.

4) Using the records in SK ApachiiHair as an example, modify the last line of the copied head parts' record (RNAM - Valid Races) using Skykids RNAM's (they follow a similar naming pattern as the base game hair RNAM's, but prefixed with 'Ado').

[Koko.Hekmatyar]

I do have NMM but I installed all these Manually as per the instructions. However, I see what I missed I forgot to go get Apachii 1.3 since I use 1.5 I tend to forget the others.

 

Edit: This might sounds stupid but I believe in better safe then sorry. Since the Monli Presets are broken if I install just the monli race files I will only have the base face to work with correct?

[en_hawk]

To patch hair's to work on SK:

Open Skykids.esm, SK ApachiiHair.esp, and the hair mod you wish to port in TES5Edit.

1) Pick any record from Skykids.esm, right click and tell it to 'copy as new record into...' Then create a new file in the next dialog. The following dialog will ask if you want to add Skyrim and skykids as masters, say yes.

2) In the new mod, delete the record you just copied. That was just to create the file and designate the masters as efficiently as possible.

3) In the file tree, find the Head Part folder of the hair mod you're porting. Right click that and 'Deep Copy as Overide into...' then select your mod in the next dialog, and allow it to set the master in the following dialog.

4) Using the records in SK ApachiiHair as an example, modify the last line of the copied head parts' record (RNAM - Valid Races) using Skykids RNAM's (they follow a similar naming pattern as the base game hair RNAM's, but prefixed with 'Ado').

That procedure is incorrect, use the one outlined in the OP; everything is automated via script in the official procedure. Once again, if a link is provided to the mod in question I can see about making an official patch for it.

 

I do have NMM but I installed all these Manually as per the instructions. However, I see what I missed I forgot to go get Apachii 1.3 since I use 1.5 I tend to forget the others.

 

Edit: This might sounds stupid but I believe in better safe then sorry. Since the Monli Presets are broken if I install just the monli race files I will only have the base face to work with correct?

'Apachi hair' and 'Apachi hair female' are two separate mods contained on the same page, the versions listed on the compatibility patches correspond to the versions of each mod. Regarding the monli, as has been said numerous times, the preset patches only affect the hair applied to the presets, nothing else. The races ability to use a given hair mod is still dependent on your having the compatibility patch for it installed. Without the preset patches, the presets simply use vanilla hair; there is nothing stopping you from selecting whichever hair you desire.

[Koko.Hekmatyar]

OK having played with these for a day or so now I have to say I really like them. If there was one thing I thought might need changed it would be the female nude body options, I use this because I hate the vanilla underwear as it gets in the way of body tattoos but given the look of these girls they are about the age of 14 or 15 give or take a few months. I'm not sure if there are any girls working on this project or not but generally girls mature faster then guys meaning a girl this age would be well on her way to showing signs of breast growth Mid A cup at the least Small C for the fast growers.

 

I'd recommend using something along the lines of UNpetite for the female bodies to make it look more believable and more immersive. 

[JerWA]

If you think Skykids are 14 I'm going to guess you're running something that breaks scaling in your game, like the racemenu plugin or player size adjuster. When scaled properly <edited>they are a full head shorter than adult females. They are not intended to be teens, that will be an entirely separate option, which is still in the works.

 

And UNPetite? Seriously? No thanks.

 

Edit: It's hard explaining heights, sheesh. Struggled with how to put that, especially since the game biases height so much by sex it seems. Hard to say, may still be a tad too tall. I think, generally, being a full head shorter is indicative of ~10, with a half head shorter being more teen-like. Maybe we should .95 the kids to make it more obvious, but either way they are definitely not teens by default.

[en_hawk]

OK having played with these for a day or so now I have to say I really like them. If there was one thing I thought might need changed it would be the female nude body options, I use this because I hate the vanilla underwear as it gets in the way of body tattoos but given the look of these girls they are about the age of 14 or 15 give or take a few months. I'm not sure if there are any girls working on this project or not but generally girls mature faster then guys meaning a girl this age would be well on her way to showing signs of breast growth Mid A cup at the least Small C for the fast growers.

 

I'd recommend using something along the lines of UNpetite for the female bodies to make it look more believable and more immersive.

Yeah that's a bit [too] high on the age end of things. We are planning on doing a teen race at some point, and there is a body for that in the girl body asset pack that you can fool with if you'd like, but that isn't what we're angling for on the current batch of races. These should be the same scale as the default vanilla kids.

 

To give you a baseline, I took some screenshots of the body with the scaling and proportions setup exactly as they should be, with no modification(ie: no incompatible mods running etc.) while standing next to an adult.

 

This is the default SFW body(ie: barbie doll nudity), however I pulled the underwear off with nifskope so its in a spoiler:

 

Creative input/constructive criticism is still welcome, though we are pretty far into this thing so I'm not sure how much could be done outside of creating an alternate skeleton morph.

[arr0w]

A comment and a question. The comment for the discussion above is that I very much like the scaling so far, I think that you've done a very good job with this. Now for the question, which is gonna be a little hard to explain. I have a mod that affects the default races and adds in some things but doesnt work by default with customs. Anyway, im patching my own version of it for skykids. I have meshes and textures already set up to work with skykids and when i replace the assets from the original it replaces it properly. So i duplicated the esp and all the forms to get new form IDs (which for the record i read that two .esp 's with the same form IDs doesnt matter, that your load order modifies the number anyway, can anyone verify this?), renamed the esp and all that. I edited the required forms to use the Skykids races so that that particular add on SHOULD only work on the skykids. It loads right in game, however the original addon is what shows up :/ Does anyone have a possible reason for why that happens? Sorry, I know its not much to go off of.

 

As an after thought, i remember reading something awhile back about where SK gets its assets. I know the females have there own and that the males are just copies? or that the male monli race are the same as the male skykids. Is this the case? Grr, sorry i dont have much information to give, i just dont understand why it will work with the addon, no edits, with the addon meant only for the default races, yet when i set it up for the SK races it refuses to work....

[en_hawk]

A comment and a question. The comment for the discussion above is that I very much like the scaling so far, I think that you've done a very good job with this. Now for the question, which is gonna be a little hard to explain. I have a mod that affects the default races and adds in some things but doesnt work by default with customs. Anyway, im patching my own version of it for skykids. I have meshes and textures already set up to work with skykids and when i replace the assets from the original it replaces it properly. So i duplicated the esp and all the forms to get new form IDs (which for the record i read that two .esp 's with the same form IDs doesnt matter, that your load order modifies the number anyway, can anyone verify this?), renamed the esp and all that. I edited the required forms to use the Skykids races so that that particular add on SHOULD only work on the skykids. It loads right in game, however the original addon is what shows up :/ Does anyone have a possible reason for why that happens? Sorry, I know its not much to go off of.

Well knowing what the mod was would help a little, but there is still some advice I can offer. First I'd test to see if your copied plugin works at all; disable the original plugin and leave yours on and see if it works on the SK races(or works at all). If that doesn't work then there's obviously something wrong with your plugin. If it does work, then its conflicting with the original mod somehow; formid's aren't the only thing that records are referenced by, and mods can tie into a lot of vanilla resources like formlists etc. It's possible that both copies of the plugin are trying to interact with the same stuff and are conflicting, or its grabbing things by editorid, or something else entirely. And to answer your question, formid conflicts are not possible between files as the first two digits are dictated by the files load order.

 

As an after thought, i remember reading something awhile back about where SK gets its assets. I know the females have there own and that the males are just copies? or that the male monli race are the same as the male skykids. Is this the case? Grr, sorry i dont have much information to give, i just dont understand why it will work with the addon, no edits, with the addon meant only for the default races, yet when i set it up for the SK races it refuses to work....

I'm not sure I fully understand the question. If you're talking about facegen assets then yes, the males just use copies of the female vanilla assets(as do the females obviously). The monli male races uses the same assets, however you really shouldn't be playing as a male monli, as its designed as a female only race anyway(notice how the males only have one choice of head part for everything?).

[Koko.Hekmatyar]

Just for fun and because I'm bored out of my mind I went and replaced the base body with the UNpetite it doesn't look that bad.

 

My Half Elf character (edited for content)

P.s. this is her at 50 weight so at 0 she'd be pretty small

 

 

[duckiej]

I seem to have a problem with the patcher. I still recieve the following error:
"There was an exception thrown during program execution: 'java.lang.nullpointerexception' 
Please contact the author."
 
I downloaded all the packages today. I added the Debug overview to this post.

 

[en_hawk]

I seem to have a problem with the patcher. I still recieve the following error:

"There was an exception thrown during program execution: 'java.lang.nullpointerexception' 

Please contact the author."

 

I downloaded all the packages today. I added the Debug overview to this post.

Go into the 'other settings' area of the armor patcher and enable debug logging. Rerun the patcher and post the newly created 'trace.log' file.

[duckiej]

 

I seem to have a problem with the patcher. I still recieve the following error:

"There was an exception thrown during program execution: 'java.lang.nullpointerexception' 

Please contact the author."

 

I downloaded all the packages today. I added the Debug overview to this post.

Go into the 'other settings' area of the armor patcher and enable debug logging. Rerun the patcher and post the newly created 'trace.log' file.

 

I am not allowed to upload it for some reason, so here's the contents of the trace.txt:

[1]                            [OPEN DEBUG FILE]  Opening Debug File

[2]                                 [skyrim.esm]  ArmorPenitusGauntlets

[3]                                      [DEBUG]  Closing Debug File.  Time was: 1229

 

Thanks for the help!