corruptscript1

The house mods without any dependencies appear to merely be recycling underused cells, rather than creating new ones altogether. If I find out more, I'll make sure to tell you all about it. But hopefully at some point this thread attracts the attention of those more in the know. From what I understand, the general essence of the answer to questions 1, 2, 3, and 5, is that Construction Set widely remains viable for most of its usual tasks. With a notable caveat being that CS is working with largely outdated data. And so while many issues can be fixed by encoding plugins with the appropriate altar file changes, there does exist a subset of features that seem to have just been totally and ultimately moved over to the UE side of modding, in ways that now make them effectively untouchable by plugins alone. Modifying existing cells looks to be possible without taking up additional dependencies; though for these reasons, has become less intuitive, and perhaps also in some ways more limited.

I don't use xEdit personally, but I'd imagine it's looking for old Oblivion, and not Oblivion Remastered. From what I understand, 4.1.5f is a release from back in April of 2024. And the version that works with Oblivion Remastered (4.1.5o?), is so-far only available for download from the xEdit Discord.

So far I've only been scripting, and playing around with the Construction Set. Someone better knowledgeable about UE, modeling, and animation is probably about infinitely better suited to answering those other questions you asked. I'm just not yet super familiar with that side of modding, unfortunately. Response to edit: MagicLoader would be an additional dependency. But if you're not adding new text or cells, your mod won't need it. For fixing NL tags with existing strings, you'll only need to modify the plugin fields such that they properly link back up with the string localization table, using how the entries appear in AltarESPMain.esp as a guide (you can technically see this in plain text, without the need of any special tools). If there existed a means of adding or writing to specific table entries, without the mod outright overwriting the related files, I'd imagine it could be feasible to patch in entirely new text manually. But that's a good question for someone with more experience with UE patching. I know that there are means of dynamic patching with UE4SS. But of course, UE4SS is a dependency in of itself.

In the remaster, exposed strings are intended to be lookups into a the game's Localization Table. NL, appearing on strings that don't follow this convention, presumably stands for 'Not Localized'. If the string follows the convention of a lookup, but doesn't actually point to anything in the reference table, the string seen in game is instead replaced with '<MISSING STRING TABLE ENTRY>'. Since the old Construction Set is only fit to work with classic data, where strings just are as they appear in the editor, edits to existing data specify changes that result in strings being reverted in the resulting plugin. Entering new cells causes a crash. And modifying existing cells in general requires extra work, because like the problem with strings, CS is still only working with old data. For adding new text and cells, the most lucrative solution I've found is MagicLoader, which enables modders to link everything up with a .json file, and have .pak files be generated with the appropriate patches.

It would be nice to have a mod that removes the deep sunken laugh lines that are apparent in nearly every character face, male or female. These lines, to a lesser extent, existed in the original oblivion too; but they weren't as drastic, presumably in part due to the softer lighting. And even then, we still had mods here on the nexus to smooth them out entirely.