David Brasher

I am a CK guy myself. If I were doing this task, I would use the CK to get the best possible intel on all the Elven armor objects. This might lead me into NifSkope where I would see the exact names and file paths of the textures I wanted to replace. And then if I built a texture replacer mod and it did not work, I would get ticked off and go into the CK and replace all the Elven armor items with my custom items that used my custom meshes and textures. (Or else I might repoint the vanilla armor items to different meshes using the CK.) It seems like one of these approaches couldn't fail to get the job done. You do not need to replace the full set of armor. You can pick and choose which pieces to replace.

@ beeblebub You are beating a dead horse dude. Didn't you read further on down the thread where the issue was resolved? The problem was NOT my 30 mods but the .bsa file which I have now unpacked. My 30 mods play just fine now. The same 30 mods I had when I installed Dawnguard.

Here is the official tutorial series: Level Design Tutorial Series.

It seems to me that there is nothing wrong with this sort of repost. When you are done with your open beta, you can either change that download point into a page for your public release version, or you could pull that mod down and upload your new version on a permanent page. I think reposting is only bad if you upload someone else's work without permission, or if you spam the Nexus and upload your mod multiple times and waste server memory and add unnecessary entries to the list of mods available for download. Another bad repost would be if your mod was against the rules or illegal and they made you pull it down, but then you snuck it back up. But I imagine you are not talking about this sort of reposts.

I have this same problem and it occurred right around the time of the Skyrim 1.7 update and the Dawnguard installation. I suspected those things. It sort of looked like Bethesda destroyed modding and nobody would be able to build or edit mods with scripts anymore. So it would be nice if this is not the case and it is just my computer and there is a way to fix it.

@ hector530 Verifying disc cache would not do that. It would see that the integrity of my .bsa was just fine and no files were missing or corrupted. It would tell me everything is cool and nothing would get downloaded. All the files seem to be there, because the game started working when I unpacked the files I already had into the loose files format. It sounds pretty stupid I know. But the game was not working, and now it is.

I am so happy! After wrestling for more than an hour with quests that won't start, missing meshes, missing textures, and inability to leave town due to a border removal mod conflict, I finally I Dawnguard playable! This is the hardest I have ever had to work with the software to get a Bethesda product running. It sounds bizarre, but the main thing I had to do to fix the problem was unpack my Dawnguard.bsa file and install it as loose files.

More than an hour later I am back on track. Here is the solution to my particular problem: use the 30 mods I was using when I first saw the problem. Use BSAOpt to unpack the entire .bsa and install it as loose files. Leave the overridden .bsa in position. (You would think the .bsa could be removed at this point, but my game is working now and I don't want to touch anything and break it.) I ran clear through my mods going from vanilla Skyrim all the way up to my full list of 30 mods and the missing sounds and meshes and textures never came back until I unpacked the .bsa with BSAOpt. (I fear that many casual gamers who are not mod-builders wouldn't think to do that or know how to carry out the procedure.)

I don't use any mesh and texture replacers. I don't see how anything I have installed could cause missing meshes and textures and sounds with the official DLC. I run a list of about 30 mods, many of them just patches for the other mods I run. When I installed Shivering Isles it worked great. Almost nothing ever conflicted with it. When I installed Knights of the Nine, there were only like two or three small mod conflicts I ever found, and they were just annoying, not game-breaking. I may have had as many as 80 mods running around the time I used those DLC. I am doubtful that all the other people who bought Dawnguard removed every single one of their mods before playing it.

My experience has simply got to be worse than average. First I couldn't get the quest to start at all. I went all over the place talking to guards and that did not work. Then after a ridiculous long time, I finally find Durok, but he is just a floating head. He has no voiced dialog and his lips don't move. So I go to see the Hall of the Vigilant and it is invisible. I don't play mods that are this bad. I stop playing and send in an error report to the modder. But this here is a DLC made by professionals and I paid money for it. What is up with that?

The followers in this mod are fully voice-acted using the vanilla Skyrim dialog: Followers Unlimited.

If you are creating a new mod with a follower in it, keep in mind that one .esp cannot normally see what is inside another .esp. So if your follower is in one .esp, the hair is in another, and the race is in another, you are going to end up with a follower with no hair and no race and your game is liable to crash. If you are going to use resources from other mods, you will have to follow special procedures. If the resources are in .esm files, what you are trying to do will work, because the .esm will automatically get connected and become a master. But if you want to use content from an .esp, then you are going to have to use Wrye Bash to esmify the .esp at the proper time while you are modding, and then .espify it again before play-testing. Thereafter, you must esmify again every time that you edit the mod. You must espify again every time you play. If you fail to do these things and you save your mod at the wrong time, you will lose your connection to the master and will lose all your content from the master and your mod will be junk fit only to be deleted. Save your game at the wrong time, and it will be junk, fit only to be deleted. So because of the extra work and danger, in some cases it is better to merge portions of the mods so that all the resources the follower needs are in the same mod as the follower. Races can only accommodate the particular hairs from their list. If your hair is not on the list, you will need to edit the race. Crashes are often a result of missing meshes, textures, and .kf files from custom content you add.

Thank you very much! It worked! SkyrimEditor.ini: [Archive] bInvalidateOlderFiles=1 SArchiveList=Skyrim - Textures.bsa, Skyrim - Meshes.bsa, Skyrim - Animations.bsa, Skyrim - Voices.bsa, Skyrim - Interface.bsa, Skyrim - Misc.bsa, Skyrim - Sounds.bsa, Skyrim - VoicesExtra.bsa, Skyrim - Shaders.bsa, Update.bsa SInvalidationFile=ArchiveInvalidation.txt iRetainFilenameOffsetTable=1 iRetainFilenameStringTable=1 iRetainDirectoryStringTable=1 bCheckRuntimeCollisions=0 bUseArchives=1 SResourceArchiveList=Skyrim - Textures.bsa, Skyrim - Meshes.bsa, Skyrim - Animations.bsa, Skyrim - Voices.bsa, Skyrim - Interface.bsa, Skyrim - Misc.bsa, Skyrim - Sounds.bsa, Skyrim - VoicesExtra.bsa SResourceArchiveList2=Skyrim - Shaders.bsa, Update.bsa, Dawnguard.bsa

I would just expect that Dawnguard would start after it was installed, but that is not happening for me. So I looked several places on the Internet and here is the widely differing advice I found in various walkthroughs: (1) Talk to a guard in a large town. (I talk to them over and over. I go to different towns. I talk to various guards. They have nothing new to say. (2) Be level 10. (I am level 45 or thereabouts.) (3) Get attacked by vampires and then talk to Durak. (No vampires are attacking me and I have not seen Durak.) (4) Just go to your quest entries and select the "Dawnguard" quest. (I don't have one like that on my list.) Implied ways to get involved in the expansion: (5) There is supposed to be a cave South-east of Riften. I saw it on a really vague map. (I haven't found the cave yet I haven't found a website yet that says what its name is.) (6) I have heard that the Hall of the Vigilant gets attacked by vampires and trashed. (I go there and everything is just fine.) Is something wrong with my game, or do I just not have proper information on how to start playing the expansion?

Is there some special trick to opening Dawnguard in the CK? It registers as a corrupted file in Wrye Bash just like Update.esm does. Every single time I try to open Dawnguard in the CK, I get a string of error messages and then the CK crashes. Has anyone else been able to open Dawnguard?

So if missing textures make things look purple, then what is happening when things look white, or more often, when they are invisible?

I will not be able to get my hands on Dawnguard until later tonight or tomorrow, so I have not been able to do any real testing or diagnostics yet, but here is what I can tell you: Skyrim Scaling Stopper is reported to not work. My guess is that the only real problem is in the optional file called Skyrim Scaling Stopper - Misc Edits which removes borders. There was another report on this thread which reported that a different border removal mod has the same symptoms -- things like not being able to leave a city, or having the cart scene at the beginning of the game be totally messed-up. So people could continue to use the main file of Skyrim Scaling Stopper at this time, and soon the problem will be examined and new versions of the mod will be released, including one for the main file which will remove the level scaling from Dawnguard. Vigilant of Stendarr Quests is of course broken by Dawnguard, but a couple of the members of the broken and dispersed modding team that worked on that project are making plans to do the compatibility work for that mod to make it so that it will work for users of Dawnguard.

Cool! Maybe I have been lucky so far with Skyrim. Maybe I have just had a ton of missing textures that are invisible but no missing meshes. I have seen the big red symbol in the CK many times. The CK can't read anything that is in a custom .bsa, and modders are told to put things in .bsas, so in the CK there are usually lots of exclamation points.

This thread mostly seems pretty foreign to me. I learned a different way in Oblivion and continue to use it in Skyrim. To create a mastered patch where one .esp uses another .esp as a master: (1) Use the esmify function in Wrye Bash to esmify the file with the assets that is to be the master. (2) Load up your mod and the .esp master in the CK at the same time with your file as the active file. (3) Make edits to the master, or use content from the master. (4) Save the file. (5) Use the espify function in Wrye Bash espify that which you esmified in step 1. (You must do this or Skyrim will be all messed up when you play. Like maybe the ground won't be there. Should you save while the game is messed up, that savegame will be totally ruined and fit only to be deleted.) (6) Play-test. (7) Go back to step 1 to make more edits or fix bugs. Other procedures: To add a master: Load an .esm or an esmified .esp in the CK at the same time as your mod. Save. To remove a master: Highlight the unwanted master in the CK Data Window (After all connections are removed and you are sure you don't need this master anymore.) Press CTRL + Delete. Ignore the meaningless error message you will get. That is pretty wild if your procedure does work. I would guess that it would not work in Oblivion. You would get form bashing errors. Skyrim must handle the baseID numbers differently and allow and merge duplicates with the slave file overriding the master by default.

Certain kinds of objects don't work for having quest flags attached to them. In that case, you may need to attach the quest flag to something else nearby. For example, in one mod, I was unable to figure out how to make my quest marker work if it was attached to a chicken. So I tried attaching it to an X-marker. That would not work either. So finally I figured out that it would work if I attached it to a trigger zone. (I ended up making a custom trigger zone that didn't trigger anything.) I assume you have properly attached a particular alias to the quest stage in question?

Maybe you have a friend or relative who owns Skyrim, and they would let you play with the CK on their computer for a few hours before you decide whether or not you want to buy the game.

Your experience is typical. The system is so touchy that only an expert (and I am not an expert) can make it work on the first or second try. One problem people face is savegame memory throwing off play-testing results. It is possible for everything to be set up right, but it looks broken because your play-tester character started playing the quest when it was only half-way built. You may need to get a clean save and start testing the mod from the beginning, or use a character who has not played any of the quest yet. You might need to describe what is happening in more detail. Are you saying that your quest target flags don't show up? Are you saying that the references the quest flags point to, such as NPCs or treasure chests, are not there when you arrive? Are you saying that your radiant quest misfires and breaks halfway through?

There is an odd quirk to Skyrim that I don't think Oblivion had. (Not totally sure. I almost always used loose files in Oblivion.) You must have an .esp or .esm file with the same name as your .bsa file, and it must be activated or no files can access the meshes and textures inside the .bsa. Make sure your .bsa file is named exactly the same as one of your active mods. For example: hothtrooper44_ArmorCompilation.esp hothtrooper44_ArmorCompilation.bsa Be sure that in the .bsa, you preserve the texture paths exactly as used in the mod. BSAOpt is the recommended tool for building Skyrim .bsa files. It seems possible that there could be problems when using Fallout or Oblivion software.

In Oblivion it seems like I was always seeing missing meshes everywhere. Those big yellow diamonds with black exclamation marks. I kind of miss seeing them. I don't know if Skyrim supports this, because missing meshes seem to be invisible, but would there be a way to make the Skyrim missing meshes look like the Oblivion ones?

You may as well wait for Dawnguard. Building a crossbow is such a tremendously difficult task, that it was seldom done for Oblivion although people asked for it hundreds of times. The handful of modders in the world with the skills to build such a thing will want to spend their time on something that isn't about to become obsolete. Dawnguard will likely be out within a month, and then you can have a professionally built crossbow.