Creation Kit with Mod Organizer

[lofgren]

Last night I made the switch from NMM to Mod Organizer. While it's immediately obvious that Mod Organizer is the superior tool, I was only willing to make the switch because the Mod Organizer guide and download page assured me that MO is compatible with the Creation Kit.

 

By "compatible," I assumed that they meant that mods installed with mod organizer show up and can be edited in the CK, not just that you can launch the CK from the MO interface. Yet when I launch the CK from inside MO, I don't see any of my mods.

 

While I am loving almost everything else about MO, the inability to edit mods installed through it or to make my own mods dependent on them pretty much breaks the tool for me. Am I doing something wrong here or is that standard behavior?

[isophe]

That's strange, you should be able to edit the mods that appear in MO. Unfortunately I'm unable to help you, but I can confirm that if your .esps and .esms appear properly in the load order (right window), then it should appear when you load CK as well. Additionally for things like texture replacers, if you've marked them as active in MO's left window, they'll be usable in CK too.

 

Have you linked any other tools or programs to CK? Ex. BOSS, TES5Edit, Wrye Bash.. if so, do your mods appear?

 

 

 

...

Also a quick tip when you (hopefully) get it working with CK - any and all new .esps you create, any new facegendata you export via Ctrl+F4, etc. will be placed in the "overwrite" folder in MO's directory - not in Skyrim's Data folder.

[lofgren]

All other tools I have linked so far appear to be working properly, including Bash, Loot, FNIS, and SUM.

 

It's good to know this ought to be a solvable problem. I will stick with MO for now and just keep the current most active mods in my data folder as I always have until I find a fix.

[lofgren]

Well I managed to get the mods to show up by running Mod Organizer in admin mode, but now I find that I can't compile scripts.

 

It's frustrating, but the simple fact is that as amazing as MO is, if I can't mod then I can't use it. I guess that's several hours of my life down the drain.

[IsharaMeradin]

Found this on the bug tracker for MO:

http://issue.tannin.eu/tbg/modorganizer/issues/268

 

The reply is direct from MO's author. Looks like doing scripted mods with MO installed assets is impossible.

 

MO then is a good tool for the average user that wants to keep a "vanilla" install and have different profiles and such.

MO is not a good tool for mod creators that wish to work with scripting.

 

That said, you can set up a directory under the Data > Scripts folder where you can copy paste all of the game's source scripts as well as any mod scripts you need to work with. The SkyrimEditor.INI can then be modified to point to this folder. You can even go so far as setting Notepad++ to compile from that directory and output into MO's overwrite directory. Then the CK just becomes a means of linking the scripts you create and compile in Notepad++ with the records.

 

It wouldn't be a complete "vanilla" setup any more but everything you work with would be isolated from where actual stock files are located.

[lofgren]

Yeah, I found that info and a few suggested workarounds. I don't care about keeping a pure data folder. I was hoping that MO would make it easier to switch between Dawnguard/Dragonborn/Hearthfire scripts and Vanilla, and also would keep all of the scripts and whatnot for my mods all in one place so I didn't have to go searching through the scripts and source folders for them.

 

Mostly I am just annoyed because in my opinion this rather seriously undermines the author's claim that MO "works with every third party tool tested" and "can be made to work with almost any workflow." "Works" to me means "functions without inconvenience." Installing, reinstalling, and uninstalling scripts using another program entirely whenever I want to edit them is a major hassle (as suggested in the MO guide). Tweaking the scripts directories is slightly less annoying but does not afford me the flexibility that MO is supposed to offer. Basically the "workaround" is "don't use MO if you want to script."

 

I did see a forum post where somebody at least presenting themselves as if they know what they are talking about claimed that the MO creators are working on 64-bit support, which would solve this issue, which make MO the undisputed king of mod tools. I will keep an eye out for that. In the meantime I will just dirty up my data folder with whatever scripts I need for modding. c'est le vie.

[IsharaMeradin]

I have succeeded. I can get the CK to compile & save brand new scripts within the MO structure

 

Steps:

1. In MO's overwrite folder add a Scripts folder.

2. Copy paste the Source folder that contains all the source files from the game into this new Scripts folder.

3. Edit SkyrimEditor.ini or use SkyrimEditorCustom.ini and change the following entries to match your folders

[Papyrus]
sScriptSourceFolder = "z:\Apps\Mod Organizer\Overwrite\Scripts\Source"
sScriptCompiledFolder = "z:\Apps\Mod Organizer\Overwrite\Scripts\"

This allows you to create NEW scripts that reference the stock source files.

To work with scripts from MO installed mods, you must first save the script before you can compile it. You can do this by opening the script editor and saving.

 

One drawback, you can only use the Papyrus Script Manager to compile. You cannot compile from the script editor window.

 

It is the best solution I can come up with to try and keep the game folder as clean as possible.

 

EDIT: I may have spoke too soon. The files were created. But when I went back to MO, there were error messages indicating that it had problems with the compiling process. You can still use the structure I suppose and compile with Notepad++ outside of MO. Or just wait to see if they make a 64 bit friendly version of the program.

Edited July 1, 2014 by IsharaMeradin

[lofgren]

I think I have found something that will work for me.

 

I created a batch script that will compile through Notepad++ reliably. It looks like this:

set Overwrite=C:\Games\Mod Organizer\overwrite\scripts\source
set SKSE=E:\Games\Mod Organizer\mods\SKSE Scripts\scripts\source
set DragonBorn=E:\Games\Mod Organizer\mods\Dragonborn Scripts\scripts\source
set Hearthfire=E:\Games\Mod Organizer\mods\Hearthfire scripts\scripts\source
set Dawnguard=E:\Games\Mod Organizer\mods\Dawnguard Scripts\scripts\source
set Vanilla=E:\Games\Mod Organizer\mods\original scripts\Scripts\source
set AllScripts=%~2;%Overwrite%;%SKSE%;%Dragonborn%;%Hearthfire%;%Dawnguard%;%Vanilla%;

if not exist "%Overwrite%\%~1" (
	xcopy "%~2\%~1" "%Overwrite%\"
	)

"C:\Games\Steam\SteamApps\common\Skyrim\Papyrus Compiler\PapyrusCompiler.exe" %1 -f="E:\Games\Mod Organizer\mods\original scripts\Scripts\Source\TESV_Papyrus_Flags.flg" -i="%AllScripts%" -o="C:\Games\Mod Organizer\overwrite\scripts"
pause

This is called from Notepad++ with the run command suggested on this page:

 

http://www.creationkit.com/Notepad%2B%2B_Setup

 

 

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\skyrim\Papyrus Compiler\ScriptCompile.bat" "$(FILE_NAME)" "$(CURRENT_DIRECTORY)"

 

It means no more compiling from the CK, but I tend to keep track of where my scripts are stored anyway.

Edited July 3, 2014 by lofgren

[IsharaMeradin]

Well, now that a means of doing full scripts have been developed. How about a workflow for script fragments? I suspect that the above will not work with them.

[lofgren]

No, but next step is to test to see if the semicolon-separated multi-folder format works for the CK as well. The CK just calls the script compiler using the folders provided in the ini, at least according to the wiki. I've already spent too much time on this today which means I probably won't be working on it until middle of next week, but if somebody wants to run with it that would be awesome.