[FO4 CK] General Help Thread

[Indarello]

15 hours ago, LordDrakath15226 said:

 

Unfortunately i get an error when i try to add it.

That may take weeks for unexperienced outfit studio user, I suggest dont try it in yiur case, adding head take a week for me and result is good but far from perfect

[LordDrakath15226]

On 2/20/2023 at 2:54 PM, Indarello said:

That may take weeks for unexperienced outfit studio user, I suggest dont try it in yiur case, adding head take a week for me and result is good but far from perfect

 

Well in that case, know any guide so i can make this nice model i ported appear in game as either equipment or a follower?: 

[vaultbait]

Finally embarking on redoing the navmeshes for a largeish mod I've been putting together an initial version of over the past year. It adds some interconnected interior cells, and one of them has a teleport door linking it to the vanilla Commonwealth exterior worldspace. So far so good...

 

I want to keep things as interoperable with other mods as possible, so trying to minimize disruption of the original navmesh. I've watched a lot of tutorial videos, but they all seem to assume you're just going to redo that exterior navmesh, which ultimately means alterations to all directly connected navmeshes as well where the finalize process adjusts their borders after everything ends up getting renumbered. Is it sufficient (or safe) to use FO4Edit to roll back most of the navmesh alterations the CK makes in the worldspace in such cases, and just retain the door triangles and their associations to the existing vertices? Or is there an alternative to minimizing vanilla navmesh disruption when adding doors?

[vaultbait]

Is HUDFramework still everyone's go-to for adding UI elements?

 

For my current project under development, various game mechanics work based on variables that can change on the fly (specifically what the player's wearing and whether they have weapons equipped), and I've noticed in playtesting that even I get taken by surprise when I forget and leave a weapon equipped, for example. I'd rather not spam the player with notifications, so am looking into adding a few small (optional) on-screen indicators instead.

 

I see that HUDFramework was last updated six years ago, so wouldn't be surprised if there's a newer, more feature-rich alternative. Recommendations appreciated!

[vaultbait]

I've got some fairly large custom interior cells which are cave/cavern type locations. I'm using the default interior LOD which, unfortunately, is fairly bright so if the player's camera clips outside one of the rock walls or there's a sightline far enough that distant parts of the cell are culled within view, the bright LOD is distracting. I couldn't figure out any existing all-black LOD to use, so I thought maybe I could encase the cell in a cube of 6 massive BlackPlanes but the CK won't allow me to scale them anywhere near large enough... how do others usually deal with this situation? I feel like I must be missing something obvious.

[vaultbait]

I've encountered a baffling new problem...

 

I have some new interior cells with placed items in them which fill quest aliases, referenced by objectives, and when the player picks them up I catch the events via an attached ReferenceAlias (or ObjectReference) script to clear the objective. It worked (past tense) quite well.

 

Recently in playtesting, picking up those objects no longer emits the expected events, so my objectives don't clear. There's also other weirdness, like a placed unique weapon in that cell has the correct model/texture on the ground but when picked up it ends up looking like the base version of the weapon and can't be assigned to favorites in the Pip-Boy either. Very strange.

 

The main thing I can think of which I changed around the same time is that I started building precombines/previs for the cell. Is anyone aware of that causing these sorts of issues?

 

I'm about to start trying to bisect back between earlier saved versions of the mod to see if I can tell more precisely when in my development timeline the problem began. The other thing I'm considering trying, but haven't yet, is to delete the affected references and quest aliases (along with their associated objective targets, quest stage fragment properties, etc) and re-add them all from scratch, but that's going to be time-consuming and I don't even know whether it will help.

[JB.]

On 3/1/2023 at 12:01 PM, vaultbait said:

Finally embarking on redoing the navmeshes for a largeish mod I've been putting together an initial version of over the past year. It adds some interconnected interior cells, and one of them has a teleport door linking it to the vanilla Commonwealth exterior worldspace. So far so good...

 

I want to keep things as interoperable with other mods as possible, so trying to minimize disruption of the original navmesh. I've watched a lot of tutorial videos, but they all seem to assume you're just going to redo that exterior navmesh, which ultimately means alterations to all directly connected navmeshes as well where the finalize process adjusts their borders after everything ends up getting renumbered. Is it sufficient (or safe) to use FO4Edit to roll back most of the navmesh alterations the CK makes in the worldspace in such cases, and just retain the door triangles and their associations to the existing vertices? Or is there an alternative to minimizing vanilla navmesh disruption when adding doors?

 

 

Ok, better late than never, heh. 

 

Once you've placed your door in the Commonwealth, and linked it to your interior successfully, proceed to the tool bar and pick: 

Navmesh
Generation
Advanced
OK
And finally look for the smoosh symbol in the navmesh toolbar (it says "Finalize cell"). Press that one and wait for a while. It will only touch one triangle, the one on your door, it will paint it yellow. 

 

 

 

2 hours ago, vaultbait said:

I've encountered a baffling new problem...

 

I have some new interior cells with placed items in them which fill quest aliases, referenced by objectives, and when the player picks them up I catch the events via an attached ReferenceAlias (or ObjectReference) script to clear the objective. It worked (past tense) quite well.

 

Recently in playtesting, picking up those objects no longer emits the expected events, so my objectives don't clear. There's also other weirdness, like a placed unique weapon in that cell has the correct model/texture on the ground but when picked up it ends up looking like the base version of the weapon and can't be assigned to favorites in the Pip-Boy either. Very strange.

 

The main thing I can think of which I changed around the same time is that I started building precombines/previs for the cell. Is anyone aware of that causing these sorts of issues?

 

I'm about to start trying to bisect back between earlier saved versions of the mod to see if I can tell more precisely when in my development timeline the problem began. The other thing I'm considering trying, but haven't yet, is to delete the affected references and quest aliases (along with their associated objective targets, quest stage fragment properties, etc) and re-add them all from scratch, but that's going to be time-consuming and I don't even know whether it will help.

 

It's not something I've done, but if it helps, before you create precombines, disable that item. In the CK, select that item and press the "1" button twice to make it disappear so it won't be generated in the precombines.

 

A tip that you surely already knew but better to notice: With Alt+1 you make visible all the objects that you have made disappear.

 

I use the "1" function a lot to get rid of all those light and smoke effects that usually bother me.

 

[vaultbait]

45 minutes ago, JB. said:

 

 

Ok, better late than never, heh. 

 

Once you've placed your door in the Commonwealth, and linked it to your interior successfully, proceed to the tool bar and pick: 

Navmesh
Generation
Advanced
OK
And finally look for the smoosh symbol in the navmesh toolbar (it says "Finalize cell"). Press that one and wait for a while. It will only touch one triangle, the one on your door, it will paint it yellow. 

 

Thanks! That's what I've been doing, but I was also regenerating the navmesh for the exterior cell. I'll blow that away and try just finalizing the interior again instead.

 

45 minutes ago, JB. said:

It's not something I've done, but if it helps, before you create precombines, disable that item. In the CK, select that item and press the "1" button twice  make it disappear so it won't be generated in the precombines.

 

I've already had to do that for some stairs that kept getting their collision blown away during precombine creation. It doesn't seem to help with the quest aliases but as a temporary workaround I've switched the objective clearing to rely on an inventory filter on the player alias rather than trying to get signals from the reference alias being picked up.

 

Also I think the weapon ending up with a broken base model is fixed, I switched from directly placing it to placing an invisible dummy and then having the quest alias create the actual weapon at the dummy's location. Not sure why that made a difference, but it may have something to do with the custom paintjob texture set I added for it.

 

Actually, this also fixed the ReferenceAlias script getting OnContainerChanged events again, so if I do this to the other quest items I can drop my terrible OnItemAdded workaround.

 

45 minutes ago, JB. said:

A tip that you surely already knew but better to notice: With Alt+1 you make visible all the objects that you have made disappear.

 

I use the "1" function a lot to get rid of all those light and smoke effects that usually bother me.

 

 

Yep, I use those a lot, or just Ctrl+Shift+C to hide whatever's seleced.

Edited May 25, 2023 by vaultbait

[vaultbait]

15 hours ago, JB. said:

Ok, better late than never, heh. 

 

Once you've placed your door in the Commonwealth, and linked it to your interior successfully, proceed to the tool bar and pick: 

Navmesh
Generation
Advanced
OK
And finally look for the smoosh symbol in the navmesh toolbar (it says "Finalize cell"). Press that one and wait for a while. It will only touch one triangle, the one on your door, it will paint it yellow. 

 

What I'm hoping for is a way to avoid navmesh conflicts with other mods that similarly touch those parts of the worldspace, since all I want to do is add a teleport door from the outside.

 

If I only finalize the interior navmesh, then the exterior navmesh where the other end of the teleport door resides doesn't look like it's actually connected the mesh to the door marker (no "door triangle" entries). Is that okay? Will NPCs be able to navigate from the exterior to the interior normally?

Edited May 25, 2023 by vaultbait

[vaultbait]

On facegen data...

 

Milking Human Kindness has (so far) 14 unique NPCs. I use the CK to generate facegen for them all (for performance reasons and also to help avoid rusty faces for people using mismatched face texture replacers). Uncompressed, the 1K res facegen texture sets for these 14 NPCs is 168MB. Even with compression, these are contributing substantially to the mod's overall size.

 

Are there any tricks other mod authors use to reduce that?

 

Edit: Solved! (Maybe?)

 

Apparently the CK saves these DDS files ncompressed at 4MB per 1024x1024 texture file. Opening each one in Paint.Net and then saving it again with the default BC1 (Linear, DXT1) compression reduces the file size to 512KB, so they take 1/8 the original space. Still need to test it in game, but this shrank the final mod size substantially.

Edited May 28, 2023 by vaultbait

[JB.]

10 hours ago, vaultbait said:

On facegen data...

 

Milking Human Kindness has (so far) 14 unique NPCs. I use the CK to generate facegen for them all (for performance reasons and also to help avoid rusty faces for people using mismatched face texture replacers). Uncompressed, the 1K res facegen texture sets for these 14 NPCs is 168MB. Even with compression, these are contributing substantially to the mod's overall size.

 

Are there any tricks other mod authors use to reduce that?

 

Edit: Solved! (Maybe?)

 

Apparently the CK saves these DDS files ncompressed at 4MB per 1024x1024 texture file. Opening each one in Paint.Net and then saving it again with the default BC1 (Linear, DXT1) compression reduces the file size to 512KB, so they take 1/8 the original space. Still need to test it in game, but this shrank the final mod size substantially.

I said fuck it and packed them as they came. There came a time when I lost the shame of the size of my mod.

[vaultbait]

12 hours ago, JB. said:

I said fuck it and packed them as they came. There came a time when I lost the shame of the size of my mod.

 

Definitely an option. I guess I'm just not there emotionally yet. ?

 

But to confirm, after some extensive testing the DX1 compressed facegen textures seem to still work fine and take 1/8 the space of the originals. Simply opening and re-saving them in Paint.Net was all it took. There's probably a way I could batch that from the command line in my release build script, but I add/alter NPC faces so rarely I won't bother for now.

[0tt3r82]

Hey Everybody!

 

Has anyone else seen these types of errors? Where the mesh of a piece of armor or hair will be stretched to infinity? In the game where I am running Nuka Ride, the OB's armor on his arm does the same thing, but it flickers in and out. I could not get a screenshot of it. Seems to be a raider armor usually worn by the Operators that has the issue too. 

 

Any suggestion on how to fix?

[Andy14]

30 minutes ago, 0tt3r82 said:

Where the mesh of a piece of armor or hair will be stretched to infinity?

Bad skin (bone weight)

[vaultbait]

59 minutes ago, 0tt3r82 said:

Hey Everybody!

 

Has anyone else seen these types of errors? Where the mesh of a piece of armor or hair will be stretched to infinity? In the game where I am running Nuka Ride, the OB's armor on his arm does the same thing, but it flickers in and out. I could not get a screenshot of it. Seems to be a raider armor usually worn by the Operators that has the issue too. 

 

Any suggestion on how to fix?

 

Repaint with bone weights. Test by trying to export as NIF in Outfit Studio and if it complains about unweighted parts of the mesh, mask by unweighted and invert, then paint again.

[HyperByron]

So I am having an issue with male NPC body morphs. When I’m adjusting the sliders in looksmenu, nothing will happen, but then all of a sudden and very briefly the morphs on the target actor will show then disappear. I have current body talk and zbg installed along w looksmenu and SAM. 
 

I'm at a loss as to what could be causing this.

[vaultbait]

5 hours ago, HyperByron said:

So I am having an issue with male NPC body morphs. When I’m adjusting the sliders in looksmenu, nothing will happen, but then all of a sudden and very briefly the morphs on the target actor will show then disappear. I have current body talk and zbg installed along w looksmenu and SAM. 
 

I'm at a loss as to what could be causing this.

 

The name of this topic is probably misleading/non-obvious, but if you check the first post you'll see this is for mod developers to ask questions about the Fallout 4 Creation Kit.

 

You'll have more luck asking for help on the ZeX Discord or maybe in the ZBG support topic here on LL.

[HyperByron]

1 hour ago, vaultbait said:

 

The name of this topic is probably misleading/non-obvious, but if you check the first post you'll see this is for mod developers to ask questions about the Fallout 4 Creation Kit.

 

You'll have more luck asking for help on the ZeX Discord or maybe in the ZBG support topic here on LL.

Thank you ? 

[Darkening Demise]

How do you add invisible walls to keep NPCs and the player within the world so they can't just wander forever?

[vaultbait]

1 hour ago, Darkening Demise said:

How do you add invisible walls to keep NPCs and the player within the world so they can't just wander forever?

 

I've not done it, but in the top menu bar of the CK pull down the World menu and click Regions. That takes you to the region editor where you can set specific regions as "borders." See this post for a longer explanation (I couldn't find anything useful about the region editor in the CK wiki, sadly).

 

Edit: As usual, I forgot to check the Skyrim part of the CK wiki, where all the good documentation actually ends up: https://www.creationkit.com/index.php?title=Region

Edited September 19, 2023 by vaultbait

[neverporn]

Greetings. How can I see which dialogs/comments were added by the mod and under what circumstances do they appear/unlock? Is it possible somehow through Creation Kit?

[vaultbait]

10 hours ago, neverporn said:

Greetings. How can I see which dialogs/comments were added by the mod and under what circumstances do they appear/unlock? Is it possible somehow through Creation Kit?

 

If it's a mod which adds a new quest object with its own scenes, you can filter the quest view by "active" forms after loading that mod's plugin as the active plugin, then open the editor window for the quest(s) and check the scene tab.

 

If it's a mod which patches an existing quest to add or alter scenes/lines in an existing quest, you may be better off using FO4Edit or zEdit to diff the QUST record(s) instead.

[neverporn]

4 hours ago, vaultbait said:

 

If it's a mod which adds a new quest object with its own scenes, you can filter the quest view by "active" forms after loading that mod's plugin as the active plugin, then open the editor window for the quest(s) and check the scene tab.

 

If it's a mod which patches an existing quest to add or alter scenes/lines in an existing quest, you may be better off using FO4Edit or zEdit to diff the QUST record(s) instead.

 Thanks for the reply. If in Creation kit I know that new dialogs should be searched in the Quest tab, and there are IDs of the one who pronounces a certain text, then in FO4Edit I can't find the ID of the NPC or character who utters the remark, I don't even know where to look. Maybe there is some kind of training specifically on the topic of searching and comparing dialogues / monologues / comments of the NPC and the main character? To me for voice acting, I rummaged through the old Axary files, he voiced Nuka Ride. I still didn't understand where he got the text of comments to the main character from passing NPCs, for example, from raider operators, this is a mystery for me for a millennium.

[vaultbait]

2 hours ago, neverporn said:

 Thanks for the reply. If in Creation kit I know that new dialogs should be searched in the Quest tab, and there are IDs of the one who pronounces a certain text, then in FO4Edit I can't find the ID of the NPC or character who utters the remark, I don't even know where to look. Maybe there is some kind of training specifically on the topic of searching and comparing dialogues / monologues / comments of the NPC and the main character? To me for voice acting, I rummaged through the old Axary files, he voiced Nuka Ride. I still didn't understand where he got the text of comments to the main character from passing NPCs, for example, from raider operators, this is a mystery for me for a millennium.

 

For "greetings" (things NPCs say to the player in passing), if you expand the owning quest and then a topic info entry within it, there should be a responses section which lists them all, and the response text field (NAM1) in each one contains its raw original text string.

[neverporn]

5 hours ago, vaultbait said:

For "greetings" (things NPCs say to the player in passing), if you expand the owning quest and then a topic info entry within it, there should be a responses section which lists them all, and the response text field (NAM1) in each one contains its raw original text string.

Thanks for the reply.