Strange Happenings with Placing Spawns

[Noggog]

So, I was drooling over WAC's set of new creatures: http://waalx.com/RealSwordsForum/index.php?sid=19ad79e095afc392828ebae69ac5b833

I didn't like that the only way to get them was to use his whole overhaul. Lame in my opinion. I decided to start a project of my own which would be to use his master file, and manually re-place stuff that I wanted.

 

I started out by just adding a lion near skingrad to get used to things. All I had was the WAC master file and my custom file with only the placement of the lion from the master file. It crashed when I entered the area.

 

After some poking around, I decided to activate the WAC.esp file, which has the overhaul part of things. Magically, it didn't crash, and my lion was there. Okay, it needs something from WAC.esp to work. I slowly started deleting parts of the WAC.esp in TES4Edit in order to pinpoint what it was that was letting my lion spawn without crashing. I eventually got the WAC.esp to 0KB, there was nothing at all left in TES4edit.

 

Okay, so it was nothing? I disabled the empty shell of WAC.esp. It crashed. Enabled it. It worked. Renamed WAC.esp to jWAC.esp, it crashed. Renamed it back to WAC.esp, it worked.

 

This is really strange to me. What is it about having a WAC.esp file with nothing in it that is allowing things to work?

[DragonAviator]

So, I was drooling over WAC's set of new creatures: http://waalx.com/Rea...28ebae69ac5b833

I didn't like that the only way to get them was to use his whole overhaul. Lame in my opinion. I decided to start a project of my own which would be to use his master file, and manually re-place stuff that I wanted.

 

I started out by just adding a lion near skingrad to get used to things. All I had was the WAC master file and my custom file with only the placement of the lion from the master file. It crashed when I entered the area.

 

After some poking around, I decided to activate the WAC.esp file, which has the overhaul part of things. Magically, it didn't crash, and my lion was there. Okay, it needs something from WAC.esp to work. I slowly started deleting parts of the WAC.esp in TES4Edit in order to pinpoint what it was that was letting my lion spawn without crashing. I eventually got the WAC.esp to 0KB, there was nothing at all left in TES4edit.

 

Okay, so it was nothing? I disabled the empty shell of WAC.esp. It crashed. Enabled it. It worked. Renamed WAC.esp to jWAC.esp, it crashed. Renamed it back to WAC.esp, it worked.

 

This is really strange to me. What is it about having a WAC.esp file with nothing in it that is allowing things to work?

Try copying the lion and renaming it in the CS and saving it as anew item into a mod you own. That will perserve the (renamed) Lion, give you ownership and a mod to place it in the Oblivion world.

Cheers

DragonAviator

[Noggog]

Honestly... I just renamed my custom patch WAC.esp and it works.

 

Maybe he implemented something in his .esm to make your game crash if you aren't using a mod named WAC.esp? I don't know. Don't really care enough to figure it out.

 

I'm just going to leave my custom patch named WAC.esp and have at it... haha

Edited February 6, 2011 by Leviathan1753

[Hickory]

The reason that WAC.esp is needed is to load the meshes and textures from the bsa files, that is why your custom WAC.esp works.

[Noggog]

The reason that WAC.esp is needed is to load the meshes and textures from the bsa files, that is why your custom WAC.esp works.

 

Ah, so the BSA files are linked to a certain .esp name? Even if that mod doesn't specifically ask to load them it triggers the load?

[Hickory]

All bsa files are processed by the game, but the esm file will not force them to load. You need a plugin (esp) to actually make use of them. A bsa is usually loaded by a plugin of the same name, or that contains the same name, as in the vanilla 'Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa'. Soy your plugin could equally be called WAC - myplugin.esp, and the game will load the textures from WAC.bsa.