FalloutSnip (TESVSnip for Fallout 4)

[VarekRaith]

http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1548366-fyi-to-potential-mod-users-tesvsnip-mods-on-the-nexus/?do=findComment&comment=24503518

[jet4571]

They never provided proof that Snip was the problem. I have several mods made exclusively with TESVSnip before the CK was released that is still in my Skyrim load order and not a single corrupt save because of them. Until the champion of Anti Snip comes forth with evidence that I requested when he was trying to get TESVSnip removed from the Nexus provides said proof that it will indeed corrupt a save game then I will assume it is fear mongering based on mods that were made by those who didn't know what they were doing and it was that inexperience that made the mods with TESVSnip corrupt saves.

 

I do believe the version of Snip in this thread isn't ready yet and I have only briefly used it to look at the data structure and there were way to many unknowns for my taste. Until it is updated more and as good as pre Skyrim versions then "use at your own risk" applies. But that use at your own risk applies for any and all mods including what the official tools can be used to make. Yes Skyrim's CK has made dirty edits like when I was working on a worldspace for the Vilja mod and never opened Tamriel or Solitude worldspaces and no vanilla cells were opened and yet there were a couple dirty edits in Tamriel, one in Solitude and a couple vanilla cells were in the mod. So yes even using the official tools can add problems and the champion of anti-Snip swears it is infallible.

 

Fun fact the majority of corrupt saves I have had was because of load order changes. I used to use Wryebash until it rearranged my load order 1 too many times because it requires BOSS. Everytime the load order changed game instability and corrupt saves would start to crop up. I stopped using the tool and no more corrupt saves. I can play Skyrim for as many hours as I want without any CTD's because I manually deal with my load order and new mods always at the bottom of the list.

 

Then another save corrupter is quick and auto saves and relying on them for all saves. There's many a good reason to not rely on a quick/auto save, the game is still saving while you are playing, things are changing that it is trying to save and once it saved any changes wont be included in the next even if it is incorrect. I only use auto saves as emergency CTD or I goofed up and want to reload, if I want to quit the game I make a new save. I used to use auto saves and quick saves but I got save file corruption, since I started doing saves via the escape menu no more save corruption.

[LordGrievous]

Dirty edits are only really a problem in expansive load orders that edit the same record. Its much better not to have them, but they won't corrupt your savegames, they'll just overwrite changes from other mods. I've never seen anyone complaining about snip who also said that any of the official mod tools were totally infallible.

 

All I can say about snip corrupting games is that multiple people who know a lot more about low level file structure than me said it can cause issues, and I'm inclined to believe them. The alternative is that they for some reason colluded to get snip removed, which is patently absurd.

 

However that said, I still would have rather had mods that corrupted savegames than have no mods at all.

Edited November 23, 2015 by LordGrievous

[nonoodles]

Thanks for the link, Varek. Good to see heads have already been butting over the subject haha, and the thread is pretty much a reprisal of the arguments I read on my own hunt to find the cause behind my corrupted savegame back in 2012.

 

Maybe I've been more reticent on the matter of TESVSnip than I should have been. As I recall, one of the symptoms of a TESVsnip corrupted plugin was what I took to calling the 'sudden void syndrome'. You zone through a door and find yourself in a void instead of the interior cell you expected. Other users experienced other symptoms. All of these problems vanished - never returned to my game even using the 'dirtiest' of mods - when the suspect mods were removed. In short, I'm one of those who had the misfortune of using a TESVSnip-created mod and experiencing the lovely results. The point here is not that you end up with a corrupted save, but that your entire game becomes unplayable.

 

However I am in partial agreement with jet4571: the use of Snip doesn't automatically guarantee a corrupted esp. I know of one mod where the author did use TESVSnip which led to no noticeable corruption...but the only reason why I knew it wasn't corrupted was because I could account for the errors it threw up when it was run through TES5Edit or the Creation Kit (EditorWarnings.txt - very handy). Most of the errors were due to author carelessness/ indifference to cleaning/what-have-you. None of those errors were due to TESVSnip.

 

And with that said, and with the prospect of boatloads of incoming new modders, consider this a 'cards on the table' scenario. It's your choice and decision to use a Snip variant, or mods made with it, nobody's preventing you from exercising your freedom. I hold the firm belief that people have the inalienable right to the pursuit of misery as well as happiness :tongue: Go in with eyes wide open.

[ericbaum10]

Where do I install this?

[exploiteddna]

Where do I install this?

 

nowhere

[KimberJ]

.Net 4.5.2 installed, wouldn't install 3.5, .exe doesn't do anything when trying to install .net 3.5, no idea, though it should be included in 4, idk, anyway, I launch FalloutSnip, set it to open FO4.esm an it says " The type initializer for 'FalloutSnip.Domain.Services.Decompressor' threw an exception. " I'm just wanting to use Snip to view game settings an editing with FO4edit if I can gather a group of settings controlling common elements. Hope everyone is having fun. :D

[jet4571]

"However I am in partial agreement with jet4571: the use of Snip doesn't automatically guarantee a corrupted esp. I know of one mod where the author did use TESVSnip which led to no noticeable corruption...but the only reason why I knew it wasn't corrupted was because I could account for the errors it threw up when it was run through TES5Edit or the Creation Kit (EditorWarnings.txt - very handy). Most of the errors were due to author carelessness/ indifference to cleaning/what-have-you. None of those errors were due to TESVSnip.

 

And with that said, and with the prospect of boatloads of incoming new modders, consider this a 'cards on the table' scenario. It's your choice and decision to use a Snip variant, or mods made with it, nobody's preventing you from exercising your freedom. I hold the firm belief that people have the inalienable right to the pursuit of misery as well as happiness :tongue: Go in with eyes wide open."

 

Those user errors with TES5Edit and the CK would be compounded if both of those programs were basically a hex editor that broke everything up into groups. TESVSnip/FO4Snip is a hex editor at heart. It isn't an easy tool to use and can make a mod that will destroy a save, but then again I can make a mod with xEdit or the official tools that will also destroy a save. changing your save game can destroy a save. removing a mod can destroy a save. Vanilla Skyrim can destroy your save if the right circumstances happen such as relying on quick saves or otherwise known as baking errors into your save.

 

Even if the official tools were released using mods is a gamble when it comes to your game and your save file. Always think that every mod you install can ruin the game and when you install one it isn't as devastating when it finally happens.

[Sharlikran]

My response from the Bethesda Forums:

 

I knew mods would be made with TESVSnip's source code. Impatient people are just going to do whatever they want and don't really care about the integrity of the plugin or how it effects players games or save games. I skimmed over the comments and it still seems some people feel that TESVSnip is safe to use. Then when someone explains that it isn't the response is that they were not part of the development so how would they know. I worked directly with two volunteers to update TESVSnip but the major issues were not resolved. I have seen the updates to the source code being used for Fallout 4 and it has no updates to how Snip uses the XML file. Because of that plugins made with TESVSnip or FalloutSnip won't work correctly.

The reason they won't work correctly is because no version of Snip can handle repeating blocks of data. This is an issue when the block of data has FormIDs in it. When Snip sees a FormID defined in the XML file it can add it to a table of FormIDs. Once you make a plugin and copy a record to the new plugin then the FormIDs from the table are renumbered correctly.

When the XML file's definition is insufficient Snip is copying the data found as binary data. It's simply reading and writing an exact copy of whatever it found from the plugin. Since Snip is not looking at that block of data for FormIDs they are not added to the table of FormIDs managed by Snip. Because the unmanaged FormIDs are saved into the plugin as binary data the Prefix of the FormID is unchanged. The FormIDs from the plugin are then written into your save game exactly how they were specified in the plugin. Each time you add or remove a plugin Skyrim/Fallout 4 will try to renumber the FormIDs but it won't be able to renumber them properly at runtime because they were never valid to begin with.

In order for Skyrim/Fallout 4 to renumber the FormIDs dynamically at runtime the FormIDs need to have the proper Prefix. A FormID Prefix is synonymous with Index just depends on the terminology you use. FormIDs from a record that override Skyrim.esm/Fallout4.esm will have a Prefix of [00] always. If other masters are present they will have the next subsequent Prefix. New records to the plugin will have a Prefix of [01] or the next subsequent number in hex decimal after the last master.

At run time all the FormIDs native to the plugin that are new records with a prefix of [01] will be renumbered to match it's place in your load order. For example a mod that is the 16th mod in your load order will be assigned [0F] always in hex decimal. It is 0F because the original master of the Game Skyrim.esm or Fallout4.esm will be assigned [00] but that is still the first mod. All FormIDs in the repeating blocks of data copied from the master files will remain unchanged. Since Snip can't renumber FormIDs in repeating blocks of data they may not end up with the proper Prefix.

When plugins are loaded into any version of xEdit and the FormID prefix was not renumbered correctly one of several things will happen. One case is when the Prefix is the same as an existing master but the FormID does not exist in the master. Since it does not exist the record belonging to that FormID becomes an Injected Record. Most of the time you should never use injected records and they have very specific purpose. Another error is known as an Unresolved Reference. This happens because the FormID does not exist as a result of not being renumbered properly. The other error is more complex in that xEdit will tell you when FormIDs are the same but the type of record is different. This can happen in an interior or exterior cell when FormIDs are not renumbered properly. Thus changing a Reference [REFR] to a Static object [sTAT] such as a Tree or Bookshelf.

Currently FO4Edit does not have all the FormIDs accounted for. For example, the Race record can not be copied to a new plugin because of all the changes. The only reason FO4Edit is safer to use is because it can handle repeating blocks of data. Some records have undecoded information. As long as the undecoded information does not have a FomrID in it then the record could be copied to another plugin. However, it's still not that simple.

There are 29 new records that didn't exist in Skyrim. Some records don't seem to be used and the rest of the records either changed or had new subrecords added as well as other changes. So it looks like there are about 141 records for Fallout 4 up from 120 for Skyrim. 28 of Skyrim's records that are used for Fallout 4 appear to be unchanged. Those records are, "GMST FACT LTEX ENCH GRAS TREE CLMT RFCT ANIO DEBR CPTH VTYP IPDS ECZN DOBJ MUSC FSTP FSTS SMEN DLBR DLVW RELA ASTP OTFT MATO COLL CLFM" None of which anyone really cares about in these early stages of modding.

Only once the GECK is released can FO4Edit account for all the FormIDs and then become as reliable as all previous versions of xEdit. No version of Snip will ever be reliable until Figment or another author fixes the XML file's capabilities to account for all types of repeating blocks of data.

Edited November 29, 2015 by Sharlikran

[ShinraStrife]

I remember the torrent of posts about corrupted saves. I was lucky enough to stumble upon xEdit first, instead of xSnip, when I started modding or I would have been making corrupted plugins too :O