Tag Archives: skyrim modding

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.

Game dev, Games, TES: Skyrim

My Mod Ideas

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I felt like just writing down some mod ideas I have for Skyrim. Mostly just small ones, ones I may or may not get around to. I sort of believe that anything one attempts to achieve, one should have a good plan, after all. I’ve had a lot of experience struggling with ill planned attempts at… well, pretty much everything. I’m definitely the sort of person to charge ahead and give it a whack sometimes just to see what happens. I think I wrote some nonsense like that a month ago….

  1. A Mountain Climbing Mod. Skyrim’s full of mountains. More so than Oblivion. I’m surprised they didn’t implement some sort of feature like this already.
  2. A small farm mod, a place you can grow ingredients or food. (Something I actually am working on.)
  3. An Altmer follower. I think there isn’t any in the base game, and the only Altmer you can marry is Taarie….
  4. A quest mod about the Thalmor. They’re the bad guys in Skyrim, but I prefer having broader choices than Bethesda likes to give us. I think of a mod I used to play for Oblivion, that allowed you to join the Mythic Dawn for real…
  5. A prequel and sequel set of mods for Oblivion and Skyrim.
  6. A tropical island escape. There’s already a few out there, but I kind of want to do my own thing with one. Skyrim’s so cold despite being next to the ocean…
  7. Going to Akavir. I don’t think anyone’s ever done that, but it’d be amazing!
  8. Overhauling the alchemy system to make it better.

Whether or not I can find the time to do all of those is another thing, but I like dreaming. It’s the first step in creating.

 

Games, TES: Skyrim, Tutorial

How to Create a Crafting Recipe

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Crafting recipes are an important part of an armor mod, or useful tools for other types. Here’s a quick how-to on how to create one. Note that tempering items will be covered in another tutorial.

The basic steps, before we go into detail.

  1. Create recipe
  2. Decide what it produces
  3. Decide materials it requires
  4. Choose to make the recipe disappear when you don’t have the materials.
  5. Save.

 

Creating your recipe

 

  • Create your recipe: duplicate an existing one or create one from scratch.Before you can do anything, you first must create a new recipe. You can find recipes in the Object Window > Constructable Object.
    Image1
    You can find all crafting recipes and tempering recipes under this section. Tempering is a little bit different, so we want the recipes. I find it easiest looking for a recipe that’s fairly close to what my finished recipe will be. For instance, if I wanted to have an item that required five iron ingot and be workable from forges, I’d probably choose one of the iron armor or weapon items.

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  • Give your new recipe a unique identifier, something like RecipeNameOfModItem.
    Personally, I usually go by the default naming scheme, especially if I’m doing a big crafting project, but ifs up to you if you want your recipes to display all together or with similar times.Image5
  • Choose your required items.
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    The required item list is where all the items you need to craft the recipe is located. You can add a new requirement by right-clicking in the Required Item List and selecting New. Highlight the new addition. To change the default item, use the drop down menu to the right and find the item you want. Change the number required just below.
  • Change the created object.
  • Image8
    You can also change the number of items created just below. It’s fairly straightforward.
  • If you want this recipe to be creatable from another option, like the alchemy table, change the workbench keyword.
    Image9

 

Making a recipe appear only when you have the right materials

Next, consider adding conditions to the recipe that hide it in the crafting menu until you have the items required for making it. This reduces clutter in the crafting menu, especially since so many crafting mods don’t do this, resulting in very cluttered crafting categories. If this is an option you wish to implement, consider adding an in-game book listing all of the recipes that are available in your mod for easier discovery and use. 
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  • Look below where it says “Match conditions” and right-click, add new.
  • Change the condition function to GetItemCount
  • Click the button where it says INVALID. That’s the function info. Click it and select one of the required items in the recipe.
    Image13
  • The Comparison menu has a list of “greater than” “less than” “equal to” et ctr items. What you’ll want is the “Equal to or greater than” function.
  • Change the value to the number of items you want in your inventory before the recipe will show up.
    Image14

You can customize this so you can have your recipe show up when you have only one of the required items or only show up until you have all of the required materials and are ready to create it. Add more conditions for each item.

And that’s it! Stay tuned for Tempered items.

Games, TES: Skyrim, Tutorial

My Random Notes on Skyrim Mesh Editing

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Well, I haven’t had much luck fixing that worldspace of mine with it’s LOD, and I have been doing my homework on it. I still don’t know what did it, but I did manage to get that weird floating cell ala Salvadore Dali to disappear, but I had to restore the ESP file from my back up. ALWAYS a good practice to save your changes in small steps in separate files. The LOD didn’t really work though something shows up, and there’s that whole lack of water thing. Anyway, I will write up a post all about that later, for now, here’s a few consolidated notes to remember from my meshing endeavors earlier last month, courtesy of everything I did wrong.

When you’re exporting an armor with parts like the Steel Plate Cuirass that use bones that is not present in the base body mesh, you should add the proper bones and bone weights before exporting. A skirt part that is supposed to move independently of the legs will show up as attached to either one leg or the other or both and will have awkward stretching.

If you’re editing an existing armor, it’s perfectly all right to use the bone weights from the original vanilla mesh if you haven’t changed things significantly. Likewise, it’s all right to use the skeleton from the original mesh as long as you import a clean one. I’ve tested both.

If you edit an existing mesh, don’t forget to check the texture and adjust the UV mapping if it’s needed.

If you’re running the Nifscripts and wind up with the wrong skin partitions or multiple BP_TORSOs, check to make sure that you do not have any overlapping assignments in the faces. If you have two BP_TORSOs and both BP_RIGHTARM and BP_LEFTLEG and the latter both have the correct assignments, and the BP_TORSO is split between the two, it’s fine. Just rename both BP_TORSOs to the correct Skyrim body value. Alternatively, try fixing the Nifscript to allow 22 bones instead of 18.

For non-armor meshes: If you get an error on importing into Blender, open up your NifSkope again and delete the value Blender reports as incompatible. You may have to re-add that value when you export.

While trying to import an arrow mesh into Blender, I discovered it wouldn’t import another property not mentioned in many tutorials: BSEffectShaderProperty.