Weye. Can't We All Just Get Along?

[David Brasher]

As a total noob, my first quest mod from a year ago was based out of a house in the quiet little village of Weye. I did not know at that time that everyone else was modding Weye into a noisy metropolis.

 

So I am moving my house out to the edge of Weye where it won't interfere with the six most popular Weye mods on TES Nexus. But I want more. I think it should be possible to play my mod plus four others (and two existing patches.)

 

Two of the mods totally conflict, so I am not worrying about making them compatible with the other mods, just with my mod.

 

My Mod: The House of Healing

 

Four almost compatible mods I want to make work together along with House of Healing:

Ruined Tail's Tale + Patch

AKF Weye

Region Revive - Lake Rumare + Patch

Weye Dog Shop

 

Two mods that cannot be used with the complete set above:

WEYE_TICS

Dragon Caption's - The Imperial Fortress of Weye

 

AKF Weye and Region Revive - Lake Rumare are set up to work together with a patch, but they conflict with WEYE_TICS, which conflicts with Dragon Caption's - The Imperial Fortress of Weye. These three groups of mods each have a great number of buildings all occupying the same space, and are totally incompatible unless one of the modders moved all their structures and changed their mod.

 

Ruined Tail's Tale + Patch, Weye Dog Shop, and the upcoming version of House of Healing will all be on the edges of Weye and fairly compatible with the others, but Weye Dog Shop tends to get buried under dirt, rocks, and trees for no good reason.

 

The second compatibility group:

Ruined Tail's Tale + Patch

WEYE_TICS

 

The third compatibility group:

Ruined Tail's Tale + Patch

Dragon Caption's - The Imperial Fortress of Weye

Weye Dog Shop

 

I do not have uploading rights to any of the mods but my own, so all the changes I make will have to be within my own mod, and it will need to be later in the load order than all the other Weye mods. Otherwise it would just be as simple as pie to merge a bunch of mods and synchronize the landscape.

 

Every time someone makes a Weye mod, they change the landscape heights and contours. The modded landscape often stretches beyond where it really needs to go so that it conflicts with the adjacent mod. Mod dirt, and conversely, mod cleaning also cause problems in this case. So whatever I try, I seem to end up with tears in the landscape between cells in Weye.

 

So after all my rambling, here is the question:

 

What I want to do, is have my mod register a change for the height and contours of all exterior cells in Weye so that if my mod is loaded last, I will control all the land and there will be no tears.

 

But how does this work? Would I just have to make one superficial change to every cell, and then my entire shape of that cell would be locked in as a change to override vanilla Oblivion and all mods loaded before mine? Or is a cell divided into many pieces? It could conceivably be tens of thousands of pieces, or scores, or dozens, or four. I don't know how many superficial changes I need to make in one cell to get the game to use my entire cell shape rather than vanilla Oblivion's or some other mod's.

 

How many superficial changes must I make?

[Vagrant0]

Offhand, I'd be tempted to think that this is a case for deisolation and having two versions of your mod, one which is stand-alone, another which uses one of the weye mods as a deisolated master. Then only change the cells which belong to your mod, but these cells can cross into the territory of that one weye mod. Deisolation with multiple .esp mods can be a bit more tricky, and may not be a viable solution.

[David Brasher]

Thanks for the advice!

 

Speaking from ignorance, that does sound tricky. And it sounds like it might not be doable.

 

Maybe it would be better to try to make agreements with mod authors so that several of these mods could be merged. I am afraid diplomacy is not my forte.

 

I am guessing there is no easy answer to this problem, because there have been so few replies.