rainrtw
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Posts posted by rainrtw
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It is handy to have both actually.
The old Nvidia plugins still add a basic, if serviceable normal map filter. So long as you use Average rgb, flip X and Y axis, and then invert the results you should have something that works with FO4 provided you save it with the Intel plugin in normal map mode. Also when patching together layers into a single normal, can duplicate the group, merge it, then use the Nvidia Normal map filter on Normalize only setting, to make sure no values are out of range from the overlay/multiply type process
Although for anything more complicated then adding basic normal map details, you may want to make proper extracted normal maps from high low res versions of the model.
Also when you open textures with alpha channels, you will not find the alpha data on the right channel, but cut right out of the texture, which is annoying to say the least. As for me, being an avid fan of Photoshop through the ages, I have an older version of PS set up with ONLY the Nvidia plugin to open Diffuse maps with alpha so I can read them more easily, then the main current version set up with BOTH plugins so that I can still read the spec/normal maps right, save with the New compression formats, and use the normal map filter for minor additions overlayed into the normal maps I make.
As for which Compression to use, lets see if I recall this correctly lol:
For DIFFUSE maps with NO alpha, Saving with whatever suits you seems to work. The game seems able to process most of these well enough.
Linear seems to be the preference of the engine, but it doesn't seem to lose quality on sRGB.
4bpp Linear, Lowest file size, substantial color artifacting in the output. Not useful for certain single tone textures as it makes for very bad gradients sometimes. However when it says most compatible it means it. If you want your textures rendered on meshes when viewed in Nifscope for example, then you mus use this, or no compression 32bpp.
4bpp sRGB, about the same as above, except not renderable in Nifscope
8bpp Dtx11 options, Fine gives much better results then fast, obviously, and both give better results then 4bpp linear, but these are all double the file size as indicated by 8 bits per pixel, instead of 4.
Here with Non alpha textures it doesn't seem to matter which you pick between sRGB or Linear, although I believe on very close inspection 8bpp Fine sRGB has the best results, although the difference between it and linear may only be noticed under magnification in PS
For DIFFUSE maps WITH alpha, Similar to above, but with less options. I haven't done much testing with specific settings Vs partial transparency, but 8bpp Linear seems like a good setting here.
4bpp is useful too as then your textures render in Nifscope... however you still get color artifacting blotches, And you do not even get a file size reduction this time, so I just avoid this. I can deal with no Nifscope preview, to have better looks in game.
For Specular Maps, Saving with 4bpp Linear COLOR only is your ticket.
This is because only 2 channels are used so it can save in such a lossy format without actually losing anything.
If you want you speculars to look in any way decent in game always save them in LINEAR compression. The game renders the sRGB spec's as blocky chunky garbage.
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I think my first computer game was Castle II... no not the one you see on a google search. I loved that one too but that came much later. You see my uncle was a programmer back in the early days of that profession. As with any business they had a bunch of stuff they made for themselves that never got picked up by the company, or never made it to market. One of them as a text and ASCII art type dungeon crawl game they called Castle II.
He did pretty well money wise back then and would occasionally drop a new computer on us as a gift. I was a kid then so I just didn't care about the name of the machine, or what OS they ran I just cared if it had neat games. I think one of them was an Osborn but past that I never kept track of brand, or even if they were an actual product or a prototype. I just remember most were of the type, Insert OS on one giant floppy disk, and the game/program on a second.
In glorious 2 color green on green graphics you would move from room to room exploring a, mostly abandoned Castle, trying hard not to disturb its few remaining and rather hostile monstrous residents. Ah good times, sadly I don't think that one ever made it out of the office he worked in. Shame too as it would be a great nostalgia trip to play that again, though it would no doubt take some ancient system emulation.
I think the next game I remember playing a lot was Leisure Suit Larry, great game for a kid eh? Granted in computer class we had O'Dell lake and Oregon Trail, but we never owned those at home. Pretty sure my uncle was to blame for out computers having games like Leisure Suit Larry and Leather Goddesses of Phobos on them, but oh my god I found them funny back then.
Anyway enough stupid ranting. I did play some official games, but my favorites, and firsts were prototypes never released.
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Hmmm well you have a good point there as that would be a nice workaround for tokens and such added as part of that mod.
And it would even work for scripts added to pre-existing objects as long as a new game is started since OnContainerChanged seems to fire when npcs first load up in game. Still if a pre-existing game was loaded with a mod that adds a script to a normal object, any instances of that object would still fail to fire a useful identifying event, since they have already changed container, or have been equipped in that saved game.
In my specific case I am now wondering if a pre-existing item in a pre-existing save game could be made to acquire info about its container. The OnInit block would still fire on items already loaded in game, since even if the item already exist and has been equipped and loaded once, the newly added script has not.
As always I am still looking for a way to get race specific armor to work in game with the minimum number of conflicts.
Altering armor forms to include armor addons for the new race conflicts with any armor tweak mod, as well then new races will have no visible effect from any mod added content.
Marking the race to use armor models of a default race means it now Only counts as the default race for the purpose of armor addons, thus they will equip items exactly as the base race would. So in effect no race specific armor is acquired.
I had been experimenting with changing torso armors to have no armor addons specified by default, and instead acquire the visible counterparts via a script that adds a stat-less version of the armor with proper race specific models specified. Granted in this method many torso armor forms must be tagged in the esp and thus can conflict with armor tweak mods, and compatibility patches would still be needed for the most popular tweak mods.
This method seems to work the best as now everyone now loads the base non visible armor for stats, and also a non-playable stat-less version for looks. The trouble here is that if an existing game is loaded with this active, all npcs that have already been loaded in game become naked or bodiless, due to this method relying on OnEquipped events. These fire once for each item an npc equips the first time they are loaded.
I am not sure if there is a way around this problem at the moment. I can't figure out how to get them to aquire data about their container in a case where they are pre-existing objects in the world and the OnInit event seemed to be the closest thing.
Either way, I appreciate the input and as always have fun modding.
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In previous games we could use GetContainer to figure out whose inventory a given object was in, and use the ref it returns to affect that container.
http://geck.bethsoft.com/index.php/GetContainer
This was useful for dropping a token item into an npc inventory that could do all sorts of things for all sorts of purposes, but only if that token item could tell who was holding it. This was used for all sorts of things from animation triggers to swapping out old version of gear for newer ones.
In my case I would like a given armor to check who is holding it in the OnInit event and give them some extra items associated with it. Granted I could manually add those things to each npc wearing that armor in the CK but that is cumbersome and not very dynamic in the sense that all of those npc's have to be and decided in advance and it can't really adjust to situations via logical arguments. If I could find out who is carrying the item in the OnInit block then it could employ some logic in who got the extra items based on a number of conditions.
Later in future events like OnEquipped we get the special variable akActor to work with and finally identify who it is that is handling this object. With OnContainerChanged events we can make it so that when a new game starts we could perhaps do something TO that item specifically, but we still can't do anything that involves the actor holding it, like remove the item or add others based on logic in the script.
So my question is simple. Is there any sort of Papyrus equivalent to the GetContainer we have lost?
If not then I personally hope this is one of the first things added via SKSE, because currently I don't see any way to emulate this function. GetActorOwner only returns an ActorBase which we obviously can't add or remove items from, and that is the closest thing I've found so far.
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Thanks for the tip TK, and well you are right about that. It seems to no longer be acknowledging any facemod or tintmask. I tested with some rather extreme examples so it would be quite obvious if it was using them and it no longer will use either while it is using custom Head Parts for the races head. The truly odd thing, aside from it making no sense, is that those facemods and tintmasks seem to be paired one for one to the npc's directly. If you have an npc with the ID of 0002bf9f (Hadvar) then their is a tint mask 0002bf9f.dds and a face mod 0002bf9f_0.dds
So then why would changes to anything other then the NPC directly have any effect on this? All the NPC_ forms are untouched.
The tintmasks and facemods don't appear to be linked to by anything in the esm. It seems like they are just found and used based on Form ID/Filename association. If I had dupped the npc's forms directly into a new mod then it would makes sense that I may have to duplicate those files into corresponding (ModName.esp) folders so it can find them, but again those are unaffected.
*sigh* I just hope more of this silliness makes sense in time. For now I find more questions then answers while tearing apart the esm file.
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If you're still interested then I've got something up to do this right now.
http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=5968
In the comments for it I've pretty much described everything done there but feel free to tear it apart in TESVsnip to see for your self.
The biggest problem that remains is that npc's will not use unique Face textures unless a bunch of complexion forms are dupped with unique IDs and such, then linked to from the Race forms. The downside here is that you then have to tag all of the race form, thus you have to figure out how to get the stupid game to use strings... which it stubbornly refuses to do for the race names. So in the end you can get fully unique assets being used for head, body, hand, and feet for all races, but all of the race names get turned into garbled junk. Also for some unexplained reason the faces get about 20% darker.... no clue what that is about yet. I haven't found any useful info on how to properly work with adding new strings, so I've just been using TESVsnip's string editor for now.
Still all of that aside if you just want to use unique body textures then look at the old version. That works just fine for everything aside from unique npc faces. Again feel free to tear apart that esp and figure out anything you can from it... I am on the verge of ditching this game anyway.
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Okay so I've wandered around google trying to figure out what exactly the Shadow Frustum shader flag is, what it does, and when it should be used in regards to this game and NV. What I learned from hours and hours of doing this is practically nothing at all, so I am asking here. I do not recall ever seeing a really good definition on this subject, but if I've missed something obvious then a link to anything which answers these questions would be welcome as well.
As a general rule I've always just looked for a default item similar to what I've made and copied its flags, but I would really like to understand this one a little better. My in game testing has revealed little to nothing on this as well. I can't notice a difference with or without this flag set, except I think skin shaders require it.
1) What is the Shadow Frustum as it pertains to modding FO3 and NV?
2) What does it do specifically, in turns of actual effects the player might see/notice?
3) Does it effect performance? If so by how much?
4) When specifically should it be used in a mesh? Should it only be used on things that define the character's outline/shadow they cast, only on accessories, never, always, etc?
Any and all answers to these would be greatly appreciated, not just by myself either as I've seen plenty of people ask about this on various forums.
Thanks in advance to anyone who knows more about this.
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This is probably a simple question that I am sure will mark me as a newb to FO3 dialog modding, but here it is all the same: How do you actually add a new dialog topic?
http://geck.bethsoft.com/index.php/FAQ States: After performing a right click on a list of topics and choosing the "Add Topic" option, the Select Topic window will open. Now, right click in the list that appears, choose New and enter unique Editor ID of your new topic.
. . . . Which does absolutely nothing for me. Right clicking in the responses area of a topic allows me to add responses, but right clicking in the topics category to the left of that does absolutely nothing, no context menu or anything. So as it stands the only thing I can do at all is add responses to existing topics. I know its possible to add new ones as I see them in many mods, though how this seemingly simple operation is carried out is mystically beyond me right now.
So I have a simple question to the community, am I missing something simple or is my version of GECK somehow corrupt / messing up?
Thanks in advance to anyone who bothers to read this!
Ha never mind I found it. Oddly enough most referances I found said just right click in the topics area of the dialog window... which again does nothing. What you have to do is right click in the dialog window of a QUEST and then you can add new stuffs there. . . seems like that would be a handy thing to note on the wiki :P
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Well in theory the technically correct way to start an idle is "PlayIdle BLAH" and then use "PlayIdle BLAH" again to stop it... though idles and very finicky beasts and I do not remember if the "right way" to stop them has any actual effect at all.
I can totally sympathize with wanting to match Drayk_cannon's greatness but I myself fell short. I don't know why. I studied everything I could about the Groovatron mod and every single field in every datablock of the animations included but for some reason they still did things with that mod I couldn't replicate. Not sure if I am just stupid or if I missed something simple along the way. For myself I am pretty sure I had to use a blank reset idle like I said above to stop an idle on myself, while I think just using the PlayIdle again would interupt one on an npc... or maybe it was reversed.... either way my main working directory for all those projects was always called "****ing with mtidle" since all I managed to do was generate more questions then answers and usually ended up corrupting the main idles. Then again I was exporting my idles from blender like over a year ago which means a different version of the nif export scripts I suppose. Maybe its easier now, or at least one can hope.
Hmmm I guess the bad news in all this jumble of words is I had compared my animations very thoroughly in nifscope to ones used in other mods and couldn't find a substantial difference. I think the amazing thing with groovatron was How it called on and activated the idles. Supposedly (and again I haven't been making little animations for a year now) the only way to use a special idle on the player any time you want, is to first put the player in ToggleFLyCam mode or so I'd been told, but again groovatron slaps a scripted spell on you that calls up the animation and somehow it works.
As for myself I am generally satisfied just to stare in slack-jawed amazement at the massive coolness that is groovatron... and wish I could pull off reliably calling up and stopping idles any time I want.
Heh and as for the siggy, been my moto for years and years now, both on the net and off.
Oh yeah and hell if I can remember quite what it was but I did manage to screw up most idles I tampered with at first, so that they played indefinitely and couldn't be interupted... crap if I remember how i fixed that I'll get back to yah but those directories were part of what got eaten when my last old IDE drive bit the dust so I can't check my old stuffs.
I think it was something like, as usual, I was following a guide and the method the guide described turned out a forever looping animation even when I set it to clamp_cycle or whatever. I think in the end I had to do something quite illogical to make it work. I'd experiment with it again now (since I lover getting my stupid poses working in game) but I am busy making some other crap right now.
Best of luck to ya
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There are probably much better people to answer the question, and hopefully they'll post here, but baring that I'll post what little I remember on the subject.
I'll be honest it's been something like a year since I was messing with idles myself, but as I recall the only way I could find to stop an idle was to play another special idle that is just a couple frames long and references all the bones with a high priority. Basically (again if I remember correctly) a special idle overrides any other idle at least for the bones it references, so make a one or two frame animation off the starting pose from mtidle with a locrot key for all bones at 100 priority. I think that should stop all other animations currently active... I think.
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First of all, just so you know this is a much more complicated thing then it may seem. You can move the various animated parts around all you want in nifscope, but the animations are stored in the .egm and .tri file associated with the head. When a part of the animation starts up it yanks those vertices it calls on right back up to the spot the animation says they should start at. Hence scaling and such in nifscope would seem useless. What you end up having to do, if I am not misreading this due to fatigue, is to rebuild the .egm and .tri files after reshaping the head and associated parts.... and believe me that is not easy. I have done it for the custom heads I use on my character in game, but I have not seen any race mod up for FO3 (to my knowledge) that shows a true example of this. The modder Luchaire is the only person I saw to do it flawlessly in their Oblivion mods. I myself use a workaround to alter the head nif's and yet retain all the animations (since for some odd reason you can't copy the blink animations properly, unless of course you are Luchaire the god of modding).
Basically what I am saying is unless you are very familiar with the nif format, nifscope, the conformulator, and maybe blender I would advise against altering heads for now. It is a real pain to get it right.
Now on the flip side you may well be able to alter the Body mesh a bit to make it line up with the head, but that would require blender/max skills.
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Well there is also the simple issue of conflicts to consider. Lets take the body replacers you mentioned. Yes they could make it appear less confusing by making it one solid install, then you only activate the esp for the set of bodies you want... except that has a nasty drawback. To do that, the once simple body replacer is now incompatible with every single mod that has to 'tag' various races. In short you would not be able to use a body replacer with a hair or eye mod for example.
Remember, the mark of a skilled modder is not in how much they change to get an effect, but how little they have to do to get the desired effect.
Wastelandassassin is totally right on this one. It is really not all that hard to alter the game and make a cool mod work on Your game, the hard part is making and distributing it in a way that allows others to use and enjoy it without conflict. Modders go waaay out of their way to ensure others can enjoy their work as much as they themselves can.
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The only thing I would add to that, is to check back with the Niftools site from time to time to see if your nifscope is up to date. I've been told different versions have different behavior when you click that little icon to pick a texture in the BSShaderTextureSet data block. The current one doesn't seem to accidentally add E:\BLAH to the path but I think certain old versions did. Like samustus said, it is always a good plan to direct your eyes at the texture path and make sure is just \textures\BLAH but it is nice if the version of nifscope you have does that bit for you. You might also have to set your Texture Folders for this to work automatically though
Also in nifscope open the Render menu and head down to settings. Then in the Texture Folders -> Custom section add a folder path that points to your game's Data folder.
Then in the File menu head to Resource files. Then hit add, and navigate to your \Data\Fallout - Textures.bsa file and add it. This way any time you load meshes you are working on it automatically loads the textures on them even if they are in the main BSA.
This is pretty handy when you keep all you 'in progress' meshes and mod resources in a separate directory, in order to keep them organized and to avoid any accidental overwriting of things in your actual data folder while you work on your mod.
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Just be sure that if you do this and have the DLC Brokensteel you must also use CREBSOR mod here http://fallout3nexus...ile.php?id=6240
Since at some point in the plot a script calls on the player BY RACE and it won't recognize your custom race, thus preventing you from proceeding in the plot. The custom race endings patch listed above fixes that problem.
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I've had this exact same problem occasionally and coincidentally have about the same specs as lemmings13 does except with an Nvidia card.
Some of the time its happened from a corrupt plugin. Open FO3edit with all your plugins and check them all (tedious I know) to see if any of the fields on the right say something like "error data could not be verified" or something like that. I've had GECK mess up while saving a plugin in several times and then the mod has an entry with corrupt data like that.
That is just one thing that has seemed to cause this for me.
The second seems to be having a mesh in the data files with an infinite recursive link, in other words someone copied a data block from another mesh to a new one but did not rename it properly. So a part of the mesh calls on the root while the root calls on the part, or something like that. Anyway I am throwing that out there since it seems that assembling a compiled list of resources would be the last thing it does before giving you control over the menu, hence this crash might be from it finding a bogus mesh or pluging at the end of its load.
The last this happened to me however (just this morning in fact) I had no bogus plugins or meshes at all. It was pretty mysterious. Myself I always load the game through FOMM + FOSE and rarely ever open the actually launcher. The only time i open the launcher is to change graphics settings etc. Now when I have opened the launcher, changed something, then run the game it gives this bizare problem like you all describe, hanging just at the point where it should give you a menu.
Myself I MUST restart my computer after every single time I open the launcher... not a friggin clue why, but if I open the launcher to change any graphics settings I then must close it and restart my computer. Then I can run FOMM + FOSE to start the game normally, but if I try it all in the same session I get an infinite series of failing to initialize until I again open the launcher, set my setting, close it, and restart.
I really wish there was any solid definitive reason why this was happening but the best I can do is say what worked for me right now.
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I will tell you what i had to do to patch my game to 1.7. I had a heck of a time figuring out why it seemed to fully complete but didn't actually finish. For me as soon as the patch finished it tried loading fallout.exe for some reason at the end, and it can't very well alter the exe while its in use. I have no idea why it tries loading the game at the end but i wasn't the only did it did this to by any means. After hunting around the net for a while this is what I was told.
Have task manager (Ctrl+Alt+Delete) open the whole time. Go to the Processes tab in task manager and get a good look at everything running there. When you run the patch, near the end a new process called fallout.exe will show up an there and you have to click it and end the task in about 1 to 2 seconds so the patch can finish up and complete. I have no idea why this ridiculous run around is needed as I had the latest patch straight from Bethesda and a fresh legitimate install of the game, but this is the Only thing that worked for me.
The only way I new it actually Had actually finished and updated Fallout.exe was to navigate to my fallout directory, right click fallout.exe, and click properties there. In the properties there is a tab called version, where you can check whether it failed and is still 1.00 something or succeeded and is 1.7
Not sure if that method will work for you but it was the only way I could make the current crappy 1.7 patch actually finish. If any of this is unclear then speak up and I'll try to clarify it. This was easily the most frustrating game to patch that I've played recently, but well worth it once you get it working.
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Null point. If a Mod or Admin sees this could you kindly delete it.
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Thanks for the replies. I had sort of assumed that was the case from glancing over the TES4 construction set (I modded my Morrowind and Fallout 3 extensively, just never oblivion) but just wondered if perhaps I was missing something. It sort of makes sense though, as there seems to be no persistent body mesh. I mean the upper and lower body mesh is defined by the gear you have equipped in those slots, if I am not mistaken. So I suppose the only way to say, have Morrowind style beast legs would be to make it be part of the pants worn then add bones and motion constraints to the base skeleton for them to be rigged to. Not impossible, just perhaps a touch bigger project then I am up to at the moment. Maybe if my schedule clears up I may take a crack at it, but for the moment thanks for the clarification guys!
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I am just checking if anyone has found a way for a new race to use unique body meshes. It appears (to me at least) that only one set of body meshes are applied to all races, and my searches here resulted in the same conclusion. Even when looking at races in tesdit4 and such tools there doesn't appear to be anyway of attaching unique body data to a race. Sooo that brings me back to the question, is it thoroughly impossible to use unique body meshes for each race, or has anyone discovered a workaround to this yet?
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I know this is an older thread, but I'll say how I got around this issue in Blender just in case someone else (like I did) finds this thread via search. My solution came from a combination of what is said here above. Niftools exports anything with different materials as a separate data block, and deleting mats deletes UVs in blender... so what to do? Re-assign the mats, and here is how I did it.
Open/Import your mesh in blender and go into edit mode. Select a face in face select mode (ctrl tab 3) and switch to the editing panel in the buttons window (F9). In the "Links and Materials" Tab you'll see what material the Face you selected has assigned to it. In many cases it will be noname. Now if you select a face from the part the Niftools keeps separating out you can see it has a different name here, like noname.00 So what we have to do is make everything use noname instead of a mix between that and noname.00 This is easily enough done however. Just select a face that uses the material you want all to use, noname in our example, then hit A twice to select every face (or specifically all the ones you want to effect). Now there are many faces selected but one, the first one you hit, will be kind of grayed out. That is the active face, and the information displayed in the "Links and Materials" tab pertains to that single face. Well we have everthing selected and our active face has the material we want to keep so now we hit "ASSIGN" button just below that to give that material to every other face selected. Now on export, provided you've Joined the objects already, they should export as one data block. Its kind of similar to how you add two-sided to all faces in blender really. Select one face, set two-sided, then select all and hit the tiny copy button near where you find two sided in the "Texture Face" tab. Of course you don't need to do this for nif's since you can just add a stencil property later, but if you want it to display two-sided in Blender's 3d view window while you're modeling it that's how you do it.
I really do have to say thanks to all you guys above since you helped me find a consistent method for merging meshes in blender now. Which kicks butt since the next thing I wanted to teach myself was how to add accessories to hairstyles and such, which definitely requires merging them first. Can't make egms off multiple datablocks and all. I tried that and it either makes the world explode or simply fails outright, seemingly with equal probability. Buuuttt now I can mix and match hair and useless but fun accessories to my heart's content.
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Holy crap you're right, not sure quite how I messed it up so many times before. I know for a while I kept trying to convert my FO3 nif's back to oblivion format first, except I didn't want to bother re-installing oblivion at the moment so I never checked if they were working conversions lol. I I know I tried it many many other ways too... and I think my downfall was assuming the editor would find the egms own. Sort of like how if you specify a texture for a body in teh race forms, it just naturally finds the associated _n's and such. It completely escaped me to search for an update facegen availability button in the menus.
Well thanks a lot to both of you for getting me to try this again. I knew I must have been missing something simple. I will definitely remember the box trick if I find things distorting oddly too.
Now I see what you mean, couldn't be easier... unless perhaps it remembered the last file path used instead of starting in MyDocuments, but hey I am not complaining. Thanks again
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Uggh lol I just found this and was sooo hoping there was anything other then the conformulator that could do it, since even following several different guides including the convert to oblivion nif first one, I've never had it turn out a working egm yet. Hmmm well back to digging around.
Still it is nice to know that someone at least managed to get working files out of the conformulator. Myself I was looking at http://www.fallout3n...ticle.php?id=32 and no matter what I used as imput or how I converted it it always came up corrupt somehow, most commonly turning every head/helm into a jagged mess lol.
Don't get me wrong, its great that someone made it... its just never worked for me is all, and all I was trying is to get something to distort with the facegen sliders, no anims.
And I found your thread Skree so I am reading back through that to see what I missed in the process. Hopefully I can get this awesome tool working smoothly for me. Would be awesome to be able to make reliable egm's at least. Functional tri's would rock too but right now I'd be happy with just having meshes distort with the head sliders :tongue:
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Well thanks for the input on that. I do agree ZIP was awesome for its time but RAR surpassed it some time ago. 7z is definitely king of compression right now it seems as far as raw size goes and seems to have pretty minimal data loss if any. Still I think RAR has the most self healing/recovery features last I heard.
And I see what ya mean about proprietary formats too. Usually I stick to only using the App designed specifically for that type but just seems I've gotten less bad md5s with winrar, although its still way more rare then back in the day lol. Ahh the memories... when command line ZIP was the hot new thing and md5 hadn't even been dreamed of yet.
I did see that backup directory too, but all I've found there is silly .bak's of the many mods I am workin on. (I re-mod everything I DL for compatibility and personalization to my setup).
Though maybe I just need to check it more often, like right after a ctd before anything else. Seems like even back with morrowind's warnings.log it would delete that file if you restarted the editor or game or some such non-sense.
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I was just noticing in a lot of mod descriptions people were noting to "unpack this with an Actual copy of 7zip". So this leads me to wonder what this added emphasis is aimed at. Are other programs that handle 7z compression inferior or lead to data loss? Myself I use a registered copy of Winrar because I have it and prefer the interface. I haven't even reloaded 7zip on this machine after the last time I rebuilt it build.
Just wondered if I could be losing a byte here or there by not using the an 'actual' copy of 7zip.
And yes I do realize how incredibly lazy it sounds that I don't want to install 7zip. Just that I am used to using one, and I tend not to slow down for anything when I am on a roll.
While I am here, in FO3 is there a warnings log type file generated somewhere on each ctd like back in morrowind days. That was pretty handy since it showed exactly what it was trying to do or load when it crashed. I might just be a fool but I've not found any such thing for FO3 yet.
FO4 Compiling within Notepad++ using Capirca
in Creation Kit and Modders
Posted · Edited by rainrtw
This is here because when I was looking for this info, I found very little and most of what I saw was for Skyrim which is a different compiler. So here is hoping the next modder trying to set this up has an easier time.
If this has been said elsewhere, that just didn't show up in searches, then I will link to that as well. But again I couldn't find anything more recent then the 5 lines or so on the CK wiki about setting up Npp to use the SKyrim compiler, and that doesn't seem useful this time around.
This was made possible by Wenderer showing how to actually use the right compiler lol.
Personally I begin modding any Bethesda game by copying the folder structure of the game off to larger storage drive for testing and building stuff without accidentally screwing up my main install folder. Then I unpack all the BSA's there to so I have a good vanilla resource base to work with, without seeing a bunch of stuff added by other mods. I want to work off what Bethesda made, not other modders. I have several nice 2tb drives, so space isn't an issue for me. I know its easier for most people to edit stuff directly in their install folder, as you don't have to keep copying stuff to there from you WIP folders to test... but I tend to have a complicated, heavily modded install and many WIP projects going at once so keeping all WIP on a separate drive suits me.
Just letting you know you WILL have to change the paths to the ones more suited to your setup, but that should be easy enough to do. Just open up a file browser, navigate to where you want that item to point then look at the address bar area.
First you need Caprica http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/7380/?
And you need to take note of where you unpack the 7z file too. For me that is,
"E:\Games\Fallout 4 Mods\Tools\Caprica" but obviously yours will be different... especially if you don't have multiple Drives :tongue:
Still you need to note down the Path to your Caprica, when you find some place you will not be moving it again. And remember that path must be the one that points to the Caprica.exe file, not just where the 7z is or whatever.
You will need all the scripts from the game extract somewhere. You can either do that with B.A.E. - Bethesda Archive Extractor, http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/78/?
Like I did, or use the library included with PexInspector, http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/7360/?
Now I have no idea how to properly use the PEXInspector so don't ask me, but the library with it is a quick source for the game scripts if you don't wanna bother extracting them, though that is fairly fast too.
Anyway you do it, you need a directory with all the game scripts in it for Caprica to compile for you. So find a place you will extract and leave Caprica and this Source folder. In my case it looks like,
"E:\Games\Fallout 4 Mods\Tools\Caprica\SourcePEX"
But yours will likely be different. Whatever folder you pick that folder must have all the game's scripts in .pex format.
At this point we can make a little .bat file to compile .psc scripts you drag onto it.
So make a new text file named Caprica.bat
If you have that evil windows feature, Hide extensions for known formats, on then you may have to disable it in Folder Options. Hit ALT in a File browser window then Tools->Folder Options, Uncheck hide extensions, Apply, then Apply to all folders. Otherwise your bat file may actually be named Caprica.bat.txt
Right click your bat file and EDIT it.
Now your paths will of course look different but mine looks like this:
You may not need to break it up to 3 lines but I like it to be nice and clear, and its more like the good old DOS Days.
First line is the Drive Caprica is on, for most that is C:
Second Line is change directory or CD\PathToYourCapricaExeHere
Third line is Caprica(name of the exe)
%1(this means insert the file name you drag and dropped here)
-i"Full path to your Directory Containing All Vanilla Scrips in .pex format" (Thanks to Wenderer... as I was too stupid to figure this bit out on my own.)
-o"Full Path to the Directory you want compiled .pex output to go." (can just omit this part if you want the .pex to appear right in the same folder as your .psc source.)
--champollion-compat yes --allow-compiler-identifiers (Additional flags to allow compatibility with scripts decompiled by Champollion, as suggested by johndoebowler on NexusMods)
Save that, and you should be able to drag viable .psc files onto it and get a .pex version in the output folder... assuming your code was right and your file can compile.
I should also note you can use paths relative the exe also, but I never got them to work on my machine so went with full paths.
Now you can copy that bat into any Directory you want, for an easy drag and drop compile option. Or Edit the -o"path" section out of the .bat so that it outputs in the same folder, for scripting in WIP type folder setups etc.
This part is adapted from and is all thanks to, this guide http://windowsbro.blogspot.com/2012/10/compile-with-notepad-any-language.html
Now you need Notepad++ https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
Install Notepad++
If it asks you about DspellCheck say No to keep it active, unless you're on Windows 10.
DspellCheck can cause a crass on Windows 10 so those users may want to disable spell check.
Congrats to you folks still using Win7, and disabling the nagware updates MS tried to shove down your throat to annoy you about their newest unstable toy.
Now you need to enable the NppExec plugin to run your compiler.
Plugins->Show Plugin Manager
Available-> Toggle NppExec-> Install-> yes install anyway.
It may ask to restart Notepad++ to activate it, say yes.
Now we need to tell the plugin how to compile your script so go to,
Plugins-> NppExec-> Execute
Here you can stretch that input box to be much larger, which you may want to do, since the lines we're adding can get a bit long.
The input here is going to look a whole lot like you .bat file did. Basically the biggest difference is that your starting with npp_save and will be replacing the %1 with "$(FULL_CURRENT_PATH)"
On my setup it looks like,
npp_save (Tells Notepad++ to save the file first, as the compiler runs on the saved .psc file not the text open in your current window.)
E:\Games\Fallout 4 Mods\Tools\Caprica\Caprica (the path where you unpacked Caprica too)
"$(FULL_CURRENT_PATH)" (passes the path and name of the open file)
-i"E:\Games\Fallout 4 Mods\Tools\Caprica\SourcePEX" (Again this points to where ever you unpacked all scripts of the game in .pex format.
-o"E:\Games\Fallout 4 Mods\Working\Data\Scripts" (where you want the compiled script saved to)
--champollion-compat yes --allow-compiler-identifiers (Additional flags to allow compatibility with scripts decompiled by Champollion, as suggested by johndoebowler on NexusMods)
You can and should test this if you have a .psc file open. Run it and check the output folder or look at the Console window for clues to fix any bad directories you may have entered. Then SAVE. That is Save the little NppExec script in the window and name it something like FO4 Compiler or whatever suits your fancy.
From this point on you can and may just want to see the original guide since it has pictures.
http://windowsbro.blogspot.com/2012/10/compile-with-notepad-any-language.html
Go to about 40% down the page to the line,
Now, we want a compile button shortcut, don't we?
(Summarized here for those who don't wanna read)
Plugins-> NppExec-> Advanced options
Associated Scripts, select yours then hit add modify.
Close window and restart Notepad++
Settings-> Shortcut mapper-> Scroll Way down looking for the name you gave the NppExec script earlier.
Personally I rebind Search Results window to CTRL+SHIFT+F7 so I can use F7 for compile.
Remember to make sure whatever Key Bind you choose isn't used by another function already.
(This part isn't strictly needed, but some may want it.)
I almost prefer using full paths for the sake of clarity, but some may prefer relative paths, so then can just type Caprica from anywhere to run it.
If you want to set up a system path so you can run Caprica more easily with relative paths etc, you can scroll back up that page to the system variable part, also summarized below for TL;DR
StartMenu, right click Computer-> Properties
Advanced System Settings
Advanced-> Environmental Variables
Bottom Section, System Variables-> Scroll down till you find the variable named Path
Select that and EDIT
Now you want to hit End key or otherwise scroll to the end of that line... it can be pretty long depending on what you have installed.
at the very end of the line you add a semicolon ;
then the path the leads to Caprica, in my case the PATH variable now looks like,
C:\Windows\system32;C:\Windows;C:\Windows\System32\Wbem;C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\Program Files (x86)\NVIDIA Corporation\PhysX\Common;E:\Games\Fallout 4 Mods\Tools\Caprica
When it comes to actually attaching your script to something in FO4Edit I still refer to this post for building the VMAD data.
I have been told there are other tools for copying and building the VMAD but personally I'd rather build it myself, so I know exactly how it works.
Just stating what helped me set this up. I hope, but cannot guarantee, it will work for you as well.