What a POS

[DocMoebius]

Loosing days of work?!

 

How could this even be done?

You would have to have your ESP file open for a few days without saving, and the CK crashes and then you lost days of work.

 

But that doesn't seem plausible to me ...

When I work in really crowded urban areas I unfortunately sometimes need to have my cells set to load to 5, so that I can use the heightmap tool - otherwise the tool only works for the cell you're positioned in and doesn't work properly on the cell edges, so you need to rotate a lot which makes it even slower. What happens then is that the CK becomes extremely slow and unresponsive, even with my new rig(Ryzen 7 3700X, 32GB, RX 5700 XT, M.2 SSD). For instance, If you move/paste an object into an unloaded area(everything is just blank wilderness) and then quickly move ahead so that said area is unloaded again(not visible in the CK anymore), those objects might become what I refer to as "ghost objects" which aren't visible in the CK anymore but appear in game out of place and out of nowhere and which obviously causes warnings etc. Then there are some glitches and crashes that appear sometimes but which are hard to reproduce. Oh and by the way, I create a backup of my esp every 30-60min. But if I add all the lost time from the last few month up, it's easily a few lost days.

Edited May 1, 2020 by DocMoebius

[MissingMeshTV]

Maybe I'm just lucky (or maybe I'm going to jinx myself by saying this), but all my various CK installs have been stable and issue free. The only time it seems to crash is when I to too many Cntrl-Z commands too quickly.

 

In theory, if you save your work at regular intervals you can prevent losing too much work if there is a crash. The CK automagically makes a backup .esp every time you save. Look in the Backup folder of the game folder and there should be the last 10 saves of every mod you've made save for with a .bak extension. This has saved my bacon more than once with only minimal loss. We're talking minutes of lost work, not hours.

 

As with every other piece of software I use, I live by the "Save early, save often" mantra, and I don't rely on those CK generated backups as my only line of defense. After I've done any significant amount of work, I'll save and quit the CK then copy my .esp to a backup folder on a different drive. I'll sequentially number each backup so I can revert to any state of a project at any time if needed. That is of course, until that drive with my backups and the archive drive that backs up the backups die simultaneously. OK, Really should stop jinxing myself.

 

Is the CK perfect? Not by a long shot. Is it a free tool provided by the game publisher? Yes. Are there alternatives that can do what it does? Not for world or interior building and generating optimization data. I'll take the warts given the price I paid to purchase it.

[Zorkaz]

 

... that it is on purpose so that we'd have to use Creation Club

 

Btw. isn't a part of the CB-content made by modders?

[BlazeStryker]

Hangups happen and individual files can be sucky to start with, folks. As it happens I just recently got one of those 4 quadrillion and change bytes expansion drives (you know, the ones sold as 4 Terabytes? Hate to break it to the guys in marketing but the old assumption that a thousand bytes is close enough to a kilobyte just falls apart past the Megabyte stage, let alone Terabytes!)

 

ANYWHO, I decided to transfer every frigging thing in my hodgepodge of thumbnail and external hard drives into this slim behemoth and it's going swimmingly except for SpacesuitF.nif which chokes it every time. Something about that particular nif file, almost certainly the one in Nuka-World, is so broken it won't even transfer. Just work out which files are the garbage in and work around it is all I'm suggesting.

[Rasikko]

The concept of the CC was not even in existence when neither versions of the CK was created. It was already stated by one of the devs back then that we are using the exact same tool as they did, and therefore we experience the same shortcomings with it as they did. Why these were not ironed out by the very people who were using it to make the game is anyone's guess.

Edited May 4, 2020 by Rasikko

[NikaCola]

Honestly I always suggest people use Dropbox to backup their ESPs every time you save. This creates a version history which you can easily roll back to in the case of any weirdness happening.

 

Doing this has saved my butt more times than I can possibly count. Seriously, use it (or some similar service) and make life easy on yourself!

[kobus2010]

I actually did lose days of work. Hint: regression test often! I was making daily (sometimes twice a day) backups. The unit test worked so I kept moving on to next task. But when I finally decided to go over everything I had broken the quest. I tried to debug/research where the issue was but I was getting no where and making things worse as I tried to fix. Just went back to a version before I broke everything. So was it my fault? Yes. Just 1 more guideline I need to follow .... retest everything and retest often.