mrpdean

Yes there is. http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/41579/?

I thought it was the Print Screen key and that they get put in the root folder of Skyrim.

For the vast majority of object I don't think you can see the texture path in the CK. This is because the texture path is stored inside the nif. The exception is objects which use TextureSets. You can see the texture path in texture sets. The CK will tell you the path to the nif and opening the nif with NifSkope will let you see the texture path. Hope that helps a little.

Just create 2 xmarkers in your house. 1 for clean objects and the other for dirty objects. Then set the "enable parent" of each object to the appropriate xmarker. That way you only have to enable/disable the 2 xmarkers and all of their associated object will get enabled/disabled automatically. This also makes it much easier to work in the ck because you can select, for example, the dirty xmarker and press CTRL+1 to hide all of the dirty objects that are linked to it so your only seeing the clean object. Etc.

Please see my answer to a very similar question in this thread. I think it should help you. http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/2094934-lighting-tips-or-why-do-the-pretty-things-hate-each-other/?fromsearch=1

Thanks for the info Ac3s.

Yes you can easily lock doors using a script: http://www.creationkit.com/Lock_-_ObjectReference As for what triggers the locking, that's up to your preference. You could use a switch/lever as you suggested. In my mod I just used a timer attacted to the door so that the door automatically locked itself after 10 seconds.

Hi Ac3s, I don't have the answer but I've been working on black book and elder scroll displays myself. So I'll be following this thread :) It's especially tricky for me as I haven't got that far in the game yet so have not done any of the quests. I just assumed that as long as I made the displays in a way that would let the player take the items back then it would just be up to them to make sure they had the items with them when doing the related quests. Sounds like it's not that simple though if removing the items in the first place is enough to break the quest completely.

Resetinterior didn't work for me either. At least not entirety. For example I moved a couple of invisible furniture markers around and even after resetting the interior they still remain at their previous locations.

Is there an equivalent command for exterior cells?

Your not the only modder having this problem. I've also been wrestling with it without much progress. It's especially problematic for objects which the player can enable/disable themselves. They just refuse to relocate to their new position. I've had *some* success with scripting using MoveToEditorLocation but even then it doesn't always work. What's worse is that there doesn't seem to be any obvious pattern to it. For example I had to move 11 soil planters to a new location. 10 of them moved (using scripts) but 1 of them insists on staying in its original location no matter what I did. Sorry I don't have the solution but I'll be keeping am eye on this myself. Hopefully someone will be able to provide a solution.

Yes, as far as the mod you're working on goes, you should be fine. Where you might run into trouble is if you leave the mod you're working on active while you're playing the game as this will lead to various data about your "work in progress" mod being added to your saved game. If you then change, remove things from your WIP mod it might have an adverse affect on your saved game. This is particularly true for scripts that your WIP mod might the using. When it comes to testing your mod, it's generally recommended do that on a clean, un-modded skyrim.

Rather than having seperate and timed day/night lights have you tried using combined lights set to use external emmittence? That way the color and brightness of the lights automatically adjusts to match the time of day. You can also use this technique as a replacement to the cells ambient light. That is, set the cells ambient light to black and add a single omni light, set to use external emmittence and scaled so that it covers the entire house. That way you effectively have a dynamic ambient light. The downside of this is that it means you can't have quite as many decorative lights around the house before you run into the max "4 lights affecting each mesh" rule.

soupdragon1234 is right about the size of the meshes being the problem with lighting hearthfire homes. Whilst I haven't made the fix for the vanilla hearthfire homes myself, I have made available the carved up meshes that would be required to fix the lighting: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/41645/? It would be a lot of work to swap out all the meshes so I can understand why nobody has done it.

Ok. I will remove the ladder. So you just want normal/static nifs, and use a seperate furniture marker? At the moment these are proper furniture nifs so the furniture markers are built in to them, but its easy enough for me to convert them. Clever idea about filling the gaps in the rungs with tiny steps. Might have a play with that for my own mod. Getting ladders to work would open up many possibilities :)

No problem. I didn't end up using them because I made the room larger and so single beds ended up looking better in my mod. When I was thinking of using them they were going to have to be up against a wall so I didnt have the option of having the top bunk accessible from the other side. Anyway, I'll center the ladder and give you left and right versions of both the top and bottom beds which should cover all options :) just give me a day to tidy it all up and I'll pm you the files.

I was working on the same idea for bunk beds in my mod but I don't think I'll end up using them. Could send you the nifs if you want them. http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=zxwf4&s=8#.VBZa2nM_7qA

The flickering light problem isn't so much because of lights overlapping with each other but rather it's to do with number of lights overlapping (or affecting) each object. It helps to understand how shaders work under the forward rendering model which Skyrim uses as opposed to the deferred rendering model which newer game engines like UE4 use (some use a mix of both as both have pros and cons). Here is a good explanation of the two techniques: http://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/articles/forward-rendering-vs-deferred-rendering--gamedev-12342 Anyway, the important point is that in Skyrim, when the engine goes to render an object it will look at all the lights that overlap that particular object and it will select a maximum of 4 lights (some say 3 but I think it's 4) and it will pass those 4 lights to the shader which in turn will calculate the lighting for that object. How the engine determines which lights to pass to the shader is a bit of a mystery but it's likely to be a combination of proximity to the player (which lights are closest to the player) and the viewing angle from the player to the object being rendered. This is why the lights appear to flicker on and off as you move around your house. The lights themselves aren't changing but the engine is constantly trying to determine which 4 lights to pass to the shader for each object being rendered. This is also why you will often get one object going dim (as if a light has been switched off) when an object right next to it will look fine. It's because the calculations are done per object. Multi-level houses are particularly hard to light nicely because not only do you have lights on the same level overlapping with object but you will also likely have lights on the levels above or below also overlapping objects. It does get quite tricky to find a happy compromise at times. Now what can be done to help? Well one solution I used a heck of a lot in my Lakeview Manor Evolution mod was to carve up larger objects into smaller pieces. The idea here is simple. The smaller an object is the less likely it is that there will be more than 4 lights overlapping it. Of course this can take a lot of work to do but if you find that there are only a few large objects which are flickering than it might be a good option. It's rare that you will get smaller clutter items flicking. It's usually the larger architectural object like walls etc. Other than that, you will just need to try to find a balance when positioning lights. Now that you know that it's the number of lights overlapping with an object that is the cause it might help you when position the lights. I have over 40 lights just in the main cell of lakeview manor and no flickering. Performance also seems fine to me. Note that everything I've said here is related mainly to non shadow casting light. Shadow casters have further limitation which The Vampire Dante has already mentioned. Incidentally there is a debug option in the CK to visualize the number of lights affecting each object. Green is good. Red is too many lights overlapping the object and flickering will occur. You can find it under: File > preferences > render window More info here: http://www.creationkit.com/File_Menu#Shaders

It's unlikely that it's any one thing that is causing the lag but rather an accumulation of all the things you've mentioned combined. Unfortunately there aren't any really good diagnostic tools available for Skyrim (that I'm aware of) that profile exactly what's going on under the hood. Options for optimising are somewhat limited for exterior cells compared to interior cells. I don't think that portals and room bounds are going to work in your situation. You can try to place occlusion planes at strategic locations around the exterior, but this might also be difficult to find the right locations given the shape of the tower etc. I think you're just going to have to tweak/test/repeat. Here's a couple of tricks I sometime use to diagnose performance: 1) Switch to wireframe mode in the console and look around the exterior of your house. This is a good way to visualise the density of vertices/edges/triangles in your scene. If there are area's of your cell which are almost solid with edged then those area's might be good candidates for mesh optimisation e.g. reducing the vertex count. Sometimes it's difficult to distinguish your meshes from background/distant meshes when in wireframe, in which case you can temporarily surround your cells entirely with occlusion planes so that you are "mostly" only viewing the meshes in your cells. Unfortunately the terrain will still be visible. Modern graphics cards can generally handle quite a large number of triangles though, so I would probably leave mesh optimisations as a last resort. 2) In-game find a view of your exterior cells which seems to have to most lag or the lowest FPS. Bring up the console, target an object and then disable it using the console command, check fps, repeat with the next object. This is a bit tedious but it allows you to determine if there is any one object which might be causing the lag (though unlikely). Start with the largest objects (the towers etc) and work your way down to the smaller objects. If the lag still occurs with collisions switched off then it's unlikely to be an issue with the collisions on meshes, though I don't actually know if disabling collision in the console stopped the engine from calculating collisions, but I assume it would. From my experience, flora (plans/trees) can have a big impact on performance. I noticed that you have a lot of Ivy and moss around the place. You could try temporarily disabling all those and testing. This would probably be easier done in the CK than using the console in-game. What about lights? It's difficult to tell in your video but do you have a tonne of lights around the exterior? Finally, the UV scale of textures on meshes should have no impact on performance at all.

This should have everything you need: http://www.darkcreations.org/forums/topic/4249-100-custom-tree-pyandonean-islands-tuto02/ I don't think C4D has a good nif exporter though. You might need to use blender or 3DS Max.

I would think that would be more than enough vram to use 2k textures. If I were you I'd just give it a try and see how it goes. Texture packs a easy and safe to add/remove as they don't affect your saved games.

Yes, sorry I just assumed you knew that Hearthfire was required for adoptions to work. I guess it would be possible to create your own adoption system but it would take A LOT of work.

Tell me which mountain piece you are using and I'll cap and texture the base of it for you. It won't take very long to do. Send me a PM if you want me to do it.

For converting color maps I believe OScape lets you do this though I've not tried it myself. http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/4727/?

The easiest way is to download the Hearthfire Multiple Adoptions mod and following the included instructions for modders. It steps through everything your house needs to have in order to make it compatible with Hearthfire adoptions and spouse moving in. People who use your house mod will also have to use the Hearthfire Multiple Adoptions mod to get their spouse and children to move in.