Dirty Mod wont clean

[Waloosh]

It's recently come to my attention that the mod I've released is dirty.. While I've actually known this for a while, it never gave me any problems in the past, but now my game crashes every time I exit and the CS crashes every time I try to add anything new.

 

So, I went into the details for my mod before loading it and deleted all of the references with a "D" on it to make it ignored. After loading it and saving it, the D's are still there, but aren't being ignored... I've restarted it a few times and done it over and over, but they seem to not want to be ignored.. Am I doing something wrong, or can they not be ignored?

 

Also, I'm getting a new problem. I can reload the mod with no problem whatsoever, but when I add something and try to save, I get the error

 

"Unable to complete operation due to failure removing previous file. Temp file remains.

etc etc"

 

When I click yes, it doesn't save, the box just disappears. Pressing no, obvious, it closes it out... Blah, All I wanted was to create my first good mod, lol.

[Vagrant0]

When cleaning a mod, you cannot just do it blindly or you will have many problems.

 

All those entries marked with "D" are not necessarily things you want to remove from the mod. There are two kinds of things which are notated with a "D" one of these is in relation to things which you placed in the scene, decided you didn't want, and deleted from the scene; the other is related to vanilla objects.

 

In the case of vanilla objects, while it's usually best to have moved these objects out of the scene, or disabled them in the CS (as opposed to deleting them), this is not always something which can be done.

 

When cleaning a mod you need to actually pay attention to what it is that you are trying to have the game ignore. The best way to do this is to load up the mod first, go back to the loading screen, bring up the details of the mod (which will now have object names by the form numbers) and ignore those bits that don't belong. Then close the CS, re-open, load up your mod again (the forms should still be marked for removal), and save the mod.

 

If your mod is loaded, you mark things to be ignored, but try to save the mod without closing the CS, nothing will happen.

 

If it isn't letting you remove some stuff, use TES4Gecko to display the mod, and use that panel to mark things to be ignored and saved. DO NOT USE THE "CLEAN MOD" OPTION AS THIS OFTEN SCREWS THINGS UP.

[Waloosh]

Oh, alright, I'll try that then. Thanks!

 

Heh.. actually, what I really SHOULD do is recreate the entire mod.

 

When I first started this, I had placed it in another area of the game. I raised land, deleted references, etc, and then I placed it in another area of the game, rebuilt the exterior and interior, deleted/moved creatures, flora, clutter, raised land, deleted paths, and I experimented in other parts of the game, so I'm sure there are a lot of errors with this that I'm overlooking.

 

Every time I try to load my mod and create a new plugin, it crashes. So I just may have to start over.

[David Brasher]

You don't need to start over. That is too much work. Just load up an old copy of your mod from before it became broken and work on revising and cleaning that.

 

Items marked with "D" for deleted can be good things. Like VagrantO said, they can also sometimes be hidden where the gamer can't see them so that they won't bother you and so you can make the mod the way you want it to be. So it is not wise to modclean out all of the things marked "D." You probably had excellent reasons for deleting those references.

 

In modcleaning, you read through all the things the mod changes and investigate the ones you are not sure about, and ignore the ones you are absolutely certain of. So if the list says the ruin next to your house was edited, it is possible. You were working next to that area and may have found something you wanted to change. If the list says you changed Martin, and your mod has nothing to do with the main quest, you better ignore that edit and remove it from your mod.