Texture Mod Erasing Collision?

[corianin]

Long time lurker because you guys are all awesome and so very helpful. However, after days of looking for answers here, there, and everywhere, I'm about to tear my hair out - and as it is very long that would just make a mess and confuse my cats. So I've decided to ask my question for once, LOL I am very new to modding (like, two weeks new) yet there are so many helpful folks online that I haven't run into any issue I've found insurmountable until now.

Basic question: can texture mods remove collision on building parts?

Explanation: The diner pisses me off. I have seen the mods that retexture diners throughout the Commonwealth, and I have seen the ones that allow you to build existing grimy diner pieces. What no one has ever seemed to do is make shiny, clean diner pieces that are workshop-constructible. So of course that's exactly what I'm trying to do. Because I'm a masochist apparently.

 

Where I am at in my mod: All diner pieces are clean, lovely (if I do say so myself, though I do have a few small tweaks I want to do yet), and fully buildable in workshop mode. Walls, windows, doors, floors, ceilings, furniture, the works. They rotate, they clip, and generally look very aesthetically pleasing. I am happy with them. Except for the fact that the floors have zero collision and therefore can't have anything built on them - not furniture, not other floor pieces, not even rugs.

What I have done: Started off by copying the original texture files to my own mod folder (did not want to start poking at the base game copies) and opening them in Photoshop. Spent about a day going through cleaning up rust, stains, and all the grime that comes with an apocalypse. Result - shiny clean counters, floors, walls, etc. Followed Kinggath's tutorial for the Photoshop DDS plugin settings and everything saved just fine. Moved on to working on the nifs. For my first attempt I copied the vanilla setdressing nifs, changed the textures, and added the snap points. Super pretty - took me a while to get the hang of snap point creation, but after a few hours and about a pot of coffee it eventually made sense. So I thought. Except I had, like, three nifs didn't want to cooperate. So I opened up the nifs from Homemaker and compared my snaps to those (since that mod is awesome and I know those diner pieces all work). Found a couple errors on my files, fixed them, and tested them. Everything snapped in game and it made me happy. Until I noticed I couldn't build on the floors.

 

Back to Nifskope I go. All settings matched - but no luck. So I decided to try a test piece and copied one of the Homemaker diner nifs, then just retextured that. I know the original dirty-looking nif worked fine - maybe I was just missing something? But no. Once I loaded it in game with the new texture, it lost all floor collision as well. Have now been futzing with this bullcrap for four days (aside from family time for Christmas, of course - my mother-in-law would hardly accept 'I'm making a thing for a video game' as an acceptable excuse to avoid holiday dinner) and no matter what I have done or whose advice I have followed, I still have the same problem.

 

Changing the texture seems to completely break the diner floor collision. Dirty texture = fine. Clean texture = sadness.

 

I have used these new textures on other pieces (shacks, other architecture things like the high tech floors and walls, Snappy Houskit's shell pieces - hell, even changed the texture in the Ground mod and lemme tell ya, chrome dirt just looks weird). On no other nifs do the textures appear to affect the collision. It seems to be isolated to the diner pieces. And I've found myself wondering if this is why no one has ever done a buildable clean diner set yet, or if I am just too new to know what I'm doing properly.

I've been using Photoshop since it was a Mac-only graphics program, so I'm pretty confident in my skills there. I have only been working with modding for about 12 days now though, and Fallout 4 is the first and only game I have attempted. So somewhere between those two extremes of knowledge I know I am missing something somewhere and it's probably obvious as a green M&M on a black plate and I'm gonna feel really stupid when someone points it out. I have no idea what data anyone might need to know, but I'm hoping that one of you lovely folks might have some ideas because otherwise my next step is to just create brand new meshes from scratch and import them as totally new objects, and that's really quite a lot of work and time that I'd rather spend moving on to the next mod I want to tackle. So, thanks in advance. :smile:

[niston]

I like your project as I have been looking for clean Diner pieces.

 

To answer your question: No, textures cannot and do not affect collision. Collision is solely governed by the bhkCollisionObject/bhkPhysicsSystem nodes and the binary data in the physics system node.

 

You mentioned two things: a) That you cannot build on these pieces and b) that they have no collision.

Now my question to you is: Can you stand on these pieces?

Because you can have things with collision, but still be unable to build on them until you add the WorkshopStackableItem Keyword (or is it an ActorValue, I can't ever seem to remember this offhand) to them.

[corianin]

OMG THANK YOU THANK YOU THANKYOU! I somehow missed that keyword on all but one of the pieces I built - like, I added it to the first one (a corner piece) and then completely forgot it even existed for the other 20-some-odd structure pieces, LOL Now I can build things on the floors.

 

 

All that's left is to work out some entrance sign snap points, figure out how I want to do the menu thing, and it should be pretty much ready to go. Eventually I want to do different colors and interior themes but for now all I want is to get the base pieces working. I can make more pretty colors later.

 

You have saved my sanity. I thank you. My husband thanks you, because he was sick of hearing my ranting. My animals thank you because now I'm not making strange random screeching noises at odd times. Well, back to work!

 

 

[niston]

LOL. You all welcome :D

 

Looking forward to your upload!