[Previews for 'Decals']

I think it has to do with the material itself. There's a 'decal' & 'decal no fade' that are both toggled on for the default version of this material. I tried toggling it off. And while I suddenly get a blacked out preview, the in-game workshop item has the alpha's outline, but places invisibly. Anyone have any idea what I have to toggle here?

[Previews for 'Decals']

So at the moment, I'm looking to add some custom letters for more signage options in workshop mode for my mod. I already had a smaller, custom, one sided 'decal' object (which is to say a static object that's supposed to be an actual sticker in game to post on walls & things), so I took that same mesh, flipped it to be portrait instead of landscape & changed the uvs/material to one of the existing sort of 'font' textures in the vanilla game (specifically the handpainted sign used for a lot of the diamond city messaging), going letter by letter to get the full alphabet.

 

The problem I'm running into is that while the transform & everything's set the exact same, the original object has a preview in both CK & in game, but the letters don't. And it's frustrating given the multitude, trying to go in letter by letter. And while I could maybe try to throw in some other kind of less descript icon, I don't really understand why the original shows up & the new stuff doesn't. All I did was spin the mesh in NifSkope & resize things so they weren't stretched. And I'm asking as I'd like to do more of these but would also like to mitigate the amount of fixes if it's something I missed & have to do across the board.

 

Would it be a matter of alpha?

 

Thanks!

[Constructible Pack-Ins?]

This might be a silly question. I'm still learning the ins & outs of the CK.

 

I mainly focus on creating workshop items & in the past, I used to rely pretty heavily on SCOLs for decoration & things. When I started learning, I was focusing on PS4 mostly where your options are pretty limited.

 

But now I'm looking to branch out a bit, & I've started learning about Pack-Ins. I tried making one & turning it into a COBJ, which I figured might be a long shot & yeah, it didn't work. I then tried making a formlist & trying to plug it that way, but same deal. So I understand they really might not be designed for workshop mode. But at the same time, I see a lot of potential with them. Like prefabbing whole room designs with furniture & containers all working as intended.

 

So is there any conventional way to get them constructible? Or is anyone aware of a way to do it through scripting? Granted, I'm not that great with scripting but willing to give it a shot if anyone can point me to a good resource.

 

At any rate, thanks!

 

 

EDIT: Sorry... still kinda new & was overzealous to ask. Realize this is probably much better suited for the CK/Modder part of the forum.

[Large Scale Material Swapping for Build Mode & Swaps crashing CK]

So the quickest work around I've found is through FO4edit. It's not perfect, but it's at least stable.

 

I selected each item I wanted to dupe, duplicated & (attempted to) rename them properly for each version of the texture (some had the EditorID's get a little screwy). Then I just copy the Material Swap field for each texture (& fix the names if needed). Since I did them all at the same time, they're in a row by FormID, so I just go down the column & copy in the material swap for each. That way, at least everything's got it's own reference & proper material on it. Doing all of them before I go back & apply them to the form lists in CK. I know I probably could do this in this editor, but it seems easier the other way. But I've opened it in CK a couple times to see if it would throw any errors at me & so far so good. I managed to get a good chunk done today, but still a ways to go & I'm only like half done with these at the moment.

 

But yeah. I can't figure out what it is about the material swaps that makes CK crash. I'm not experimenting with different looks. I might have with some of the originals a while ago, but I will open CK fresh now, immediately open up a reference & point directly to the material I want (or even 'NONE') & CK will just go away.

[Creation Kit Landscape: Create "Tear" or "hole" in ground]

I've experimented a little bit with this in the past but I didn't get very far. You CAN turn off quadrants of a cell if you go through its editor... BUT:

 

A) It's a large chunk of ground that you will then need to use solid meshes to patch in & fill the gaps, since a quarter of your cell just won't have any ground any more, & it's just a square (and or rectangular depending on if you do two) chunk of landscape missing.

 

B) A lot of standard cells have water &/or LOD layers under the surface you'd also need to edit.

 

C) Messing with the LOD seems like a real pain in the ass tbh & seems to often lead to problems.

 

 

But take that with a grain of salt as I'm still quite new & haven't done much in terms of mods outside of adding things for the build menu.

[Large Scale Material Swapping for Build Mode & Swaps crashing CK]

So I've been working on this mod where I have about 20 different retextures of the standard 'woodtile' that makes up a lot of the floors & walls & stuff, & formatting it for build mode is driving me crazy.

 

What's killing me is that I've duped a few references of the original pieces, & in some cases (because I'm slowly teaching myself creation kit), I used the 'Custom Material Swap' to point to the particular material. Now that I've learned how to implement proper material swaps, for some reason, pointing to the new material swap will sometimes randomly crash CK, causing me to reopen the mod which takes a couple minutes each time. These crashes seem mostly indiscriminate. Sometimes the same piece will work fine, other times it'll crash hard if I even just set it back to the default 'NONE.' Sometimes I'll go four or five without a problem, other times, the same one will crash three times in a row & then suddenly just work. There's nothing different to the original meshes, just dupes of the existing vanilla. Anyone else run into anything like this?

 

And I guess the other question I have: Is there any nicer way to do this, given I've got something like 50+ pieces to put about 20+ textures on? I duplicated in FO4Edit & started slowly going to town trying to put them in logical form lists, & then pointing COBJs to the form lists. But do I really have to go through manually & reassign the texture on each or is there some better work flow I can do?

 

Thanks in advance for anything you can offer

[Adjusting the Water Levels]

So in case this helps anyone else in the future, it turned out it was Scrap Everything. To test things, I'd turned off most of my mods but left on Cheat Terminal (on account of getting there from a fresh save), A high jump mod, & scrap everywhere, thinking if I had to select a piece in build mode to figure something out, it'd let me select more than the standard pieces..... I would've never surmised that it actually overrides the water levels. So all I ended up needing to do was swap the order of it & the mod I'm making & it worked.

[Adjusting the Water Levels]

Thanks. I actually tried hitting those toggles too in order to see what would happen, both in the world & in the cell itself, but got the same results. I thought LOD was more a visual distance thing though & this acts like water when you hop in it.

[Adjusting the Water Levels]

So I posted this elsewhere, & I'm definitely biting off more than I can chew here with how proficient I am with CK at the moment, but I'm beginning to think what I want to do is impossible with how the game engine's set up. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

The goal is to alter a version of Hangman's Alley to make it seem as if a deep sinkhole has opened up in the middle of it, ultimately with an elevator & a couple of structures, maybe a portion of a subway tunnel inside, with busted pipes creating a waterfall for a small pond at the very bottom. I've edited the landscape to create a large drop off, & I've started using craters & cliffside pieces to patch in the gaps & make it seem more like a proper cave.

 

The problem is the water level. By default, the cell (FensRaiderCamp) has it set to a height of like 450 & ocean water. The cell borders the river which I think is set to the global default, but none of the Hangman cell is apart of that, it just has this default water level that's well below any of the terrain. Now in CK, it let me drop it to the level I wanted (about -700 units) & let me change the type of water to murky. And once I hit F5, the changes show up & it looks pretty much how I was hoping. But whenever I open up a game, all the other changes are present, but the water level/type snaps back to the original default. Tried a fresh save even, but got the same result.

 

When I look at the worldspace data for the Commonwealth, it says there's a default height of 450 & type as ocean water. Is there some sort of global override I'm running into here that negates the individual cell data? I'm a bit leery about adjusting any global settings & have a lake or big square chunk of ocean somewhere drain. That said, I tried it for a second, putting the global water height a good 300 units beneath where I needed it & it STILL didn't work. What kills me is that it's showing up that way in CK just fine with the existing settings. And actually, the whole settlement is actually over two cells & the other one has water height that does actually go lower than the default, so I can see that it is possible!

 

Has anyone else run into anything like this before? Any help would be greatly appreciated!!