Tag Archives: fixing a bug/other problem

Rant, Review

Alternates to Adobe Photoshop

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I’ve never been a big fan of Adobe, never liked Photoshop (to me, it was a giant mess of user-unfriendly gui and unintuitive options), but also was considering finally jumping the bridge to start using it in various ways in my art, using Manga Studio if I ever actually decided to draw a comic.

With the recent purchase of my new drawing tablet, I quickly realized my old go-to, Paintshop Pro 7, which I’d been using for years and pretty darn good at it nobody actually realized I wasn’t using Photoshop, wasn’t up to the task of modern drawing tablets. That’s fair, I hadn’t been in drawing form since I left college and stopped modding.

Shortfatotaku recently (rightfully) criticized Adobe for it’s subscription plans and at one point was like he was perfectly fine with his license of the older version until it became obsolete.

Days later Adobe comes out with that absolutely insane announcement previous licenses are void and companies/studios can be sued for using old software and are doubling their subscription prices.

Needless to say I won’t be hopping on the Photoshop bandwagon and it kind of needs to learn a lesson, so I’ve been collecting alternatives, some free, and some not, to Photoshop in the hopes of getting the word out and breaking the monopoly Adobe has on the digital illustration world.

Autodesk Sketchbook went free recently, entirely. I’m currently trying it out.
https://sketchbook.com/

MangaStudio/ClipStudio is the same program but recently had a name change. CD versions are still called Manga Studio. I bought my license a while ago for Manga Studio 4 on sale for $25. It seems to have a learning curve but I was able to do good looking line art with itrecently. It’s geared toward making comics and manga. You can get a trial. There’s several different programs and there’s a 3D modeling studio in the set.
https://www.clipstudio.net/en/dl

GIMP. When on Linux I tend to use GIMP, though I find it almost as irritating to use as Photoshop in a lot of cases. It has some useful features. There’s a version for Windows.
https://www.gimp.org/

Paint.NET is one of my favorites, and a must for modders of Skyrim or similar games. It handles DDS files natively which was a big bonus considering I refused to use Photoshop and everything else I had at the time I was modding required plugins. It’s free. It’s a bit like GIMP but in my opinion, easier to use.
https://www.getpaint.net/

Procreate was recommend by a friend of a friend, though I have not tried it. It seems geared toward computer tablets and things in the Android/Iphone nature. I may have tried it if my Galaxy Note 4 hadn’t been broken by obvious deliberately broken patch.
https://procreate.art/

Drawpile is for multiple people to draw on the same canvas, which sounds like a fun time with friends.
https://drawpile.net/

Affinity is a low cost alternative to Adobe. I know little about it but the price tag seems reasonable. It looks very well put together and the gui looks somewhat close to Paintshop Pro and somewhat userfriendly and I’m downloading the trial for Designer now. (It requires an account ??? and email verification ???? to download a trial since it counts as a “purchase.”)
https://affinity.serif.com/

Full disclosure: I’m not being paid by anyone to list these programs in any way. So yep, these are my actual opinions.

Considering there are a lot of free, really good programs out there to try there’s no reason not to try them or keep them around unless space is an issue. Sometimes I’ll load up a program just for one specific process it handles better than my usual and it’s worth it when doing a lot of drawing.

For the moment I’m going to stick with my good old Copics until I get a new workflow set up.

Games, TES: Skyrim

Amazing Follower Tweaks: Fixing a Save that didn’t get Tweak Commands

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Well, on my newest character I encountered a strange bug regarding AFT and the fact I didn’t seem to end up with the Tweak Commands (absolutely necessary when your followers hit a guard by accident) no matter what I did. The dialogue menus would pop up like always on the followers, but never in the powers and neither did I get the AFT readme added. Trying to look up the problem got me a whole bunch of scattered bits and pieces talking about mod conflicts and other things that were interesting, but not really what the issue was with the mod.

So I did what I normally do when troubleshooting. Swapped AFT to the bottom of the load order, uninstalled it, reinstalled it and checked for conflicts in my other mods. I *almost* tried the Boost Priority plugin but the thing is that the NPCs were reacting normally, had all the right dialogue, it was just that the Tweak Commands and Make Follower wasn’t available, so I figured something wasn’t getting triggered right. It was hugely frustrating.

THEN, I checked again and found some info where Dheuster mentions that AFT is start game enabled and that Alternate State mods like Live Another Life can mess with start game enabled mods, and can specifically prevent the powers and readme from being added to the inventory– his recommendation is to disable AFT when making a new save until after sufficient enough time has passed (I think it was 24 in game hours) and then reload with AFT enabled.

The save game was a port from a different machine. I don’t even think the save was made with an alternate start mod. It had already completed the start quest, and for some bizarre reason when I loaded it up for the first time the powers didn’t get added. In retrospect this isn’t so surprising; sometimes the scripts take a while to run and something probably interrupted it the first time I loaded that save.

Unfortunately, reinstalling wouldn’t work with this save. So I did the next thing I could think of; cleaning the save. It’s been a while since I’ve had to do anything like that. In fact the last time I did, it was for beta testing for some issues Dovahtracker was experiencing regarding CTDs and not being able to update the server with the character info.
So, I went out and found this amazing little utility that seems to work even better than the one I had used before. So I backed up my saves and tried it out. Even though I had reset AFT and followed the proper uninstall instructions the scripts were still in the save and that indeed was the problem as to why the powers weren’t being added. Once the scripts were stripped out, the save loaded the powers just fine and I got AFT fully functional again which was a pretty big relief. One time the followers got into a scuffle with the guards and somehow I ended up with a 1000 coin bounty. It was a blood bath around Whiterun.A note about the save cleaning tool:Users say sometimes anti-viruses will react badly to it, but so far Avast has been quiet for me. I’ve also got FNIS Sexy Move installed and it seems all right so far. The program is pretty easy to start up and use.  Some of the features seem useful to keeping a healthy save, particularly the reset havoc because that can create a lot of data from moved objects. Especially if you’re like me and jump up to dance on Ulfric’s table… never knew the guards could arrest you for that until I tried.

Games, TES: Skyrim, Tutorial

NPC Editing: Fixing the Gray Face Bug

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So you might have noticed the guy in the banner that pops up sometimes. The one that wears the tartan hood. He’s a follower I’ve been working on and I’ll say, it’s a pain in the butt to get the gray face bug fixed on a custom NPC.I created his face in the chargen and exported it the normal way using spf charactername in the console. Then I imported it through the NPC editor in the CK.(For the record, I have RaceMenu and Enhanced Character Edit installed, and I think his face port went juts fine using the SPF export straight from the game. He doesn’t look particularly different from how he did as a PC, but the real test will come if I disable the chargen mods.)

Everything looked pretty good, but I had a problem when it came to viewing him in the game proper, and that was the gray face. Googling around, I came across several scattered forum posts and the wiki, so I read up on it.

It’s because the CK doesn’t generate the head mesh for the NPC automatically. You have to do it yourself by selecting the NPC in the Item window, not the NPC edit window.

Selecting the NPC and hitting CRTL-F4 will generate the meshes and textures that will properly display the NPC in game without the pale look and neck seam.

But wait! Some of the tutorials don’t really specify the conditions where CK will actually export the darn things. I found this out from a forum post I’ve since lost, but anyway. For some reason, the CK won’t generate the files when you have the NPC selected through the ALL category in the CK, especially if you’re like me and tend to use the filter a lot in order to cut down on wild edits and just being about to find the right entry. The best bet is to go to where the NPC is listed normally, say if your character was a Nord, it would be in NordRace.

So select them, and CTRL-F4. CK will inform you it will start generating the files. Give it a bit. It will have a popup that says “done” when it is done, and it might take a bit depending on if you have multiple NPCs selected. Make sure that any previously generated files for your NPC are deleted if you are updating the face files! I’ve had the CK actually act like it’s exporting, but it really didn’t because the files were already there. You can tell when it does this: there will be a slight pause when it is actually generating, but when it isn’t the DONE popup will appear almost immediately.

A word of warning:

I have tried this successfully several times for my NPC, right up until I started giving him his custom hair.

Custom hair on an NPC requires a bit more involved work, and for this NPC I used Vie Male Hair Pack, which comes in a BSA and ESP respectively and is a pretty awesome addition for guys. They look a bit punkish but some ‘dos can also be used for Celtic NPCs like my guy up there. (Also, if you download it, remember to check for the password because Vie uses a secured archive.)

Following the ESM conversion method to get the hair listed in the CK so I could give it to my NPC, I also had to unpack the BSA file before the CK would generate the proper head mesh and textures, otherwise it gave me errors whenever I tried to view the hair in the NPC preview and it also gave me errors while generating the NPC meshes. In fact, prior to unpacking it wouldn’t even display the hairs in preview mode. There was the BSA archive right there! I have no problems with Apachii’s hairs but Apachii also provides an ESM out of the box… but I have no idea what’s going on there and will have to research further.

Anyway. Unpacking the BSA did the trick and made working meshes.

I believe when it couldn’t find the hair meshes in the loose files, it generated an NPC face mesh without the hair. He still had the gray face bug in this instance because in game he had the hair, but according to the CK he didn’t and that caused the generated face files to not match up.

It seems like any time the face files and the NPC do not match up, the gray face bug occurs as well.

After the CK finally found the loose hair meshes, and generated the face files properly with custom hair, he didn’t have the gray face bug.

Lastly, if you ever make an mod with an NPC, do not forget to generate the face files and include them with the proper file pathing in your zip file.

The files you can find in Data\meshes\actors\character\FaceGenData\FaceGeom\YOUR PLUGIN.esp\

and Data\textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\YOUR PLUGIN.esp\

Any time you make an edit to your NPC’s looks, you should generate a new face file.

You’d think this is something the CK would do on its own once you were done editing the guy, right?

I still have some testing to do to see if I can get things working fine with the BSA and ESP.

Games, TES: Skyrim, Tutorial

The Hi-Res Texture Pack

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I downloaded Skyrim’s free Hi-res texture pack shortly after it first came out. I enjoyed the better resolution for months, when I actually played Skyrim. Unfortunately, a problem struck about a month or so ago when one of the mods I had did something rather… uh weird, to some of the torches about Skyrim.

I still have yet to figure out what mod it was. I can only think it was one of the ember mods I had installed just prior to encountering the bug. What it did was turn several torches, candles, and braziers into the complete opposite of what a light source should be- it was more like a magical device tapping into a back whole which sucked all light away and became a “black void radiator” instead of a photon radiator. It was bizarre and affecting my ability to play.

I started uninstalling the most recent mods- no fix. Then I went and uninstalled the less recent mods- still no fix. I said “Screw it,” and stripped the game of all mods- including the Hi-Res packs by accident.

Well, it fixed it when whatever files responsible were finally deleted, and I had my light back. At least I didn’t have to re-install the game! But then I had to clean up and reinstall the mods bit by bit… and I started getting that weird floating grass bug which I fixed. I think. (Check Modding Resources from the menu if you also have this bug.) Anyway, during this, I managed to iron out the incompatibilities between the mods I use the most and install a few more that were pretty awesome.

Unfortunately, I wondered why my textures were so low now. Then I realized just a bit ago the Hi-Res packs disappeared.

A thorough search about how to re-install the Hi-Res pack produced results- for removing it. Not what I wanted. Uh. Okay. So anyway, I tried fixing it on my own. Just opening the game through Steam didn’t work, despite what others mentioned (note that I usually launch Skyrim using SKE). The only other thing I could do was a bit more technical. Usually, when something is wrong with the default game files, you do a cache verify. So I opened up Steam again, right clicked Skyrim in my library, and did one. Lucky me, it detected the Hi-Res packs were gone and slated them to reacquire. The Hi-Res is downloading even as I type, but again, it’s taking it’s sweet time.

Oh, there, it’s done. Actually, it seems to have freshly downloaded the DLCs as well, and BOSS informs me that I have to reclean the ESM files, but a small price to pay for the better resolutions.

Anyway, the moral of the story is clear; trying to fight your way out of darkness may leave causalities.