payl0ad

Absolutely, loose files are essentially "debug mode on". Like in a dev environment.

You should put the raw sound files on the Nexus as a modders resource for modders to pick it up. First, this way it's available to others who want to change the game music, and more toys to play with are always good for everyone. Second, this way your sound files retain their original quality and aren't compressed through YouTube. You can of course still make a YT playlist but mod authors would like access to the raw files much better.

You're welcome. :) This is just a technical thing I guess. You can work around it with good object placement but as you can imagine, BGS does not really take moddability into account when building places. And why would they?

Keep in mind that going the route from Blender through OutfitStudio into NifSkope will not update collision. To generate new collision, you need to create your meshes in 3dsmax with either the official or unofficial nif plugins. With free tools, you'll need to use an existing nif with a collision shape that's similar to your new mesh (so your mesh has at least somewhat fitting collision).

Also, as these files are typically many small files, using archives reduces I/O (and thus CPU) overhead to a relevant degree, making load stutter and FPS drops less likely.

They apply to all non-Havok objects I've figured, that seems to be the rule of thumb. Those decals are everywhere, they're actually very useful for a level designer.

Well you could replace them globally, if that works for you. That's sort of hacky though, you'll become incompatible to some other mods this way. What are you up to, specifically?

Those are projected decals, they'll apply to anything in their projection trajectory. You'd have to place the sleeping bag in your example above the decal projector marker (a blue arrow marker in the CK) or move the marker down below the sleeping bag, so its decal still projects correctly.

You do know that we already have the magnificent Start Me Up mod?

Scroll further down and see if the list is actually leveled - meaning, it has differing level numbers for its entries. If it does not then that "fix" in UFO4P is completely cosmetic because it simply would not matter if that flag is set or not. It tells the engine to use the level numbers provided on the list. If unset, everything is treated as level 1.

Are you editing a vanilla cell or a scratch made one? If you copied a vanilla cell or are working on a vanilla cell, chances are good that what you see is the sloppy work BGS did with roombounds and occlusion planes.

I want to implement a mechanic that makes finding a weapon a little more challenging. Meaning that I do not want enemies to drop their gun on death - instead I want to replace the dropped gun with a Misc item (already baked some working nifs for that) that resembles broken down weapon parts and acts like your regular junk item. Having browsed through the leveled item structure that attach to NPCs I can see that I could spawn the broken weapon by using an LLD but I can't exactly see how I would go about removing the intact weapon. How would you tackle this? I think this should be possible with a script that monitors actors around the player but this just screams error potential to me. Is there a more elegant solution?

Best way to learn your way around the CK and the dos and don'ts is to build new cells. When you've messed around a bit (give it time, this is really complex stuff after all), transfer what you learned to the probably far more complex existing cell. You'll need to learn how to edit a navmesh and redo the cells previs optimizations for example.

Watch out, if you replace the meshes of static cars (there are movable ones, so-called Movable Statics (MSTT) and regular Statics (STAT)) you will kill performance by breaking the optimizations FO4 uses. Read more in this thread.

What's Fault City?

I'm not 100% sure but that little functionality might be hard-coded into the engine. Meaning, you can't change it without making a F4SE plugin. And even then it might be too hard to pull off.

So this happens when you download the file and not when you install it? Did you try a manual download and adding the file to NMM manually? If that doesn't work either, a manual download and manual installation (just extract all ESP files and possible folders/ba2 archives into your Data\ folder) should work.

Alternatively, if for some reason the Intel tools don't work, Paint.NET can also read most if not all DDS formats.

Just a heads-up, add regenerating LOD to your "to do" list ;)

OK, seems you have a different issue. If reinstalling doesn't help, maybe there's a different issue? Does the CK maybe miss write permissions for its Data folder or something?

Press "B" in the render window to display cell borders and quads. You can only use 4 textures per quad (the blue tiles) at most, that's actually normal. No way around it, this is an engine limitation.

Well, you could always use the fix mod in the same way PC players do. It literally only disables the offending references.

It might very well be that I was using that ini edit back then, when information about it were still not well understood by many.

I distinctly remember having the bottle glitch (the giant bottles in some places, like at the bossfight against Colter) in a vanilla setup on PC, back when NW was brand new. Seeing that the fix mod on PC simply disables these placed refs I'm relatively certain it's just a bug in the vanilla ESMs but that could be wrong.

The CK will crash with certain SCOLs that it can generate, but not parse. This happens, for example, when you have an SCOL that generates a nif with a havok physics node inside. This can happen if you use custom STAT records that are made from nifs that are physics enabled.