Modding with Open Better Cities...

[Ranokoa]

Well i want to make a mod of mine compatible with Open better cities, but umm... i just downloaded it (I really have no intention of playing it aside from testing) and looking inside the zip file i umm.. grew a large question.

 

When modding for Open Better Cities, and the mod will affect the outside and inside of each city i mean EVERY one of em just REALLY small mod though not much added, do i.. have to open every single file with a city name in the construction set? If not what files specifically do i have to open? And generally my experience has been when modding with an ESP opened and not setting it as active but, especially multiple esp's at once, and saving as a brand new esp, it does not have the best of outcomes and a lot of things are either missing or bugged. What uhhh.. what do i have to do in order to mod for Open Better Cities so i can make a completely seperate ESP altogether.

 

Be well, sleep well, fight well, live long.

~Ranokoa

[Vagrant0]

Don't know how well it actually works, but I did something like this with my fighters guild mod.

 

Basically, I accepted that there would be two possible states for the town. In one state, the town and NPCs would be located in their own worldspace, in the other state, the town and NPCs would be located in the Tamriel worldspace. I didn't need to have the open cities mod installed or active to implement such a system, I just had to have some idea about how it was constructed and make some assumptions.

 

My solution was to have a script which checked if the player entered any of the town worldspaces. If the player entered Chorrolworld, it would be assumed that Opencities Chorrol wasn't active. To detect for the opposite state, I placed some markers in Tamriel which were behind the walls (in space which was normally non-accessible). With these markers I used distance checks to see if the player ever stepped inside those walls within the Tamriel worldspace. In retrospect, trigger zones would have likely been a better solution. This system allowed for reliable detection as to which worldspace the town was linked to, and could trigger the moving/enabling/disabling or other features. This was used as a primary switch and always remained active so that incase someone without an opencities mod had hopped behind the walls, they wouldn't screw up their game.

 

To this, just incase the player wasn't going to go around visiting every town, I made use of another part of the initial assumption. Whichever worldspace the town existed in, NPCs would also exist in. Given that every town has a few low processing enabled, persistent NPCs which have packages that tell them to stand outside an interior, but do not tell them to go outside the city walls, I reasoned that I could use these NPCs to detect which worldspace the town was in. This was one component of a deadman switch script. After a day or so, and depending on the time of the day, the script would check the location of one of those actors. If more than 1 actor existed in a given worldspace, it would be assumed that all actors existed in that worldspace. After few days of checking, this portion of the script would disengage, and the scripting would just assume that the town existed in the Tamriel worldspace set things up that way once, and stop checking. If this wasn't the case, things would still be switched based around the logic of the primary script as soon as the player entered the town worldspace.

 

Or atleast, that's how I think it went. You don't need to have any of the mods installed or active, all you need to do is have some idea where things are positioned within that mod. Not sure what it is exactly you are needing to do, but most everything can be moved or enabled through scripting. If you don't need to use persistent objects, you could just place those objects within both worldspaces. As long as you don't touch the terrain, there shouldn't be any significant conflicts or issues.

[Ranokoa]

That is way too much work for what i intended lol! I just wanted to make a compatible version of Ranokoas City Stealth Enterance lol. Someone did something of the likes as was inspired by me, however, it was far from the original's quality, albeit the originals quality was not masterful but definetly much more than acceptable by most of the stingiest mod downloaders. But it is good to know that there is a way around having to actually open the cities in the CS. Considering the hassle it would take from my own expertise with scripting to do it that way i think that this will simply suffice:

Open the city mods individually so i have an exact position of where the walls are, do not set as active, and make the stealthy enterance. Save individually for each city.

OR because i have never had to open an esp without setting it as active for an exterior in vanilla so i don't know how it will go, if it complicates the mod by having the city mod loaded nonetheless and not saved over actively then i will just get the exact coordinence from city wall by positioning the stealthy enterances and recording the number data, then just do as you say and have none be loaded and simply individually place them and have them be each city their own mod.

 

I would like to know, however, which is better to do. Would it mess anything up if i loaded the city without setting it as active and then saved as a seperate esp with the stealthy enterance there?

[Vagrant0]

I would like to know, however, which is better to do. Would it mess anything up if i loaded the city without setting it as active and then saved as a seperate esp with the stealthy enterance there?

Yes, loading any inactive .esp can cause significant problems and conflicts. Which is why you should almost never load more than one .esp at a time.

 

Unless I'm mistaken, none of the better opencities actually move any of the walls, so the wall position should be the same in both Oblivion.esm and those cities. If not, you'll either need to use deisolation methods, or write down the positions of objects that exist within the better opencities mods, and place your objects based on those positions within a new .esp without any the mods loaded.

[Eiries]

So your essentially just adding a trapdoor and want it to be compatible with Open Cities? Try first deleting anything added to the city's worldspace (ie trapdoors, etc) and resave your mod as a seperate file (Ranokoas City Stealth Enterance OC or something like that.)

 

Now, load any Open Cities type mod you need to use along with your new mod which should be set to active. Technically anything you deleted from the worldspace should still be sitting the CS limbo, so now you're free to place them into the Open Cities version of the town. Save your new mod and you're good to go.

 

I'm not a superb mod-creating guru, but I don't see why it should be any more complicated than that. Good luck.