MarkInMKUK Posted February 18, 2011 Author Share Posted February 18, 2011 Hmmm ... it seems I managed to misunderstand the criteria for merging mods - I thought a mod, plus it's patches, which affected IT and nothing else, would be an ideal candidate ffor merging. I'll give up on the whole notion I think. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Herculine Posted February 18, 2011 Share Posted February 18, 2011 @Ferryt: The CS does indeed have a function to "merge all loaded plugins", but for some reason (which I'm sorry I can't recall the exact details of right now) I eventually found the GECKO to be more reliable and useful for merging, plus it does a lot of other cool stuff that the CS doesn't but I won't list all of that here. TES4Edit is very similar to TES4Gecko in functionality, but I believe that the GECKO is the more complex and versatile of the two. My advice would be to try merging something with the CS, then if it doesn't work for whatever reason, try one of the other utilities. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lehcar Posted February 18, 2011 Share Posted February 18, 2011 (edited) Both are extremely useful and easy to use little tools and absolutely vital for me. TESEdit is great to use in conjunction with Gecko, because it lets you actually go through individual records of what the ESP edits (which are very nicely organized so you can find things easily), so you can delete stuff you don't want in there, like if something's defective or you made a mistake but don't want to trash the whole thing, or if you accidentally edited something you shouldn't have, you can completely remove it. Personally this is how I like to do it because Gecko's "clean plugin" function did not work well for me. Edited February 18, 2011 by Lehcar Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Herculine Posted February 18, 2011 Share Posted February 18, 2011 @Lehcar: Thank you for going into a more detailed description. As it turns out I was getting TES4Edit confused with the TES4 Plugin Utilityy, the latter of the two being the utility I was intending to compare to the TES4Gecko. I apologize if I inadvertently confused anyone I was trying to help. And since I'm linking to utilities, there's also TESSnip. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ferryt Posted February 18, 2011 Share Posted February 18, 2011 MarkInMKUK's question has not been addressed, but I'll restate it (as I understand it), since I'm curious as well. I have the KOTN DLC. I also have the KOTN unofficial patch. What could be the problem with merging these two? That makes no sense to me, either. Anyway, Herculine, I'm aware of the stated ability of the CS to merge .esp files, but I, too, remember reading somewhere that there was an issue with this and I didn't really want to take a chance with it. I'll look into TESGeko and TESEdit, though. My main question about all this is whether or not there's actually a difference in the behavior of two merged mods, compared to simply recreating the functionality of both of them in one mod. Would the automatically-merged mod be bigger than a made-from-scratch combo, for instance? What if I'm merging three mods and "B" is dependent upon "A", but "C" is completely independent from both, such that "B" would have to come lower than "A" in the load order. Would TESGeko, or even the CS, automatically do it right, would it get it right half the time (i.e. flip a coin and pray) or would it not even make a difference in a merged mod? Quite simply, I know how I would manually merge those two mods, but I have no idea if the auto-merge does it exactly the same way, or whether it maintains the resources of both of them separately, somehow linking them together. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Herculine Posted February 18, 2011 Share Posted February 18, 2011 MarkInMKUK's question has not been addressed, but I'll restate it (as I understand it), since I'm curious as well. I have the KOTN DLC. I also have the KOTN unofficial patch. What could be the problem with merging these two? That makes no sense to me, either. Anyway, Herculine, I'm aware of the stated ability of the CS to merge .esp files, but I, too, remember reading somewhere that there was an issue with this and I didn't really want to take a chance with it. I'll look into TESGeko and TESEdit, though. My main question about all this is whether or not there's actually a difference in the behavior of two merged mods, compared to simply recreating the functionality of both of them in one mod. Would the automatically-merged mod be bigger than a made-from-scratch combo, for instance? What if I'm merging three mods and "B" is dependent upon "A", but "C" is completely independent from both, such that "B" would have to come lower than "A" in the load order. Would TESGeko, or even the CS, automatically do it right, would it get it right half the time (i.e. flip a coin and pray) or would it not even make a difference in a merged mod? Quite simply, I know how I would manually merge those two mods, but I have no idea if the auto-merge does it exactly the same way, or whether it maintains the resources of both of them separately, somehow linking them together. If mod B is dependent upon mod A, merging mod B to mod A will create a resulting mod C that is still dependent upon mod A. In other words, merging the KOTN UOP to KOTN and renaming the resulting file KOTN will cause KOTN to look for KOTN when the game loads, thus causing really bad juju to happen. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shadowfen Posted February 18, 2011 Share Posted February 18, 2011 (edited) MarkInMKUK's question has not been addressed, but I'll restate it (as I understand it), since I'm curious as well. I have the KOTN DLC. I also have the KOTN unofficial patch. What could be the problem with merging these two? That makes no sense to me, either. I would think that KOTN DLC in particular is a bad candidate for merging with anything because it is "special" (i.e. has issues that make it extremely difficult work with or mod using the straight CS - much less doing anything fancy with). I'll look into TESGeko and TESEdit, though. My main question about all this is whether or not there's actually a difference in the behavior of two merged mods, compared to simply recreating the functionality of both of them in one mod. It depends on which two mods you are choosing to merge and your skill at recreating the functionality in a single mod. Yes there can be a difference in behavior - especially if there is any kind of a conflict between the two mods, or if the mods have voice files or bsa files. Would the automatically-merged mod be bigger than a made-from-scratch combo, for instance? Usually not. (Could be larger than a scratch mod if any of the original mods were dirty.) What if I'm merging three mods and "B" is dependent upon "A", but "C" is completely independent from both, such that "B" would have to come lower than "A" in the load order. Would TESGecko, or even the CS, automatically do it right, would it get it right half the time (i.e. flip a coin and pray) or would it not even make a difference in a merged mod? The CS won't get it right. With TESGecko you must specify the priority (essentially the load order) of the mods that you wish to merge. Load order is vitally important when merging because the overridden records will simply not be in the merged mod file. Only the winner's (in this case, the last merged) records are kept. Quite simply, I know how I would manually merge those two mods, but I have no idea if the auto-merge does it exactly the same way, or whether it maintains the resources of both of them separately, somehow linking them together. If any of the mods you which to merge have sound files or bsa files, you will have to modify/create/repackage those files to work with your merged mod. Much easier to avoid merging files which have bsas or voice files. Edited February 18, 2011 by Shadowfen Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shadowfen Posted February 18, 2011 Share Posted February 18, 2011 If mod B is dependent upon mod A, merging mod B to mod A will create a resulting mod C that is still dependent upon mod A. In other words, merging the KOTN UOP to KOTN and renaming the resulting file KOTN will cause KOTN to look for KOTN when the game loads, thus causing really bad juju to happen. You can use Wrye Bash (I happen to like it) or TES Gecko to edit the master list of the merged mod to remove it looking to itself as a master... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ferryt Posted February 18, 2011 Share Posted February 18, 2011 Hmm ... OK. KOTN was a bad example. Repeat question using <fill in your favorite DLC name>. MarkInMKUK said "I thought a mod, plus it's patches, which affected IT and nothing else, would be an ideal candidate ffor merging." Seems reasonable to me. He was talking about merging each DLC with its relevant patches -- not merging all the DLCs together, which someone misinterpreted him to mean. The question still stands. Why is merging a DLC with its patches a Bad Thing in general (the special case of KOTN notwithstandig), or did we both misinterpret the answer to that question? Now, Shadowfen mentioned that a mod that is associated with a .bsa file will have issues if you merge it. Is that the reason? I don't recall, right offhand, if all the DLCs have a .bsa file. If they don't, then what about those? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shadowfen Posted February 18, 2011 Share Posted February 18, 2011 (edited) Hmm ... OK. KOTN was a bad example. Repeat question using <fill in your favorite DLC name>. MarkInMKUK said "I thought a mod, plus it's patches, which affected IT and nothing else, would be an ideal candidate ffor merging." Seems reasonable to me. He was talking about merging each DLC with its relevant patches -- not merging all the DLCs together, which someone misinterpreted him to mean. The question still stands. Why is merging a DLC with its patches a Bad Thing in general (the special case of KOTN notwithstandig), or did we both misinterpret the answer to that question? Now, Shadowfen mentioned that a mod that is associated with a .bsa file will have issues if you merge it. Is that the reason? I don't recall, right offhand, if all the DLCs have a .bsa file. If they don't, then what about those? Okay, with the exceptions of KOTN and SI that wouldn't work and Battlehorn that I know absolutely nothing about because I don't have it, other DLCs could possibly be merged with their relevant patches (making sure to keep backups of the originals!!!) as long as the patch mods do not have their own bsas or voice files and the merged mod adopts the name of the original DLC so that the merged mod can use the original DLC bsa and voice files without having to muck around with them. The general reason why merging the DLCs with anything is not recommended - even with the unofficial patches - is because many modders expect the Oblivion/SI and DLC to be "gold standard" (unmodified) for their mods and they may not work with a DLC/UOP combo because the merged file changed something that the mod relied upon - it can even cause CTDs that cannot be fixed because the mod can no longer be "inserted" into the "load order" between the DLC and the UOP for it. Edited February 18, 2011 by Shadowfen Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts