Mod limit?

[ibble]

Also found in google search. :excl: Can't believe this don't have more attention. :excl: Or if it do could one please direct me? Cause you see, I'm sure I have reached a limit to. Strange glitches and CTD's all over the place. Stuff that worked just fine yesterday won't work now.

 

BOSS report 143 plugins, data folder have 175 ESM, BSA and ESP files, savegame is poking 21mb. Can't get stable on higher loads without CTD shortly after any action in game.

 

Reminds me of the Oblivion xxx hours played magic animation bug, who had me quit the game until I stumbled upon a fix.

 

I found this in another thread with words on the issues:

 

^Uh, if you're talking about the 255 mod limit, then no, there's not " a mod for that". The limit is hard-coded into the engine by the way object references are handled.

 

Everything gets an object reference that is usually shown as an eight-digit hexadecimal number, i.e. 0100F23E. This actually has two parts; the first byte(first two digits) are the mod ID, and the rest is the object ID from that mod. The base game ID is 00, so anything in vanilla Skyrim has a mod ID of 00. Any mods loaded(by which I mean any ESMs and ESPs that get loaded besides Skyrim.esm) each get their own unique mod ID, starting at 01(which is the decimal value 1) and going up to FF(which is the decimal value 255). It's literally impossible to have any more mods than that without extensively re-writing the game engine itself.

 

So. Then. Who can rewrite the game engine since Betty seem to think were all on xbox and don't care about our very severely game breaking bugs/limits!?

 

All I can do now is try WRYE or uninstall mods, only to meet the limit again. So much for liking to have hundreds of armor/clothing options. Of course I have met the ID limit, 2.17GB texture optimized clothing pack, not a single weapon or real armor, just clothes. And I was just about to start on weapons... Yea right. :wallbash:

 

Found SMCO today, while it is slightly better than morrowind texture optimizer. The one part that is better is in beta phase and may disrupt files, something I expect it to do with TERA armors or random funny mod like lady of death.

 

What have become of TES? Only lore and modders left? So slim that vanilla Skyrim is, modding is a necessity. 255, come on. I'd be at like 1500 in couple of weeks if I didn't have to argue for hours with CTD's every day.

 

And why would Betty care? Why must there be a limit? They afraid we will change the game so much. That we can resell it as a 100 x better version of Skyrim with more content created by fans in a few months, than a paid game company can conjure in a period of 6 years?

 

:mad:

 

edit: aww crap noticed this is Fallout forum, sorry, but think it applies anyway.

Edited May 2, 2012 by ibble

[MichikoUnknownFox]

I suspect you have a lot of clothing mods, which will really eat up your mod limit. Try combining all of your clothing and armor mods into one giant mod so that it only counts as one. You can do that easily in FO3Edit if you know what you're doing.

 

For mods that do little tweaks like to game settings (GMST) or global variables, you can also combine those into a single mod. I have a text file for globals that I run via the "bat" console command whenever I start a new game, so that I don't need to have an extra mod loaded just for that. Globals like Timescale and stuff save into your save file once set, so they don't need to be put into a mod that's constantly loaded. Unlike GMST, which resets when you exit the game if I'm not mistaken, and therefore need to be loaded every time the game starts.

 

Bethesda didn't put the mod limit just to annoy us or because they don't care. If I'm not mistaken, the 255 mod limit is probably the first convenient and easily programmable limit at the first hexadecimal end. Just like with most things about computers, breaking that barrier can be a bit more complicated, because the next limit would have been 65535 mods, which means the developers would have had to prepare for the possibility of somebody actually loading 65535 total plugins, and an insane amount of testing. I dunno that doesn't seem reasonable at all.

 

I think 255 is reasonable, because the game tends to be less stable anyway when you have too many mods, unless none of your mods conflict at all.

 

If you know what you're doing, you can easily and smartly reduce your mod count. And let's face it, the reality is that you probably don't even use or need a lot of the mods you have loaded, so you can probably get rid of some of them.

[ibble]

Thanks for rising them hopes again! I was thinking combining mods would not help as amount would still be the same, but as it is ID limit problem you moved my eyes a little further. I'm left with question if object ID is easily changed, if that's so. This could be a simple problem to get past. In theory.

 

Do FOD3Edit work with Skyrim though? Don't think WRYEBash can do this job, or?

 

Suppose all answers are here,

http://fookunity.com/forum/showthread.php?t=202

 

Thank you kristjin

Bethesda, in their wisdom , has chosen to give the finger to every enthusiast/modder/player-who-uses-mods by releasing the 1.5 patch which implements changes that make .esp files an unstable way to release a mod.

 

Although you may still use them, you must bloat every savegame file by making *every object in the mod a persistent reference.* Talk about bloat! Don't do this. It's a headache for you, and fattens the savegame.

 

Instead, the easy way is to release your mod as an esm/bsa pack, just like DLC's and the rest of the native fallout data.

 

Of course, the difficulty here is that if you have a big mod with lots of optional esp files, there is more work ahead. We'll get to that.

 

To create an ESM, you can use FOMM or FO3Plugin. [Originally I had typed FO3Edit by mistake - was a typo. Find FO3Plugin on Nexus here. THANK YOU to LordBlazen for asking for clarification, or I wouldn't have caught this.] I prefer FO3Plugin because it has greater functionality and is easier to use than TESSnip as included in FOMM.

 

So, we will assume you have already created your mod in your .esp file, and we will also assume that you have added meshes and textures to the data folder, so you will also need a BSA.

 

Install and open FO3Plugin. (Easier said than done.) Once open, open up your .esp file. Now just select File, Save As, and type the name of your mod and be sure you end the filename with .esm. FO3Plugin will not only save the esp with the esm extension but will also make the necessary changes to the header flags and so on to make this a functioning master file.

 

Since you also have added some meshes and textures, these need to be wrapped up into a bsa file. This is slick as dog slobber on a doorknob using FOMM. (There are other ways you can do this, but I'm just giving you my opinions here, so take it or leave it.) First, make a folder on your desktop and call it whatever you want. I usually go with "MODNAME BSA".

 

We will treat this folder as if it were the data folder for fallout 3.

 

Fill the folder with the meshes and textures (or anything else you created) relevant to your mod, being sure to recreate the appropriate folder structure. Again, treating this folder as though it were the data folder for FO3.

 

NOTHING ELSE SHOULD GO IN THIS FOLDER.

 

That means no esm files, esp files, read me files, thumbnails, nothing at all.

 

Open FOMM and click on "BSA Creator." In the creator dialog box, click "Add Folder" and then browse to the folder on your desktop. Select it. This will add a list of the files going into your BSA. It's really a clever idea to at least give this list a glance and make sure the folder structure in the "Relative Path" column is where you want your files to appear in the Fallout 3 data folder. If not, fix the structure in the folder. Also check for files that don't belong in the BSA, and have a do-over if necessary.

 

Click "Create BSA" and give the BSA the EXACT SAME NAME as your esm, but with the bsa extension. If you don't do this, you will have more work to do. So do it this way.

 

That's all there is to it. Now you have a BSA with all the necessary folders and data files for your mod, and have turned your esp into an esm, thereby negating the requirement that you make all the objects in your mod persistent.

 

Now, for those of you with complex mods that have lots of options, you have some more work to do. If you choose to release any portion of your mod as an esp, you run a risk of incompatibilities with 1.5. So design decisions should be made - as often as possible - to create a way to set preferences for the mod from within game, and to release the mod as an esm. If you must have external files that are different, you may need to make a variety of ESM's with various options enabled/disabled, and/or tell those using your mod how to pick what they want and make an ESM/BSA out of that.

 

Obviously, the less the player has to do with esm/bsa file creation, the better. KISS must always be the modder's motto. (Keep It Super Simple is my preferred KISS definition.) Because many players aren't uhhh... sufficiently technically minded to handle such operations with skill.

 

It's not too tough, but the big thing is being prepared by planning ahead to incorporate as many options for your mod into in-game settings. Use a terminal, use a pop-up-dialogue, use anything you can to not require the user to do anything except plop your mod's ESM/BSA pack into the data folder and play.

 

Hope this helps!

 

***

 

Okay, so this is my first attempt to write from scratch something useful for public consumption. If I've missed anything important, or just got something plain wrong here, please let me know so I can update the post. Please also be nice.

 

Or for Skyrim more like here.https://creationkitadventures.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/how-to-package-a-bsa-archive-for-skyrim/ FOMM no work with Skyrim.

Edited May 3, 2012 by ibble

[MichikoUnknownFox]

Skyrim should have its own TES Edit version soon, if it doesn't already.

 

Having so many mods is really a problem. :P You gotta deal with it yourself, meaning you have to figure out what kind of balance you want in your game.

 

Personally I like to keep my modding simple, restricted to just the mods that change what I actually want changed. Everything else I mod or combine into my own personal versions of the mods, edited to my liking.

 

My point there is that you gotta figure out what's more important to you: adding every new mod that comes out but ultimately losing stability and having so much clutter in your data folder because of mods you're not even using, or keeping the stability despite a heavily modded game.

 

Check for the stuff you don't even use anymore. If you check you're probably gonna find quite a few of those. I used to have extra weapon mods and armor mods that I equipped like once then replaced with better stuff as soon as I found them. Then I never saw or used the weapons or armor again. Maybe I sold them to some vendor. Wasted .esp space. D: I instead used the resources to make my own compilation pack of these mods in a single .esp, so I can still use the graphics but free up the plugin space that each of these individual mods would've used.

 

Stuff like that heheh. :dance:

[ibble]

Coming to thoughts thats it's not id limit yet, it's save game limit/ram limit. I get rid of CTD by disabling the house mod I have all the cloth on display in. Didn't expect to meet my comps limit in game like that, CTD comes when trying to load other things.

What's eating save game size? Stuff in chests or stuff laying around/on mannequinns?

 

Tested with smaller save, and it works. Wish I had a huge save optional to test...

Also tested a mod that never really worked before, but do on a smaller save. It's dova warehouse and its quite huge in clutter. It's definitely a size problem. Skyrim can handle more than 21mb save file cant it?

Know there is a mod cleaning up clutter, I like the idea of world being how I left it, so not running it. Maybe it could help.

 

All the work I had putting it on display :/

 

well most of the work was getting it all to work well :thumbsup:

 

Loads of NPC's, house mods frequently visited full of fancy clutter, wardrobe for all the beautiful armors to also have a selection for custom NPC's and easy display control option. How can you ask me to remove it? My game will become boring as hell without it. And really, it is what I do. Enriching the game heavily, playing in between, reaching pinaccles. Like said, my cloth pack was just at a point where i was to start on weapons, until these limits occured. It's a huge perfection project with loads of biproducts, the base of my gaming. Can't even finish the base it seems.

Edited May 4, 2012 by ibble

[MichikoUnknownFox]

Save game bloat and similar can be caused by a lot of things. If you have very long respawn times, or no respawn times like in vanilla, for example. Each area that should not (yet) respawn is saved into your save game (to record all the things like where the corpses are, what items you touched, doors opened, computers hacked, etc.) until it's time for it to respawn as well.

 

The more kinds of items that exist in more places, the more your save file will grow as well. It doesn't matter if they're in chests or out in the world for save games. The game has to record each item kind and tell your save file where they are in the game world, so the next time you visit, they should still be there. Of course, again, if it's a respawning place it's less of an issue.

 

That being said, houses will be a big culprit for save game file sizes if you like to collect too many things.