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Found 3 results

  1. Cleaning the Official Master ESMs This guide assumes using TES5Edit on Skyrim Nexus, Or SSEEdit on Skyrim SE Nexus Due to this guide being dual purpose ( For Skyrim and Skyrim SE ) for the rest of this guide I will refer to both tools as xEdit. Screenshots of tools used may be one or the other, or older versions, which does not matter, the images are only to illustrate the method / options used. Why Clean the Master Files ? Firstly because the masters have entries that are identical to the same records in Skyrim.esm or other DLC esms'. They exist because Bethesda may have looked at something in the CK and an unneeded entry was auto included in the plugin even though the item was not altered in any way. The Official Creation Kits are notoriously buggy and randomly create dirty / wild edits, often when the author of the plugin is completely unaware. Wherever that plugin is placed in your load order its records overwrite all the conflicting records from plugins loaded before it ( the rule of one ) resetting the settings back to the values contained in the Official Bethesda DLC. It won't cause crashes, it just changes the values of plugins loaded before it. Which can alter mods that you have for Weapon Damage, Armor, Lighting, Food Effects and so on. The masters are very early in your load order but there is potential for a mod to be made as a fake.esm, and placed among them, and so ITMs in a later loading master may cause problems for that mods esm. Chance is remote that a master will affect another master, and this procedure is best used on all of your mods plugins, but cleaning everything of ITMs ( Identical to Master records ) causes no harm, is more optimal giving the game less to process in your load order, and so it is best to get rid of these completely unnecessary dirty edits. The Second reason is that Bethesda chose to delete some things that are in the Official DLC. Any mods loaded with references to deleted records from the Official Bethesda DLC will cause your game to crash. This problem particularly affects older mods ( especially mods that were made before newer official patches were released, with more deleted references the old mod did not anticipate - It will also become problematic for the Skyrim Special Edition community where old Original Skyrim mods are being converted to SSE, and Bethesda have deleted even more records from the plugins before they released the newer plugins for that version of the game ). xEdit can restore and properly assign values to these records that will disable them and still allow mods to access them. This is done using the "Undelete and Disable References" option. For further explanations of why it is still recommended to clean the games masters .. Read on from this post, Zilav and Arthmoor, most valued technical and vastly experienced modding authors, weigh in on the subject. The following mostly apply to mod authors, but worth knowing about for mod users too : xEdit will also report when a mod has Deleted NavMeshes as part of the report from Automatic cleaning. Like deleted references, any mod that references a deleted NavMesh will cause Skyrim to Crash. Properly optimizing your mods NavMeshes and checking your mod for Deleted Vanilla NavMeshes ( which can also be caused by a CK wild edit even if you did not do it yourself ) is important. Mods altering the same cell and the same NavMeshes when your mod is not optimized will cause Skyrim to Crash. Poorly optimized NavMeshes with errors reported by the CK will make Skyrim unstable. Instabilities like fast travelling to a location and Skyrim crashes. Note the ones found to be deleted in the games masters, cannot be undeleted. To fix deleted Navmeshes in your mods, Arthmoor has provided a walkthrough in Skyrim - Fixing Navmesh Deletion in TES5Edit Manually cleaning your mods is also important to remove wild edits. This is mostly down to the experience of Mod Authors to solve such problems, but there are a few noted later in this guide which are in the DLCs which everyone can easily Manually clean. Some mods can have accidental Wild Edits in them caused by the author looking at how Bethesda did something they wish their mod to do as well. These Wild Edits often prevent Skyrim from doing things like advancing quests, spawning NPCs, assigning dialogue to NPCs, preventing NPCs from patrol areas they are assigned to. They can also alter Vanilla Lighting and Triggers that the author wished to use. All of these things affect any plugin with conflicting records loaded before a mod with Wild Edits. Mod authors - Learn to use xEdit, and ensure the only records in your mod plugins are what you would expect to be in there, its the most important tool the community can make use of when used properly. Mod Users - Follow this guide... Before moving on to the Manual cleaning, something everyone should do prior to Manual Cleaning : Automatic cleaning of Bethesda's ESMs with xEdit With the games Original esm's installed ( You can use Steam to Verify Integrity of Game Cache of Skyrims files to ensure you have good error free copies of the original master files ), and in accordance with the following wiki article http://www.creationk...ty_Plugins_List : Load up xEdit. 1. Right click the plugin selection screen and select "none" 2. Tick the relevant esm to edit, and click okay ( If you have not cleaned any of your Master files yet, the first one to tick will be Skyrims "Update.esm" ), then click Okay After each of the following actions, wait for a message in the message window that the previous operation has finished / Done : 3. Right click the plugin after you get the "Background Loader : Finished" message,and choose "Apply Filter for Cleaning" Wait until Filtering is finished then .. 4. Right click the plugin and choose Remove Identical to Master Records Wait until it finishes then .. 5. Right click the plugin and choose Undelete and Disable references Wait until it finishes then .. 6. Close xEdit, and it should check with you that you wish to save the plugin ( this only happens if you have made any changes to the plugin to save, if it just closes .. Then you have not cleaned anything ) Rinse and repeat the Automatic cleaning ( steps 1 - 6 above ) for each of the master files. Working from first to load, to last, not including Skyrim.esm or any unofficial patches ( No point doing Skyrim.esm, and the unofficial patches are already done and should not be cleaned ) So clean in this order Update.esm Dawnguard.esm Dawnguard.esm ( Yes it needs to be done twice ) Hearthfire.esm Dragonborn.esm Dawnguard.esm needs to be cleaned twice ( as of xEdit 3.1 onwards - After doing the automatic cleaning routine once on Dawnguard.esm, and saving it, load it up again in xEdit and you will be able to clean a further 6 ITMs ) ------------------ Dawnguard.esm needs manual cleaning aswell as automatic cleaning After the automated cleaning is done, you can also now manually clean a few more Wild edits xEdit will not have touched ... Recently Arthmoor has brought to the attention of the community additional information regarding manual cleaning of Dawnguard.esm, which everyone needs to do for their own setup same as automatic cleaning ( because nobody can legally upload official master files anywhere, everyone needs to do their own ) First load up xEdit When the plugin selection comes up, right click and select None Then put a tick in the box just for Dawnguard.esm, click Okay After its finished loading, right click Dawnguard.esm and choose "Filter for Cleaning" 1. For "CELL 00016BCF: Remove XEZN subrecord referring to RiftenRatwayZone [ECZN:0009FBB9]. Otherwise it blocks the official fix in Update.esm." .... Expand the records as in the following screenshot, and right click the indicated sub-record, and choose Remove 2. For "CELL 0001FA4C: Wild edit. Remove this record. It's a testing cell." .... Expand the records as in the following screenshot, and right click the indicated record, and choose Remove 3. For "CELL 0006C3B6: Wild edit. Remove this record. It's a testing cell." .... Expand the records as in the following screenshot, and right click the indicated record, and choose Remove NOTE : This guide used to include cleaning instructions for "CELL 00039F67: Wild edit. Remove this record. It's a testing cell" ( The WICourier edit ) - But since the new version of TES5Edit 3.1+ now cleans that as part of the automated cleaning ( which you should have done prior to manual cleaning ), you no longer need to clean it manually afterwards. ----------------------------------------- Now that the Master files are cleaned, you could put them in a zip, and get your mod manager to install them - Maybe at a future date you want to do a refresh of steam cache and it redownloads the masters which are not the same as the originals anymore (because you cleaned them), so then you would need to reclean them again. But beware, Bethesda have started redoing some masters due to Creation Club mods compatability, so make sure any redownloaded masters are not newer than your previously cleaned ones, because in that case you will need to reclean and rezip them again anyway. You can go through the rest of your Load Order using Automatic cleaning of ITMs and UDRs on all your mods plugins. The sequence of cleaning mods plugins should be after you have your Load Order correct, masters are cleaned, then clean them with the last to load being the last to clean. Mod authors should have done them already, so most will probably not need cleaning. Also look out for any mod specific cleaning instructions in the mods description. Prime example = The Unofficial Patches will not need any cleaning, they are already done, and any remaining ITMs in those plugins should be left alone because they do have a purpose .. ( its a very rare occasion when this is true ). The xEdit Work In Progress Development topic is at the following link https://afkmods.iguanadons.net/index.php?/topic/3750-wipz-tes5edit/ Development project is at GitHub https://github.com/TES5Edit/TES5Edit And newer versions of xEdit (3.2.7 +) have a link to Discord top right of xEdit window.
  2. Greetings, all! I need some expert-level help on splitting a rather large ESP into an ESM/ESP pair, and so far neither Google nor tool documentation nor direct searching on TESA has found me a way to do this. I know that TES4Gecko can "split a mod", but it puts way more stuff into the ESM than what I want there, and it doesn't seem to allow me any manual control over that. Background (sorry, this is long, but the information matters): My ESP file defines a couple thousand new base objects, seven interlocking quests, hundreds of custom scripts, and over 3,000 lines of voiced and lip synced dialog. Among those base objects, some use vanilla meshes and textures (e.g., a vanilla door but with a custom script added requiring a base object just to add the script, but no external assets). Other base objects use custom meshes, textures, sound files, music files, or some combination of these. All told, the added meshes and textures total about 250 meg, and the voice files are about 150 meg. I deploy the mod to my alpha test team (several people) as an ESP plus three BSA files (one each for meshes, textures, and sounds which includes voices and lip syncs). Development has reached the point where the meshes and textures are quite seldom changing, but I'm still editing recorded voices and inserting them into the mod. That means that of 400 meg download, about 250 meg of it is the same for the testers every time. Looking ahead, we're just a few weeks away from a public beta release, and hopefully a lot more people downloading. There is no way the voice editing will be 100% done before the beta, so I need to make that part easy to update for testers. Furthermore, the ESM/ESP split is the right thing to do *long term* as well. The reason for this is that the music handling logic for the mod is smart enough to detect Sound Commands, Enhanced Sound and Music, or Better Music System, selecting the best available option, and falls back to vanilla StreamMusic() calls if none of those are installed. The initialization logic builds arrays of the mod's internal cells and which music files should apply to which cells (merchants, taverns, dungeon....etc.). All of that logic is something I don't want to duplicate in the (required by BMS design) separate ESP file that supports BMS. So my code builds the arrays in one place and then shares them with the optional ESP that supports BMS -- and this requires the optional ESP to have my main ESP as a master. I know how to do that, but it's an ugly hack that I'd like to avoid. If I create an ESM, all that shared logic for music handling can go into the ESM. There are other optional ESPs planned, such as one explicitly supporting CM Partners. So getting some of the global logic into an ESM has lots of benefits that have nothing to do with download size. Now, given the above, here's what I need to do: The ESM should contain only one quest, and not one of the existing ones. This quest will contain the music data arrays and initialization logic, so that MyMod-BetterMusicSystem.esp can depend on my ESM and not my ESP. The ESM quest will also have a few declared variables that are shared by the other quests, but other than that it won't have much code. The ESM should define most or all of the unscripted base objects (or base objects that use only vanilla scripts) that use custom meshes, textures, and sound FX files, but *not* voice and music files. For scripted objects such as custom activators, I'll add a dummy unscripted version that has the model attached but no script, just so the models get pulled into the BSA for the ESM file. The ESP will contain all quests except the one mentioned above, all dialog, all interior and exterior cell edits, and almost all of my custom scripts. In short, the ESM should mostly define base objects, and the ESP should have references to those base objects. That last bit is the problem. Here is what I've found so far with the tooling I have, which includes Wrye Bash, Construction Set Extended (very latest version), TES4Edit, TES4Gecko, and TES4Files, among others: TES4Gecko does a perfect job of splitting the mod, but it's way too aggressive in what goes into the ESM. With Gecko, all new records go into the ESM because they can safely load early, and override records stay in the ESP so they can load after the things they override. That is sensible enough for some situations, but not what I want to do here because all those voice files end up in the ESM. I have tried copying my ESP to a different name, using Wrye Bash to "esmify" one of them, then using either TES4Edit or CSE to delete or mark unmodified the records in each file that I want to use from the other. This basically results in vast numbers of missing records. I tried making the ESP as a clone of the ESM such that there are intentionally (and temporarily) huge numbers of ITM (identical to master) records in the ESP, the idea being then to delete out of the ESM those that should be in the ESP and vice-versa. The problem here is that when I do this, even though I created the ESM by physically copying the ESP file and esmifying it in place (that is, never opened in the CSE), neither Wrye Bash nor TES4Edit considers the duplication to be ITM records! This completely surprised me. I have tested with changing just a few objects in the ESP manually (in TES4Edit or the CSE) so that the references point to mod index 00 (implying "load this from whichever master has it defined"), and this works -- but with thousands of base objects, it doesn't scale to my situation. Using TES4Gecko's display-and-copy functionality doesn't work, either, because the export gets new formIDs for the base objects. Creating an empty (or nearly so) ESM in the CSE, then making it a master of the ESP, then using TES4Gecko's "merge to master" function doesn't help, because it uses the same decision logic as the "split plugin" feature and puts everything into the ESM that it possibly can. Looking at the references in the ESP after doing any of the above, it appears what is happening is that the ESP's references are hardwired to itself rather than pointing back to the base object that now exists in an ESM. I think Coda (the programming language embedded in CSE) could do what I want, but try as I might I can't find any documentation for Coda's callable functions. There is documentation for the language syntax but nothing I can find for available functions to do things like change the base object ID of all references of a specific type. I'm sure someone has done this before, but I spent almost an entire day trying to figure out how, and I'm stumped. I don't need (or want) the tooling to pick which objects go where -- that's got to be a manual decision. All I need is something that updates the references in the ESP correctly and lets me do a group of manually-identified base objects in a batch. Ideally, what I want is a tool where I can start with an almost-empty ESM, master it over the ESP, then use a feature like TES4Gecko's "merge to master" but *only on base objects I select* in the UI. Second choice would be more extensive documentation on Coda so I can create my own custom logic to do exactly what I need. I am an IT pro professionally, so writing code doesn't scare me -- but I need API docs and not just syntax docs. I'm sure someone has solved this before. If that person is you, please help a guy out here! As an incentive for replies, I will offer that whoever provides the solution that ultimately works for me, can be listed in the mod's credits as a technical contributor. :-) Many thanks for reading this long post, and for any advice you can offer. --Syscrusher
  3. Rewrite: original post deleted. Hard to ask question when I am unfamiliar with the territory. I need to know about the pros and cons of making [.ESM] or master files. I want to do tedious 'warehouse' tasks that involve keywords, forms, lists, etc. This means making a resource mod that is available for drag and drop for ALL mods I create. I don't want to edit the resources one by one and choose a model. I just want to drag & drop and it is already filled out ready to use. So how do I do this? Am I MERGING two [.ESP] files into a larger [.ESP] file? Or Am I making a master warehouse file that all mods rely on and I have to tell the users to download two files, both the .esm and the .esp file?
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