PSA: Fallout 4 invisible weapon attachment (game engine bug) fix 100% working

[VikMan9158]

Some of you may have encountered a problem where a certain weapon mod will have invisible weapon attachments. Usually its the pistol grip, as is the case with the Noveske REECE mod, and the Zenit AK mod. I have heard others having the same issue but for scopes on some other. Until now there has never been a fix other than acknowledging that this is a game engine problem and that it is unfixable. Can't really blame mod authors because they usually never encounter this problem, because of course they wouldn't publish a mod with invisible meshes. But since I had this bug keep showing up for me across different mods, I finally managed to fix it.

The root of the problem has to do with weapon attachment naming in the NIF file. I don't know why the game engine will have some attachments attached to a certain named attachpoint show up as invisible, but that's just how it works. Sovereign, the wonderful mod author of the EFT weapons pack, told me it had something to do with if you have a lot of mods using the same attachpoint name, the game engine will get confused and that particular attachpoint won't work for that weapon. The weirdest thing is that this only happens to a minority of us, so thats why mod authors have never been able to fix it. From a modding perspective, its hard to fix something when you don't even know what's wrong since you can't replicate the issue. Again, why this happens to some of us, and whether or not the game engine gets confused with attachpoint names I can't say for certain. I only know that I used this premise to troubleshoot and figure out the solution.

The easy fix is to simply rename the the attach-point on both the parent and the child mesh. For example, in the case of a missing pistol grip attachment, you need to open the mesh .nif file in nifskope for both the Recievers and the Pistol Grips and rename the the Parent attachment (usually its something like P-PistolGrip) for the receiver, and the children attachment on the grip (usually C-PistolGrip). It can be renamed to anything but for my fixes I chose AR15PistolGrip, so for the example of P-PistolGrip and C-PistolGrip, I changed it to P-AR15PistolGrip and C-AR15PistolGrip. Those are the only two changes that need to be made. Nothing else in FO4edit needs to be changed. I don't know if this is the case for other attachments like a vertical grip or lens, where animations are rigged to that attachment. That could be more complicated maybe someone else can shed some light on that, but my recommendation for best practice for all weapon mod authors is to come up with unique attachpoint names for their particular mod so this bug doesn't happen. So for the ZenitAK, instead of adding the "AR15" part, I made it "AK" so it looked something like P-AKPistolGrip and C-AKPistolGrip. This fix 100% works because I only changed 1 reciever and a few pistol grips for the noveske REECE mod and after I made the fixes, when I went in game, only that particular receiver and those grips I changed were fixed. The remaining pistol grips that I didn't change still showed up as invisible. I've tried this for the EFT pack and the Zenit pack and the fix has worked for all of them. 
 

Check the screenshot to see what exactly needs to be fixed. Hope this helps you guys. I've seen this issue be unresolved for a few years, so just glad its finally fixed for us.