Savegame preventing texture mod from working ?

[ElRizzo]

Hi,

 

I recently added the mod "Bijin Warmaidens" to my current character's modlist and noticed that it worked as intended for all npcs the mod affects except for 3 of them, Lydia, Aela and Annekke, which were incidentally the 3 followers I have in my current party (I use AFT). The mod is dead last in my load- as well as my priority order, so it wins any conflicts, which there are none as far as Mod Organizer tells me, except for the overwritten vanilla files of course.

 

After some experimenting with different versions of the mod and even disabling some of my other mods for testing purposes I created a vanilla profile in MO and only activated the Warmaidens mod and the unofficial patches and started a new game and behold, ALL followers looked as intended, which was to be expected. But when I loaded my current savegame with this new vanilla profile, the three aforementioned followers weren't looking as intended anymore while the others looked as expected, showing that the mod was working just fine except for those 3 again.

 

My conclusion from all this is that somehow my current savegame must prevent this mod from applying correctly to these 3 followers and I have no idea if that is even possible and if so, how I can fix it. So I would really appreciate it if someone with more knowledge could help out with this :)

If any additional information is required, I am more than happy to provide it to you.

[Aintiarna]

The appearance of NPCs is set when you first meet them/enter the cell in which they exist. If you install a mod like Bijin Warmaidens, you need to do so before you meet them. e.g. for Lydia, it must be before you meet her for the first time in Dragonsreach. It's not like a texture replacer where it takes effect immediately. That's why it works fine with your newly created character. If you don't load from before you meet them, at best you may get odd face/body mismatches because the mod conflicts with the details of the npc that are stored in your savefile.

[ElRizzo]

But I met Delphine, Iona, Uthgerd and a lot of the other npcs that are affected by this mod long before I installed this mod and every one of them looks exactly like the screenshots of the mod, so that can't be the reason or otherwise all of them would have this problem, right ?. And funny enough, I have one really old savegame where Aela looks as intended when I load it with Bijin Warmaidens activated (which it wasn't at the time of the save) and Aela is in my party in that savegame, so I clearly have already met her and it works just fine.

 

Besides, other Mods that alter the appereance of characters/npcs like Women of Skyrim worked just fine when I installed them mid-play, so what should be different about Warmaidens ? (I'm not trying to contradict you, but this is the first time ever I read that texture mods work only before the object/npc are encountered and every other texture mod works just fine regardless of when you install it so if there is something different about Warmaidens, please elaborate so I can understand)

Edited September 1, 2015 by ElRizzo

[Aintiarna]

Interesting. I don't know the answer for certain. npc faces do not use the same data as other textures. They use facegen data which is kind of special and bug prone. Ask anyone who has created a follower mod for Skyrim and they can tell you all about bugs in facegen data. Bijin warmaidens comes in two flavours, loose files and bsa, both of which parcel the facegen data up correctly to overwrite the base game's facegen data. Skyrim _should_ use the new data instead of the base game information, but when you've already got information about an npc in your save file it can get confused.

 

I've made quite a few follower mods, and I always test them using a save file from before I've met the follower because of the number of bugs (and they are legion) you can introduce by making changes to an npc that already exists in a save game.

 

I can think of no other explanation I'm afraid. Sorry.

[ElRizzo]

Ok thanks for the explanation :smile: that clarified it for me. I just found it strange since I have never read in a mod description to install before meeting the npc that gets modified, so I wasn't aware that this might occur and I guess I was lucky that I never experienced these bugs before ^^. Could disabling the npc via the editor then loading the savegame and creating a fresh save, then enabling the character again solve this ? Don't know if this can even be done and if it would somehow "refresh" the facegen date of that npc or not.

 

Or do you know of any savegame editor like TESV ESS Files Editor that can reset or edit the facegen data of npcs ? (The description of this tool is not that great so I have no idea if this could be useful)

Edited September 1, 2015 by ElRizzo

[Aintiarna]

Don't know what effect disabling the npc would have on such things without testing it and I've never used that tool to comment on it. I've wasted so much time and been hampered by so many bugs in Skyrim, Fallout 3, FNV, the Creation Kit, the GECK, etc. over the years that I'm pretty much a scorched earth, clean save, fresh load sort of a person. Only way to be sure. :wink:

[ElRizzo]

Ok :/ but that is not a viable option at this point for me, as this character has 150+ hours on it and I won't start from scratch just to get part of one mod working ^^. Maybe someone else has an idea how to fix this without starting a new game ?

 

Update: I solved it and this might even be interesting to you tirnoney and others, as it lets you delete individual facegen data in your savegame so you never run the risk of face mods not working ever again :smile:

 

By mere accident I stumbled upon a post that had the answer to my problem in the Save game script cleaner thread, which is also the tool required to fix this problem. The procedure is pretty simpel and is described in detail here. I deleted the 3 necessary entries and tadaaa, all npcs now look exactly like they are supposed to :smile:

Edited September 8, 2015 by ElRizzo