Custom followers... Check if they use own skeleton.

[majordespair]

hey all!

 

Thought I would mention this as it has been cropping up for me for a while now. It seems that more and more "stand alone" followers are using there own skeletons and sometimes they are NOT suitable for HDT extension mods. Whenever you go near any NPC without a correct skeleton you are most likely (I do on a semi decent system) going to lag to a crawl then CTD. If you are lagging with HDT and don't know if followers/NPC are using there own skeleton then check your HDT extension log file, in your SKSE/plugins folder....if it is full of spamming errors about an illegal hkx file then you have found the culprit for your lag and crash. What I do is just replace the stand alone followers skeleton with the same one that your player character uses. This is not a bug report cus nothing is broken Its just a warning to check your stand alone followers/NPCs if you are lagging and crashing a lot If there is already a post or warning somewhere about this then I apologise for cluttering the boards but I couldn't find anything obvious to point it out to new comers to the HDT extension system     thx all

[Groovtama]

1. open the follower esp with tesedit

2. look if there is a race category => if there is no then they can't use a custom skeleton, if yes go to 3

3. open the race, and check the skeleton paths => if they are like in a vanilla race like "NordRace" or "ArgonianRace", the follower does use the vanilla ones, if they are different go to 4.

4. copy the path from a vanilla human/beast race depending on what the follower is, into the custom race of the follower.

5. The custom follower is now using the vanilla skeleton again.

5+. If the custom follower Race is just a copy of a vanilla race with edited pathes you can just set the references of the Race to the Vanilla race and delete the custom race, saves around 50kb per race. 

 

[Uriel]

There's also a lazy way: search not yet installed follower mod for a custom skeleton. If it exists, overwrite it with the one from that man who posted before me.

I just came up with one more solution: Ban separate skeletons if there is no apparent reason to include one. Make violators read guides, tutorials, FAQ's and stuff.

[Groovtama]

There was a reason for a seperate skeleton for a follower, to have different weapon positions than the defaults, but you can basically do that now with scripts and NiOverride, which saves the 50kb for an extra race.

[Uriel]

Yep, this one goes as apparent reason.

In my world, i would also make followr authors to use body meshes from vanilla paths. That would have saved us a bunch of RAM/VRAM.

[zzz72w3r]

Yep, this one goes as apparent reason.

In my world, i would also make followr authors to use body meshes from vanilla paths. That would have saved us a bunch of RAM/VRAM.

 

I am curious on the VRAM usage on custom followers.  Say I replace vanilla with the same mesh and texture as the ones found in custom followers, does a scene of 10 vanilla + 10 custom follower (containing 10 separate mesh/texture paths with identical contents) uses more VRAM than a scene of 20 vanilla, all nude of course?

 

[Uriel]

It's all about paths. For 10 npcs that have textures located in one path, textures will only load once. 10 custom followers behind your back with 100-200mb of textures in each custom folder will eat your memory alive.

[Groovtama]

Meshes aren't the "technically" the problem, skin textures are assigned through texture sets in the follower esp if you set the followers armor addon texture set to vanilla you would be done, the 2mb of meshes are "ignoreable". You would have to make sure that vanilla texture and body for the follower would be comaptible, and a lot of people would be annoying if the follower wouldn't look like on the pictures^^