Prettier Bandits

[Blackbird Wanderer]

53 minutes ago, Pfiffy said:

the only time that I have seen this, was when a part of the Nif is missing. 

It probably has to do with the RaceMenu generation process for custom characters.  Unsure how that makes them different, but it does somehow.  Head meshes exported directly from CK don't have any issues in the conversion.  @EinarrTheRed and I use the same series of steps for character creation so similar results (or anomalies) with PB isn't unexpected.

Edited May 10, 2022 by Blackbird Wanderer

[Pfiffy]

8 hours ago, Blackbird Wanderer said:

It probably has to do with the RaceMenu generation process for custom characters.  Unsure how that makes them different, but it does somehow.  Head meshes exported directly from CK don't have any issues in the conversion.  @EinarrTheRed and I use the same series of steps for character creation so similar results (or anomalies) with PB isn't unexpected.

This is what I don't understand: I didn't found anomalies in PB...  

[bwaomega]

On 4/11/2022 at 5:47 PM, EinarrTheRed said:

That's one of the very reasons I hesitated to include her and decided to see what people using my mod might want.

 

For me, I've got another personal mod where I update all the various NPCs in the game other than what PB or my Whiterun update.  I had been using some by Bijin and Pandorable but figured if I just did my own I could drop about 8 mods out of my load order.  Add that to consolidating various gear mods and dropping some other mods I just don't really use and I'm down to under 150 mods now and by the time I'm done might get it down to somewhere between 120 to 130 mods.  Smallest my load order has been in a long time.

 

Will be interesting to see if there are other responses and what they think.

I know that I'm fairly late with this response, But I would rather have a PB(SE?) that just does the mobs and related NPCs, with significant NPCs handled by either individual esl or a separate group esp.

[EinarrTheRed]

Working on getting caught up on the posts.  I've got Skyrim LE back up and running but I'm thinking of reinstalling from scratch with MO2.  Que the shocked faces.  Right now I'm still going through my mod archives and sorting things out, getting the archives organized and trying to work out a list of all the mods, patches, etc. that I have installed.  At some point I'll need to install SE and try to mirror that setup.

 

On 5/5/2022 at 1:58 AM, Pfiffy said:

For testing: use the resaved esp with the LE headmeshes and then export them one by one and look at them in-game, to see if they show up as expected. I made a screen shot of the Imperial captain in the opening scene: Is this the way she should look like?:

Looks right to me at a distance.

 

Looking at some of the other posts though, I'm not sure if they have the right tintmasks, and that's an area that has been an issue.

 

On 5/10/2022 at 3:11 PM, Blackbird Wanderer said:

It probably has to do with the RaceMenu generation process for custom characters.  Unsure how that makes them different, but it does somehow.  Head meshes exported directly from CK don't have any issues in the conversion.  @EinarrTheRed and I use the same series of steps for character creation so similar results (or anomalies) with PB isn't unexpected.

I can answer some of that.

 

Racemenu does things with both the mesh and the tintmasks that CK simply cannot do.  CK is limited to a few morph sliders, where as Racemenu has a much broader selection of options in addition to allowing you to directly sculpt the head mesh.  This can give much better results in Racemenu, which if exported and merged into the nif, work fine in game.  But, since CK doesn't support those and cannot recreate them, if you simple re-export a headmesh that was created in Racemenu, then it loses all that extra detail and gets set back to whatever base forms CK can create.

 

Tintmasks in CK are limited to 512x512  (or in a few cases I think it can use 1024x1024) where as much of what we use in Racemenu is a minimum of 1024x1024 (1k) and often is 2048x2048 (2k) or 3072x3072 (3k) or 4096x4096 (4k), resolutions CK can't handle at all by default.  So, if you take a NPC made in Racemenu and re-export in CK, you lose that higher resolution tintmask, which means all the custom tats, make-up and so forth that was added in Racemenu goes *poof*.  Not only can CK not handle the higher resolutions, but the make up in Racemenu is done using installed mods that aren't even required by PB, and CK can't use them by default anyway because the way they get applied in Racemenu is not compatible with CK.

 

The new Fjiola in PB is a good example to test with, since both her face morphs and her new tintmask done in Racemenu are noticebly different from what CK can produce.  So re-exporting her will give you a clearly different result.

 

This is why in the past you could just regenerate the facegen and tintmasks for PB using CK, because that was all I used in the first place.  But with the new NPCs, everything is getting done in Racemenu, which gives much better looking results but it means it can't be recreated in CK.  Eventually, all the NPCs in PB will be done in Racemenu, and I'm projecting that will eventually be around 2,500 base NPCs + about 50 unique ones.

 

Different lighting and ENB setups can also make it hard to tell whether the results are the same since they change the lighting color values and that in turn alters how the skin tones and tint masks get rendered, to say nothing of having different skin packs installed.

 

There's another problem that can creep in.  Improperly converted tintmasks.  Tintmasks are, of course, in dds format.  Specifically DDS DTX5 usually because it does have an alpha channel and transparency, and it also has mipmaps.  The problem is that sometimes when the mipmaps get generated it fucks up the image resolution by adding 1 pixel to the width and height, so a 1k 1024x1024 image becomes a 1025x1025 image.  Why's that a problem?  Well in LE its not, the LE engine is more tolerant and while that will slightly degrade performance, its not really a major issue.  But SE is fragile as fuck, and a 1025x1025 image can actually crash your game, if it doesn't crash it may not render at all, so in the case of a tintmask would probably cause grey face.  Its another reason I don't really like SE and have been so reluctant to convert over, they improved graphics performance and memory use, but the way they did it make the game easier to break and less robust.  Honestly, Bethesda needs to learn to code but now that Microsux bought them, forget that... it'll get worse not better.

 

The whole TES engine is about ready for the scrap heap if you ask me, its in dire need of a major overhaul, and when you put it up against Unreal 5 which is way more powerful, much easier to mod, there's just no contest.

 

Anyway, figuring out the conversion and getting a smooth workflow is definitely on my near future to do list.  I do want to be able to get a properly working / converted version of PB out for SE.

 

On 5/23/2022 at 10:20 PM, bwaomega said:

I know that I'm fairly late with this response, But I would rather have a PB(SE?) that just does the mobs and related NPCs, with significant NPCs handled by either individual esl or a separate group esp.

Not too late, I'm always up for a chat.

 

Question, what do you consider a "significant NPC"? 

 

I've mostly steered clear of things like Serana, Lydia, housecarls, followers, and so forth.  You're right, those are done by other mods... and often done to death.  I'm mostly looking at hostile NPCs that you fight and that aren't generally done by other mods or only be a variety of obscure mods.  So for example I do the Imperial Captain at Helgen, or The Caller in Felglow Keep you fight during the quest Hitting the Books.  Anska at Highgate ruins is a more recent addition and another NPC generally ignored.  In her case I also made her a proper unique named NPC, because in vanilla Skyrim she's actually just a leveled bandit mage with the factions changed and dropped into an AliasRef.  That matters if you are using PAHE because first, if you strip her outfit it doesn't cause any other NPC to end up naked... its just her.  Second, recent versions of PAHE are increasingly treating unique NPCs differently so there's a nice synergy there.  Bethesda apparently originally intended her to be an option as a follower (like Salma and Fjiola and Eisa), but like so much content it never got finished... it won't take much to finish that and then you can either have them as followers or drag them off to Mia's Lair and make sex slaves out of em.  What ever you like.  An it puts all that under the hood of one mod instead of having to have this mod and 4 extra mods to do the same thing, so fewer mods in your load order.

 

That said, if you want to use some other mod that happens to overhaul the same NPC, you still can, just put it in your load order after mine and make sure its loose files overwrite mine.  And in the case of say, Salma, you should still be able to have both some other appearance replacer and the option I'm adding to recruit her as a follower after doing the Ironbind Barrow quest, best of both worlds.

 

However, the bulk of the mod is still going to be focused on all those random NPC encouters, and I'm getting back to work on that now that I've got my game install working again.

 

On 5/5/2022 at 4:45 PM, Pfiffy said:

So the Mazken are Dark Seducers. They are already introduced with the CC content Beth added with AE. There is already a good beautification patch. 

 

True, and there are also several other mods that add Dark Seducers as well.  That's had me thinking.

 

Based on feedback and observation I think what people really want are just some sort of succubi.  They don't want Mazken specifically.  They want a sultry, hot, sexy, naked or nearly naked, female daedra sex pot.  So, maybe I should just make that, call it something new and viola! we have a new type of daedra.  Up til now I've kept the mod strictly lore friendly... I guess in this one case... we could call it "lore adjacent".  Its something I'm pondering still and haven't made any decisions about.

 

Edited June 2, 2022 by EinarrTheRed
dang typos!

[Pfiffy]

Well, except of the male orc I didn't have any problems with the unconverted headmeshes. If they don't get touched, the resolutions will not be changed. exporting them is just usefull for finding troublemakers.

 

I'm not looking for something special. There are just no female Dremoras in the leveled lists and far to few female orcs on the road. I have played around with the dremora race a bit. They need an armor race, at best dark elves and some horns... I took the vanilla horns and made them unisex..

[EinarrTheRed]

1 hour ago, Pfiffy said:

Well, except of the male orc I didn't have any problems with the unconverted headmeshes. If they don't get touched, the resolutions will not be changed. exporting them is just usefull for finding troublemakers.

Soon as I can get myself set up with SE then I'm going to be looking again at your results and make sure I can do the same.  If it turns out to be as easy as it seems for you, then that'll make me very happy and in turn I can make a lot of other people happy with an official SE version of PB! ?

 

It will also save me a lot of time and headaches with over 2500 NPCs to do eventually.  The first 100 of those are already in development.

 

1 hour ago, Pfiffy said:

I'm not looking for something special. There are just no female Dremoras in the leveled lists and far to few female orcs on the road. I have played around with the dremora race a bit. They need an armor race, at best dark elves and some horns... I took the vanilla horns and made them unisex..

For the female dremora, that was pretty much where I going to begin.  Just make a female counterpart to the male dremora, same level groups, perks and abilities.  Set them up with gear pack them in the leveled list.  Would also mean you could encounter female dremora at Mehrunes shrine.  If I include dremora lords, then your vanilla Conjure Dremora Lord spell might conjure a female one or a male... random chance for either.

 

The Mazken / succubi would be in addition to that and would require something new. 

[Pfiffy]

12 minutes ago, EinarrTheRed said:

Soon as I can get myself set up with SE then I'm going to be looking again at your results and make sure I can do the same.  If it turns out to be as easy as it seems for you, then that'll make me very happy and in turn I can make a lot of other people happy with an official SE version of PB! ?

 

It will also save me a lot of time and headaches with over 2500 NPCs to do eventually.  The first 100 of those are already in development.

 

For the female dremora, that was pretty much where I going to begin.  Just make a female counterpart to the male dremora, same level groups, perks and abilities.  Set them up with gear pack them in the leveled list.  Would also mean you could encounter female dremora at Mehrunes shrine.  If I include dremora lords, then your vanilla Conjure Dremora Lord spell might conjure a female one or a male... random chance for either.

 

The Mazken / succubi would be in addition to that and would require something new. 

2500? Making the whole leveledlist unique?

[EinarrTheRed]

11 minutes ago, Pfiffy said:

2500? Making the whole leveledlist unique?

Not quite, but... okay... this a preview of how the new system I've been working on for the last couple of years will work.  I've gotten as far as building some demo NPCs and testing it to verity all aspect of the method work, so now begins the actual work of implementing it.

 

Currently, the leveled lists work something like this.

 

Base Template > Combat Type Template > Level 1-6 Group Template > Subleveled List > Leveled List > Leveled Actor (encounter marker)

 

There may be as many as 6 templates in that chain of templates before you get to the first leveled list.  One thing to note is that PAHE considers whatever template is LAST in that chain before going into the leveled list as the Base Actor, this is important because when PAHE strips the outfit off a random leveled NPC it is always the Base Actor that is affected instead of the unique instance of that NPC in game.  That's why we get the naked bandit bug.  The Base Actor is also where PB currently adds in the custom appearance to any leveled NPC, but not Uniques which work differently (uniques don't use this whole leveled list chain at all).

 

The template tree was a handy and efficient way of building large numbers of NPCs based off a common type.  But its not necessary and the utility of it is often unneeded, during game play you don't see any of that, you only see the end result.

 

The new system will work a little differently.

 

Base appearance template > Leveled Actor Template (groups 1-6) > Subleveled List > Leveled List > Leveled Actor (encounter marker)

 

So the first thing to note is that chain of templates mostly disappears and is compressed into its last iteration, the leveled actor for whatever leveled group we are working with.  The Base Appearance Template is new, and all this will be is a naked NPC with facegen done in Racemenu.  There will need to be hundreds because I have to build them not only to cover the various races (Nord, Breton, Imperial, Redguard, Altmer, Bosmer and Dunmer; the other races won't be dealt with) but I also have to do variations for each voice type.  So... 7 races and I need plenty of variety for each so there's the 2500 roughly sets of Facegen done in Racemenu.  Once I get that done, I have 2500 presets to use and I can export these and create my library of base appearance templates.  I need more than just those 7 races, each female can have several different voice types and I have to create a duplicate base actor with the voice type changed for EACH of those voice types.  I can further differentiate them with different body weights, so that creates a lot of potential variety and more to the point a thousands of base actors in every level group and quite literally thousands or tens of thousands of potential base actors for every faction.

 

I may even build more encounter groups, turns out that while most factions have only 6, a couple have 7 and some only have 2, there doesn't seem to be any upward limit... there could be 20.  The encounter groups are just actor files, its just data at that point and doesn't require any new facegen be made with this new system.  So I could rebalance things like bandits and town guards to have higher level encounter groups... instead of topping out around level 24-30... they could go to level 40, 50, 60, or higher if desired.  I could even set an MCM option to allow that to be configurable by simple disabling some of the higher level encounter groups... don't want bandits higher than level 40, disable the rest and you'll never see them.

 

You may never see the naked bandit bug in the same game play thru again.

 

The biggest drawback is the resource ESM file will be very large... I'm estimating around 4-5 GB in size, maybe 6.

 

The upside is once its completely built you'll only need to download it once.  Any future updates to PB will only be for a vastly smaller ESP file of maybe less than 1 MB in size.  Updates will also be easier to do because its just working with the templates and leveled lists, the really time consuming part, all those appearance facegen sets, is already done.

 

Also that resource ESM will be available as a stand alone download for other modders who want to update their mods with lots of nicely done prebuilt appearances.

 

So... any support I can get on this project is very much appreciated because its going to be a TON of work building that ESM.  Its already been a lot of work researching and developing the system that will make it possible.  The end result will be worth the work though.

 

 

[EinarrTheRed]

One other thing about the issue faces done in Racemenu vs CK that I thought I'd clarify.

 

If you look at a NPC in TES Edit, down towards the bottom of the NPC Actor record you'll see NAM9 - Facemorph.  These are the facemorph settings CK uses and they get stored in the Facegeom nif when you export the data from CK.  But, if you export a face from Racemenu, this mostly gets ignored.  The only morphs will be from the base head shape you started with in Racemenu.  Racemenu does not (and in fact cannot) store its custom morphs in the nif file, that's why we export them as a JSON preset file.  CK doesn't read that JSON and wouldn't know what to do with the info if it did.  The NIF you export in Racemenu when you're finished has all the facial changes baked in, but no morph data.  So if you load up that in CK and then export, you basically just erased all that work done in Racemenu.   This is why when we're done in Racemenu we have to export the final shape to a nif and then use NifMerge to combine it with the NPC actor.

 

Its sort of the same with the tintmasks.  Tintmask get generated in CK using some preset options... and its either those options or nothing.  Racemenu lets us temporarily import a paint mask to apply make up, tattoos, etc.  Then it compresses those into the exported tintmask and stores the info in the JSON preset.  CK can't duplicate this because it has no method of replacing paint masks on the fly nor can it read the JSON.

[chaimhewast]

I'm still shocked at the idea that you're making 2500 faces. It takes me a while to create a character I'm happy with, and even that is just picking a preset that's close and playing with the sliders until it's something I like. I probably spent 5 minutes picking my last character's face, and in the end she was basically RedguardFemalePreset01 with some changed tints (no makeup, no dirt, green-hazel eyes instead of brown), slightly more weight, and a different haircut (HairFemaleRedguard03 instead of 02). Even if you put in as little effort as I did, that's still over 200 hours of character creation, let alone the time to set them up as NPCs.

[EinarrTheRed]

1 hour ago, chaimhewast said:

I'm still shocked at the idea that you're making 2500 faces. It takes me a while to create a character I'm happy with, and even that is just picking a preset that's close and playing with the sliders until it's something I like. I probably spent 5 minutes picking my last character's face, and in the end she was basically RedguardFemalePreset01 with some changed tints (no makeup, no dirt, green-hazel eyes instead of brown), slightly more weight, and a different haircut (HairFemaleRedguard03 instead of 02). Even if you put in as little effort as I did, that's still over 200 hours of character creation, let alone the time to set them up as NPCs.

Currently in PB, using CK, there are around 1,200 sets of facegen already created, plus the 20 recently added which were done in Racemenu, plus another 20 that will be in the next update (they're already done).  Originally it took me about 30 min to make one character in CK, but after doing hundreds of them, I got that down to around 5 min.  When I started in Racemenu, it took me hours, then got it down to around 20 min and now I can roll one out in about 5-10 min... its not on par with Pandorable or Emeralda or Bijin or Toki... but... its not bad and looks better than anything done with just CK.  Part of the trick is having a process, understanding how the make up works and some combinations that just work, so some of the stuff I throw on pretty quick because its one of about 5 or 6 combinations I use a lot.

 

But you're right, its still hundreds of hours of work.  I figure to build the full database will probably mean working over the next 2 years to finish it.  I won't wait that long to release it, in fact I'm planning on doing 1 faction and about 100 base appearance templates in the next update as a preview and test run.  So yeah, when I mention some support on Subscribe Star would be helpful... I ain't kidding, this could be a full time job for the next two years on just this one mod, and I still have the Hearthfire Dungeon to rebuild (which is in progress), Whiterun Revisited to finish and get an initial release out, and then there's my Darklight Tower mod as well (which I haven't even talked about and its about 1/3 done). ?

 

I do have some other problems to solve.  One is the file size and the other is memory limits.  One problem with doing all those NPCs in Racemenu is that the facegen NIF tends to be around 4 MB and the Face Tintmask tends to average about 16 MB.  That's 20 MB per NPC.  Multiply that by 2,500 NPCs and you get 50 GB! ?  That won't work.  Because if you go around enslaving a lot of those NPCs and then hauling them back to a city and selling them... well, say 50 slaves in one city would use up an extra 1 GB of VRAM, and Skyrim LE cannot handle that... I'm not sure even SE could.  So I've got to find ways to cut that down or I'm going to have to rethink doing all the NPCs in Racemenu.  That's the current problem I'm wrestling with.  If I can't get that down to something reasonable (like about 1/10th or 1/20th of that file size) then I may have to leave the Racemenu option for the 50 or so Unique NPCs and do the rest in CK.  On the other hand I can do much better in CK these days as well, plus converting everything to KS Hair.

 

Comparatively, PB NPCs built with just CK had facegeom Nifs of around 1-2 MB each, and Face tintmask averages just 350kb each.  That high resolution stuff comes at a premium.  Apachii Hair uses less geometry than KS Hair, that's the main reason Face nifs jumped from 1-2 MB to and average of 4 (and sometimes 5) MB.  That's also without using hi-poly heads which would run the file size up even higher.

 

Who knew building mods involved so much math. ?

 

 

Edited June 3, 2022 by EinarrTheRed

[chaimhewast]

1 hour ago, EinarrTheRed said:

Part of the trick is having a process, understanding how the make up works and some combinations that just work, so some of the stuff I throw on pretty quick because its one of about 5 or 6 combinations I use a lot.

That's fair. I do so little character creation (I last did it a year ago in LE, ported the character to SE 3 months later, and only now am getting ready to make a new one) that I have trouble making someone look good.

 

1 hour ago, EinarrTheRed said:

Because if you go around enslaving a lot of those NPCs and then hauling them back to a city and selling them... well, say 50 slaves in one city would use up an extra 1 GB of VRAM, and Skyrim LE cannot handle that... I'm not sure even SE could.

I think either game would have troubles with the 50 extra NPCs before they had problems with the extra gig, assuming you had the VRAM to spare. I remember going past vanilla's memory limits with ENBoost, and my SE install currently sits at 7.5 gigs of VRAM in Whiterun.

[EinarrTheRed]

53 minutes ago, chaimhewast said:

I think either game would have troubles with the 50 extra NPCs before they had problems with the extra gig, assuming you had the VRAM to spare. I remember going past vanilla's memory limits with ENBoost, and my SE install currently sits at 7.5 gigs of VRAM in Whiterun.

Whiterun Revisited (another mod I've been working on forever) currently has about 150 NPCs wandering around Whiterun all with KS Hair and better faces done in CK, that's about 100 more than in vanilla Skyrim.  I can run through it in LE and my FPS stays around 40+ and in places maxes out at 60.  So NPCs done in CK aren't so much of a memory issue... but then they have tintmasks at around 350-500 kb.  That's a far cry from one tintmask from Racemenu that weighs in at 16 MB average (some go as high as 20 MB).  SE sounds like it would be okay, but I doubt LE can handle it unless I can reduce the file sizes of those tintmasks.  I'm pretty sure I can get them down to around 4 MB each, but 1 MB would be much better for LE, I can always leave the higher resolution ones for the SE version... assuming nobody minds downloading a 50 GB resource file. ?  Not sure where I'd even host that monster at.  So... I got some more work to do.

[Pfiffy]

While working on the TDF Prostitution Mod and the Pahe-Patch for it Clifton stumbled over another interesting bug that can be solved by more variation.

He called it the friendly-bandit-bug. If you really get this done, you will save us a lot of headache.

 

Just a few suggestions: Let the NPC's level with the char. Something between 0.5 and 1.0 for the 'usual' encounters and 0.8 to 1.5 for the 'bosses' This will keep the encounters more 'interesting' on the long run. 

 

To reduce the Data, you might split the whole thing into smaller groups like Bandits, Forsworn, Necromacers/mages, Dremoras... something like that.. (PB-PF-PN....) You get more separate files, but they might be easier to handle. You have one .esm file (use the one you already have) with the assets and some .esp files with the facegens for each group.  

 

 

 

 

 

[EinarrTheRed]

6 hours ago, Pfiffy said:

Just a few suggestions: Let the NPC's level with the char. Something between 0.5 and 1.0 for the 'usual' encounters and 0.8 to 1.5 for the 'bosses' This will keep the encounters more 'interesting' on the long run. 

Doesn't really work as well as you'd think.  Level means a lot less in Skyrim than most people think it does.  What really makes NPCs more challenging are Perks, and you can't add them with scripts, the only way to give them more perks are new actor bases... thus level groups.  The other thing that can make them challenging is a better designed bandit camp with a better mix of archers and melee attackers.  One of the other things keeping me busy are all the bandit camps I'm building for SBC (I've got another dozen roughly to build).

 

Making more level groups is not a big deal, its just data and leveled lists.  The time consuming part was creating all those custom appearances.  If all I had to do was just make leveled lists filled with base actors, I'd have already made a mod that had 50,000 base actors by now and you'd never see the same base actor twice in a single play through (I could build just that part in a month, or less), but those custom appearance eat up most of my time and most of the game resources.  Once I get the new system up and running with those appearance templates, adding thousands more base actors will be the easy part.  That was ultimately why I started trying to develop a new system of doing things because the old way of building in the custom appearance at the end of the template chain is just way too time and resource consuming.

 

Since there doesn't appear to be any upward limit on how many level groups there can be in a faction I can add more leveled groups to all the factions (and some really need more, witches only have 2 level groups in vanilla Skyrim, Forsworn have 6 but only 5 actually got used), and that way they not only go up in level, but I can give them better gear, more perks, more spells, etc.   Using level groups instead of just multilevel NPCs (NPCs that level in ratio to the player level) offers a lot more options for making them more challenging and more interesting. 

 

6 hours ago, Pfiffy said:

To reduce the Data, you might split the whole thing into smaller groups like Bandits, Forsworn, Necromacers/mages, Dremoras... something like that.. (PB-PF-PN....) You get more separate files, but they might be easier to handle. You have one .esm file (use the one you already have) with the assets and some .esp files with the facegens for each group.  

The data (as far as actor records and leveled lists) isn't the problem, its the graphics information (face geometry and especially the tintmasks) that takes up so much space.  There's no need to split the factions into multiple esps.  So far as the leveled lists and base actors, all that could be done with thousands of base actors in one esp that would still be under 1 MB in size (and in the new system, that's all Prettier Bandits.esp will be... just the actor records and leveled lists).

 

The appearance templates however are what will have to go in a esm, and you cannot separate those from the facegen and tintmask, that all has to be packed together, that's what takes up the bulk of disk space, VRAM and time to make.  If I can't reduce the Racemenu stuff down to around 4-5 MB per base template, then I'll have to scrap doing them in Racemenu and stick to making them in CK.  But, even if it comes to that (and I'm not there yet, there's a few things I can still try that will cut the size down some, it just a question of whether it will be enough), with all the practice I've had over the years I can still get better results out of CK now than when I started... and there's a whole lot of bandits, warlocks, necromancers, and Thalmor that I did a LONG time ago in CK when I was a lot less skilled, just redoing them in CK now would improve them plus swap to KS Hair.  So either way, things are going to get better looking and I will be able to make loads more base actors.

 

The unique NPCs I've done in PB (including some formerly leveled NPCs that are now unique like the necromancers in Wolf Skull cave, the Vaermina Dreamgirls, Anska, and others) will still be done in Racemenu.  With the changes to PAHE, that potentially gives a player a lot of unique slaves to grab in the game.  Stripping them of their gear doesn't affect any other NPCs (because they're now unique) and so can't contribute to naked bandits or friendly bandits.  Then if you turn off automatic stripping for non-uniques, and use mandatory nudity law, you can grab bandits without stripping the base actor and no naked bandits in your game.  So there's that.

 

I hope all that was clear, I'm still on my first cup of coffee this morning and I gotta dash off to class and then work. ☕?

[EinarrTheRed]

I did get a chance to do some more work on some of the issues today, specifically the files sizes from Racemenu.  The item that worried me most was the tintmasks which were about 16 MB each, that's much too large and if I tried that the mod archive would huge, but also use up so much memory resources it would likely cause crashes or serious FPS drop.  I needed to get that down.  Well, turns out Racemenu is generating 2k tintmasks by default.  I can size these down to 1k (1024x1024) which is still pretty decent resolution and in several tests that reduced the file size from 16 MB to 1 MB without too much loss of quality.  So that partially solves that problem.  I still need to look at ways to get the facegeom.nif down by about 1 MB average if I want to be able to make all the NPCs I planned, if I can manage that then things will be in good shape going forward.  I'm trying to be careful and keep in mind game performance for LE.  Now for SE, because it has so much more memory, the larger file sizes may be okay but I still have to consider the size of the mod... I really don't think anyone wants to try downloading a 50 or 60 GB (Giga, not Mega) mod not to mention I have no idea where I'd host it at.  So even though SE can handle the larger memory demand, I may keep the smaller files just to be practical.

[veinhan]

There used to be a mod that make male bandit like ECE boyish face. It sould be in LE but now it's gone. Anyone has any info abaut it?

[EinarrTheRed]

Getting a little more work done on PB towards the next release.  I'm adding 3 more new unique NPCs.  These all appear in Felglow, but only during the Hitting the Books quest.  They appear at the very end, just before you get to The Caller, all are now unique female mages.  That's 3 more lesser NPCs that can be enslaved and stripped without causing any naked leveled NPCs.  These three were good candidates since they appear already in the vanilla game, only appear once (during the quest) and don't respawn.

 

Still working on the batch of 100 new appearance templates, but making progress.

 

I'm also thinking of going back and tweaking the appearance of Keeper Carcette, still not 100% happy with how she turned out.  Suggestions welcome.

[EinarrTheRed]

On 6/3/2022 at 1:27 AM, Pfiffy said:

While working on the TDF Prostitution Mod and the Pahe-Patch for it Clifton stumbled over another interesting bug that can be solved by more variation.

He called it the friendly-bandit-bug. If you really get this done, you will save us a lot of headache.

 

Adding thousands more base actors won't fix the problem it will help to alleviate it because you won't notice it as much.

 

To wit...

 

Here's what I'm currently working on as I've gotten far enough along with it to be at a point I can discuss it and answer questions.

 

I decided the best way to approach the big changes in how I build the NPCs and encounters would be to start with one faction and use that as a testbed so everyone could try it out, see how it works and give feedback.  I picked Witches for this test for several reasons. partly because I was already working a lot on researching witches for another mod project, but also because witches were a small faction and so if this didn't go well it would have minimal impact and if does work then it updates a small faction that had been given very short treatment by Bethesda.

 

I started with research on witches both in Skyrim and in ES lore generally.  I've always preferred to stay lore friendly.  I noticed witches in ES lore had more generally worshiped Hircine and Namira as a representation of the duality of Nature (not all, the Fen Witches seem to have always worshipped Molag Bal; but the majority it seems did not).  But I also noted that in Skyrim many witches had changed to the worship of Molag Bal, or Molag Bal and Namira... with Molag Bal seeming to supplant Hircine.  So Skyrim's witches are generally more hostile and sinister than witches in ES lore were in the past.  Some of this seems partly because the older more traditional Glenmoril covens had apparently been wiped out and what was left were covens more under the influence of the Icereach Coven (and some of this dates back to the Planemeld, apparently a lot of witches were involved in aiding the Planemeld attempt and that may be where Molag Bal's influence began).   Anyway... most of this was for another project but I kept some of it in mind for Skyrim because it seemed to help explain why many witches were hostile to Spriggans (which may have at other times been allies), seemingly being in conflict with Nature and animals and why they might be seen dealing with dremora and other lesser daedra.

 

My first order of business was rebuilding the template system and leveled lists for witches.  I put more work into this than I have any other faction so far and what I've come up with could be considered an example of what I intend to eventually do with all the leveled factions as time allows.

 

Originally witches had only two level groups in their leveled lists.  Group 1 - Witches and Group 2 - Hags.  Each of these was composed of three sub groups based on elemental magic - Fire, Ice and Storm; which originally had only 4 witch base actors each.   Witches were fixed at level 4, and Hags were fixed at level 8.   That's it, vanilla Skyrim had only about 24 witch base actors for its leveled lists and they were pathetically weak; nothing like the powerful witches seen in previous ES games.  They also had no perks, few spells, and limited gear.

 

My first pass at them, done a few years  back, tripled the number of base actors so each elemental type typically had 12 base actors instead of 4.  I also changed their levels.  Group 1 (Witches) began at level 4 (minimum) and could level up to level 15 at a 1:1 ratio to the player.  Group 2 (Hags) began at a minimum level of 16 and could level up to level 48.  They got some perks and a few more spells and a bit more leveled gear.  It was an improvement but, not enough.  I also tended to make hair color reflect their elemental type which in retrospect I consider a bad choice.  In the future hair color will simply be natural hair colors for whatever race the actor is.

 

So where are things going now?

 

As some of you know, most NPC factions have an average of 6 level groups, which gives more variety and more nuance in encounters.  Witches will now have 7 level groups.

Group 1 - Level 1-6 - Apprentice Witches

Group 2 - Level 8-15 - Initiate Witches

Group 3 - Level 16-30 - Witches

Group 4 - Level 32-45 - Witches

Group 5 - Level 50-59 - Elder Witches

Group 6 - Level 60-70 - Elder Witches

Group 7 - Level 75-80 - Grand Witches

 

Each level group is triggered by the Player reaching the minimum level for that group.  So you won't see Grand witches until you hit level 75 for example.  If you did Darklight Tower early (below the recommended level of 8 ) you could see Apprentice Witches instead of Initiate Witches, making it a bit less dangerous (well but you'd be weaker so... it evens out more or less).

 

Each group has more depth of spells and I'm working on some new spells unique to witches.  They also have perks appropriate to their level but also to their skill level in that particular school of magic at the minimum level for that level group, so its all very consistent.  The addition of those perks makes the witches much tougher than they were.   I created a unique skill class for them which is similar to the Elemental Mage but with a few changes.  They get more leveled gear, including things they can and will use in a fight against you.  Each group has some ability to level as indicated above... so an Apprentice witch has a minimum level of 1 but can level up 1:1 with the player to a max of level 6.  Initiate Witches start at level 8 and can go up to level 15.  You get the idea, and this helps them keep pace with the player so they continue to be a challenge in encounters as the Player levels.  With seven level groups, they should remain a challenge pretty deep into your game, but by having those level groups, they're not overwhelming early in the game so it helps keep game play balanced.

 

There are no more "hags", I never understood why Bethesda did that other than a vague relationship to Hagravens and there's nothing I could find in ES lore to support calling a witch a Hag as some sort of title (as an insult maybe, but not a title).  So I came up with some level titles I felt were more appropriate (I couldn't find any faction titles in lore either other than coven leaders being sometimes called the Beldam).

 

Each of those groups will still be split into three elemental subgroups of Ice, Fire or Storm witches; as they are now because there are encounter markers specific to that and I want to keep my changes compatible with existing encounter markers.

 

In short, if you encounter a Grand Witch... best be careful, they are FAR more powerful than vanilla Skyrim witches and could squash a vanilla warlock or mage without breaking a nail.

 

There are no witch Bosses in Skyrim officially (hagravens often seem to serve that function), so I haven't created any as they wouldn't be used by the game locations currently.

 

I'm also seeing what I can do about giving them their own unique outfit by taking the default robe mesh and retexturing it.  Don't expect anything super fancy or slooty, but it should at least help distinguish them as their own faction more.  If anyone wants to take whatever texture I come up with and make slooty outfits or fancier outfits from it, blanket permission is given.

 

With the templates built (and I'm putting the finishing touches on that part), the next step was figuring out what actor types to populate each leveled list with.  Here again I sought to expand things where possible in the interest of variety.

 

Previously witches only used 4 voice types.  Most used the FemaleCondescending voice, Nord witches always used the FemaleNord voice, High Elf witches always used the FemaleElfHaughty voice and Dark Elf witches always used the FemaleDarkElf voice.  I did some digging and found there were a few other unused voice types that were compatible with witch dialog so I will be adding witches with the FemaleEvenToned and FemaleCommoner voice types.

 

For races, I'm expanding and rebalancing that a bit for Skyrim, it will break down as follows for both race and voice type (since the two are linked in the actor records).

 

Base Actors per element per level group:

40 Female Bretons - 10 FemaleCondescending, 15 FemaleEventoned, 15 FemaleCommoner

25 Female Nords - 15 FemaleNord, 10 FemaleEventoned

15 Female Imperials - 10 FemaleCondescending, 5 FemaleEventoned

8 Female Altmer - 8 FemaleElfHaughty

8 Female Dumer - 8 FemaleDarkElf

4 Female Bosmer - 4 FemaleEventoned

 

That gives us 100 base actors total per elemental type per level group for a total of 300 base actors per level group and a grand total of 2,100 witch base actors in all.

 

Those 100 base actors will use (and re-use) 100 appearance templates, each of which gets re-used for the appearance of various witches 21 times each.

 

So for a final comparison, previously PB gave us about 72 unique looking witch base actors (24 per elemental type) in total with only 2 level groups and limited ability.  The new system will give us 100 unique appearances that get re-used in the leveled lists, for a total of 2,100 base actors and a much greater range and variety in strength.

 

And that's where things are at with that.  I'm still working on creating those appearance templates (which is going to take awhile) but the level templates and the leveled lists are nearly done.

 

I've also been tweaking Keeper Carcette's appearance to make her a lil prettier and a lil less plain looking... but without going glam model.  At least that's what I'm aiming for.  I'll post a screen cap when I have something I'm happier with.

 

Add the above to a bunch more new unique NPCs you can enslave and strip their outfits without affecting any other NPCs (which is one of the main reasons I started adding those), and setting up 4 NPCs to be available as potential followers and the next update should add quite a lot as well as marking the beginning of the transition to the new appearance and template system and moving away from using Apachii Hair in favor of KS Hair.  If all goes well with this faction, I'll begin working on other factions and adding more appearance templates in future updates until I get everything transitioned over and rebuilt.

 

An then figure out converting to SE... ?  Well... at least I won't be bored with nothing to do. ?

[kalador]

Not a problem, just an observation.  I have been experimenting with my setup, and reducing the number of mods that I run at any time.  I just started really using Prettier Bandits rather than other bandit faction cosmetic mods.

The last three times that I have gone to the Hall of the Vigilants, I have been finding two Keeper Carcettes.  One is standing at the long table in front of the stairs down with her eyes closed.  The other is lying in the bed in her room with the eyes open.  The next time that I go in there, I am going to try to remember to check out the ID Numbers for both of them.

It seems that I have the absolute best luck to find strange unexplained things in my game.?

[EinarrTheRed]

Yup, that was a goof on my part, it'll be fixed in the next update.

 

Basically here's what happened.  I made a new interior cell to use for a screen shot studio for my promo images.  For that I made some duplicate NPCs set to stand on some markers for the various group photo's.  Well... when I duplicated Carcette I forgot to remove all her behavior packages from the duplicate... so the duplicate eventually escapes the studio and joins her twin in the Hall of the Vigilants.   Oops...

 

It's harmless though, just ignore the extra one and she'll be removed in the next update.

[kalador]

Okay.  That I can understand.  Identical twins dislike being separated for extended lengths of time.

1a204422 for the one in the hall, and 1a204423 for the one in the bed.  1a being KShairdos.esm in my load order.

[EinarrTheRed]

If its injecting them into KS Hair, you're using an older version.  Make sure you are using. v1.01 that removed KS Hair as a hard dependency (it still is, its just not baked into the esp anymore, it caused errors that shouldn't have happened but did anyway).

[kalador]

v1.01 did the trick.  I only have 1 Keeper Carcette at the Hall of the Vigilant now.

[natybs]

whenever I try to enable this mod it causes my game to CTD on the main menu load. I have the base mod, patch, and all listed requirements?