exploiteddna

I started modding about 6 months ago and have since learned a LOT of different things from a lot of different people in the community. From mesh and model edits nifskope to simple record edits in tes5edit, ive dabbled in a little bit of everything. I am having a little trouble trying to determine all of the various uses of the alpha channel for all the various different textures types and what type of model theyre being applied to. For example, the alpha in normals serves as specularity. For my transparent glass weapons, the alpha channel has to be done properly in my color maps (along with shader flags in the mesh, but i digress). One thing however I have not been able to figure out is what role the alpha channel plays in diffuse maps other than opacity/transparency. For example, a lot of landscape diffuse textures will have the alpha filled with a grayscale version of the rgb.. other times it will be completely blacked out except for areas where certain rocks are (imagine a texture that is all grass with 10 medium sized rocks scattered about... all/most of the grass will be blacked out, with all of the rocks kept white). Can someone explain to me what technique is being used here? I think for some textures, like rocks.dds that are used as "trim" textures around the base of mountains and such, this technique allows only the rocks to appear.. based on NiAlphaProperty alpha threshold of the mesh, maybe? Is there any place that has good documentation of the different techniques used for textures? Are there any techniques that are general or any that are specific to skyrim or the gamebryo engine? Anything else you can think of that would be helpful? Thanks :thumbsup:

Im finally in the testing phase of my house mod that ive been working on since march (yay). Ive run into a small snag and not sure how to remedy it. I have an area of the house with several display cases lined up next to each other, and when I walk past them with a follower behind me (ie Serana), the tops/lids of all the cases swing open. This forces me to go back and close each of them manually, which is really annoying (or i could just leave them open). How can I prevent these display cases from being triggered to open by followers? Ive already tried reworking the navmesh so that the follower doesnt walk as close to the cases, but this did not help at all. Now I'm thinking that maybe I should mark all of the display cases with a "initially disabled" tag ... but im pretty sure that's not the right thing to do. If anyone else has ever come across this issue in the past I would be very grateful for some advice! :thumbsup:

yes there is a limit of 255 ESPs/ESMs (maybe 256). This is a limitation of the hexadecimel numbering system that is used for indexing the formIDs of each plugin/master. ESPs that are completely merged into a bashed patch (if you use wrye bash) do not count towards the limit since they aren't technically active.

This is amazing. Im so glad this worked for me. At the same time im also a little irritated that it was something so "dumb".. All this headache for using a 60fps cap (bc if i didnt the physics engine would freak out and water would flicker). This is everything I did to try and solve the problem (for anyone else who is trying to troubleshoot, this helpful..somehow..maybe) fresh reinstall of the gamefresh install of Win7tried multiple driver versionstroubleshooted my entire 350 plugin/texture modsmoved skyrim and mods from SATA III 500gb HDD to its own dedicated 120gb SSDtried debugging the Papyrus logsstarted a new character (or two),'cleaned' the saved game of my main player characterthorougly cleaned all mod plugins and bethesda DLC plugins in tes5edittweaked the heck out of my INI files, anything i thought may helptried opening the world map and doing a full rotation around it before going into a loading screentried removing keys from my characters inventory (based on recommendation on different forum/youtube), but obviously this is useless when your character is brand new and has no keys to remove lolran most of my large texture packs (SRO, HD-2K, Serious HD, etc.) through DDSopt for optimizationunpacked the BSAs from all of my scripted mods to look at all of the scripts to see if I could find any obvious conflictstried running my two cards in non-SLI and assigned one card to just do physXtried using only one graphics card altogethermessed with my overclock settings in the main BIOS (for mem and cpu OC) and in nvidia inspector (for my gpu OC)said "what. the. f." like a million times...oh yeah, then i tried changing my search terms I was using to google for help and found this thread.. WOW what do you know! It WORKS LIKE A CHARM. You have no idea how relieving it is to have this resolved.. this is by far the most difficult problem solving ive had to do with skyrim (and ive had some doozies haha). I cannot thank the OP enough for posting this. I hope more people having trouble with this will find this thread and get the same outcome :thumbsup:System Specs i7 3770k @ 5ghz HT-enabled 2x4gb 2400mhz ddr3 2x crucial m4 SSD 500gb SATA III HDD 2x evga gtx680 classified (evbot) gigabyte z77x-up7 motherboard

good work, thanks

lol. ive read all of that already and, while useful information, did not say explicitly say what causes the flickering ive described. At any rate, it seems that there was a light in the "basement" that was shining up through the floor and its radius was overlapping the radius of the problem light. in this case i just decreased the radius of the light in the basement and now its all good. If i run into a situation where i need to prevent light from coming up through the floor, i wonder if there are any game objects that can block light. collision for light?

ok cool. yeah ive read through that first one on lighting an fx but have not seen the second one you listed. I just looked over it briefly and it looks like it has a lot of good information, not just with lighting. i guess i was hoping someone would be able to tell me exactly what type of oversight or placement mistakes will cause the scenario i described. like, is it an indication of too many lights, or overlapping radii, etc. Anyways, I appreciate your response. maybe one of the optimization techniques in that second link will help. anyone else willing to chime in?

nobody? cmon :biggrin:

hello guys and gals, ive been working hard on a new interior for a new mod im putting together and have run into a "snag" of sorts. This is certainly not the first time I have noticed this problem (in my mods and in other people's mods), but its finally bothering me to the point that I just need to ask the community for some advice. It would be much easier to explain with a video but i dont have the patience for all that, so ill just explain it.. imagine youre standing in your cell while in-game (it can be seen from ck sometimes too). If you position your character at just the right distance from a placed light (SolitudeInnWindowtDefault, for example), you can make the light turn on and off by simply looking up and down or side to side... no need to actually move your character, just stand still. This does not always happen, however. Sometimes I can place lights throughout a room and I don't get this effect. When it does happen, I try everything under the sun to make it stop. Nothing has worked. I attempt to decrease the radius, FOV, and fade. I have tried using less lights, more lights, different types of lights, shadows, no shadows, etc etc. Nothing seems to have an affect on this. Surely I can't be the only one who experiences this behavior. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

yeah for the most part, except after i end a list. After i close with a tag, it doesnt matter how many times i hit enter, it doesnt wanna give me a line break. maybe im incompetent, lols

im having a hard time forcing a line break with the bbcode tag [br] [/br] any other way to force a line break?

thanks buddy

hey fellas, so after a few months of learning the basics i decided to upload one of my first "mods" anyways, i was looking for some info on the language used so i can customize my page.. i cant even figure out how to add a hyperlink lol. i tried something like [link=skyrim.nexusmods.com]My Mod[/link] but didnt work. is there a noob tutorial on customizing these mod pages? thanks again for your help

i was just having the same issue and I fixed it by: - deleting all the current factions associated with my merchant NPC - adding back the appropriate factions one at a time, making sure to put jobmerchantfaction first (this changed the jobmerchantfaction rank from -1 to 0) This was good enough for me and now ive got it working again. EDIT: i know this is an old thread, so i hate to revive it after so long, but i thought it important to update so other people searching for current solutions can get the newest info

anyone?

So, I'm running 3dsMax 2012 and using the latest niftools import/export plugin (found here). I have successfully imported a few meshes (2 or 3) since I first installed it, but have not really needed to use it very much... until recently. Now that I am trying to get more into modeling I have been trying to import more meshes. However, a good portion of the NIFs i try to import give me an error, similar to these: try to import: meshes/magic/iceprojectile01.nif message: Link could not be cast to required type during file read. This NIF file may be invalid or improperly supported Type of object with index 77 was: NiPSysData Required type was: NiGeometryData try to import: meshes/furniture/alchemyworkbench.nif message: Link could not be cast to required type during file read. This NIF file may be invalid or improperly supported. Type of object with index 24 was: NiPSysData Required type was: NiGeometryData try to import: meshes/furniture/alchemyworkstation.nif error message: Link could not be cast to required type during file read. This NIF file may be invalid or improperly supported. Type of object with index 88 was: NiPSysData Required type was: NiGeometryData As you can see, all of the messages have the same problem (NiPSysData should be NiGeometryData), except the location is different for each of them. I have loaded up each of the files into NifSkope and located the NiPSysData node for each of them, but I don't really know what to do with it. I'm not very knowledgeable with NifSkope or NIF files in general, so I am stuck. The only possible solution I could think of (which is probably not the right thing to do) is manually change the NiPSysData node to a NiGeometryData node.. however, I dont see an option for doing that in any of the dialogs or context menus. Another thing to note is that this doesnt happen with all of my meshes, but a lot of them do. I also tried to import the NIF into gmax but I receive the exact same error message. I also tried to export from Nifskope as an OBJ file and open it in 3dsMax, which works, but it only exports a single NiTriShapes node, not the entire file. Is there some reason the niftools importer is "expecting" a NiGeometryData node instead of the NiPSysData node?? Maybe I could change something in the MaxNifTools.ini file? Ive also tried using 3dsMax 2011 but that didnt help. Ive been thinking about trying the Maya NIF plugin to see if that works any better, but I would have to download and install Maya and not sure if it's worth it (but i do get the student software for free, so I could do it if I think it would help) Any suggestions or advice will be very much appreciated *EDIT* : i just removed the NiPSysData branch that the error message refers to and it imported without any issues. However, I'm assuming that removing random branches is probably not the best thing to do...??

stupid question probably, but... arent all the kids going to be blue skinned??

But be aware when downloading diffuse map mods, as sometimes the colours may not match up, or neck-seams will be present. oh yeah, i did forget to mention that.. this can definitely be an issue if you use different diffuse map mods.. i tend to keep the diffuse maps together.. unless im willing to manually edit out any seams

i would be more than glad to help do some retexturing for you.. i think i could do a decent job. but like i said before, i dont mess with the meshes at all. If you get something put together or organized, you could shoot me a PM and we can talk more

all you should have to do is open up CK, load a cell into the render window that you know has ore veins in it, find the ore vein in the render window, right click on it and you can get any of the info you want. Once you know the name and location of the mesh, you can open it in NifSkope and see which textures are assigned to it. Then you can go pull those textures out and open them in photoshop or whatever program you want

good luck with your project.. i wish i could be of some help, but my texturing skills are still minimal.. especially if were talking about building completely new models and textures, instead of a retexture. ill keep an eye out though and if i see something i can help with ill let you know

yeah i had considered doing that. I still have the feeling that it may have been here at one point and then removed by mods.. but im not sure. I suppose it wouldnt hurt to ask/try

would definitely be nice.. it would be a welcome addition to the nexus and im sure would be a really popular mod.

however you can mix parts of female mods together if you want.. and same with male mods.. like i use the normal map from one female mod, the meshes from another, and high res diffuse (color) textures from another source.. then mix them together.. so keep that in mind when youre choosing

i know. i think maybe if they changed the name... the x kinda has a negative connotation to it in my opinion.. kiinda like "x" as in "x-rated" i dunno.. sounds silly i know, but it may be .. "x" and "children" shouldnt go together imo.. even if intentions are good. who knows though. i could be way off