A Guide to HDT-SMP Users/Modders

[Medusa30]

@Medusa30

 

A few questions I have for you to start off a debugging hullabalu.

 

* Which version of the game are you running? (Special edition, Legendary etc)

* Is the nif you are applying SMP to created by you or being adapted from an exisiting mod?

* Does your hair nif contain proxy objects called VirtualGround, collision head, collision body? (with those exact names, triple check for typos) (also try removing the space in the 'collision' names, shouldn't matter but *shrug*)

1. Special Edition (I thought SMP is only available on SSE so I didn't include this info)

2. The .nif was not created by me. It was a model created for LE which I wanted to convert to SE. For this I followed several tutos. In essence I used SSE Nif Optimizer as the first step, then I was beginning to write the .xml file based on an hairstyle from KS Hairdo's as reference for the XML structure and using this guide to understand the properties of the file.

3. Yes, it does.

 

What I did:

When creating a hairstyle that is selectable in the race menu only the first mesh in the .nif file seems be drawn. So I began splitting up the .nif file into ExtraParts (with .tri files) and made sure the that VirtualGround, collision body, and collision head were also included as they were in the original .nif. However it only resulted in all meshes being properly drawn by the game. Later - half a day after my post above - I took a step back from my attempt to create/convert a hairstyle and instead created a wig out of it and then it worked perfectly. So my hypothesis is that SMP doesn't work all that well with race menu assets, but works perfect on armor, clothings, etc. Does it? I mean, there aren't many modders who make hairstyles twice as long as the characters height so I guess there isn't much available to learn from.

 

So the problem seems to be solved for now even though with a workaround I wanted to avoid.

[treota]

Interesting, I have not personally tried to get character hair working so I can not be of much use there sorry.

 

I would have thought SMP would be applicable to anything as long as the mesh is actually present in the game, though it is possible that some kind of merging or renaming goes on behind the scenes with character mesh/hair. Someone with more experience in body mods / hair mods would be good to reach out to for some insight there, I would certainly be interested in learning more about how that works behind the scenes.

[Medusa30]

I'm beginning to think there is a bit more to it than that. Checking the hairstyles of KS Hairdo's I realized that they have Physical collision. So I think it could be because I scaled the bones of the hairstyle I converted. I'll will do some further research.

[zhongjiedong]

so the main guide says that there's plenty of guides out there for bone rigging, could you maybe link some because obviously that's quite a vital part of making this whole thing work. Kind of baffles me that you wouldn't link a guide in the first place.

[treota]

I have intentionally not lingered on rigging.

 

Rigging as a subject is somewhat dependent on the software you choose to use, though the fundamentals are transferable, it should be rather easy to find tutorials on it from whatever your favorite learning source is.

Rigging for Skyrim specifically I can not really vouch for as I have been out of the 'game' so to speak for a long time. The nexus wiki seems pretty legit from a brief glance.
http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/Creating_an_armour_for_Skyrim._Part_1
https://wiki.nexusmods.com/index.php/Category:Tutorials

 

This guide/document is just an investigation of SMP itself, it would be great to have someone make an end to end workflow guide for actual use cases though.

 

Your best bet for up to date information like that is probably the discord servers of some of the active SMP outfit creators.

Edited May 27, 2020 by treota

[CobbleSansPyro]

idk if this is the correct place to ask about this and if this is the case, im sorry, but i REALLY want to fix an issue i have with my physics.

So, im using an hdt pe-smp patch and it worked perfectly. no crashing, no nothin. until i installed the Combat Gameplay Overhaul. my hdt-pe still functions but all my smp gear is stiff as a rock. can someone help me fix this? that'd be appreciated.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mNve_qQgYFgxqo_C2sq0uWaDvdcuP8PM/view this is the patch

[treota]

idk if this is the correct place to ask about this and if this is the case, im sorry, but i REALLY want to fix an issue i have with my physics.

 

...

 

Sorry friend, I don't think there is much we can do to assist there. I would suggest contacting whoever made the patch as they are more likely to know about potential conflicts with other mods.

 

You appear to have narrowed the list of culprits well, nice work!

 

I would not really expect Combat Gameplay Overhaul to cause issues for SMP as it does not have any `.dll` files that I can see, usually those libraries are what conflict with SMP's engine.

 

Some things to try:

* Remove Combat Gameplay Overhaul to test if your SMP starts working again (this will give further evidence that it is the culprit)

* Make a mod profile with only the required files to make the PE + SMP + Combat Gameplay Overhaul work and see if SMP is still broken (this will also help confirm that CGO is the issue)

* Take a look at the SMP log files for any clues to what might be going on. (C:\Users\<user name>\Documents\My Games\Skyrim\SKSE - If you are on windows, not sure about linux)

* Talk to the author of Combat Gameplay Overhaul and see if they know of any reason that the mods would conflict

* Talk to the author of the PE + SMP patch to see if they know of reasons that the two mods would conflict

 

Usually I would recommend not trying to mix PE and SMP, if you can live with alternatives try to just use one or the other.

Edited June 2, 2020 by treota

[CobbleSansPyro]

First things first, thank for the reply. I will conduct these tests and i'll give results. it might take a little bit since some of these test are a little outside of my modding comfort zone. i have a lot of mods and you can almost see my stance towards my mod stability as someone who made a jenga tower. adding is fine and removing corner blocks is no issue, but some mods represent the parts of the tower that are the least stable and they might mess up everything. i had it a few times where i was left with a broken mess and had to figure out what broke it and i really hate that feeling so that is why i'm a bit cautious since i already had issues with getting some mods to cooperate with cgo when i first installed it.

(Btw, what exactly is a mod profile?)

But second, i want to give a little more insight on what i know about the mod.

If i remember correctly, this mod separates upper and lower body anims to get the leaning and jump attacks and all the other magic that makes up this mod. Maybe that might be the thing?

Also i took a look in my My Games\Skyrim\SKSE folder but there was nothing related to SMP

 

Another thing, I see you talking about the SMP engine i took a quick look at the install guide for SMP that you provided on this very page. I use Oldrim and your guide tells me to use UNP but i have CBBE. The patch came with armors from the same mod author(example: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/96851) and these are CBBE and UNP. So this patch is made to work with both bodies in mind. Also the set-up process for the patch is much different from what i see on this page. All there is to it is you copy-paste the contents of the folder(which only contains dll's and ini's) into Skyrim\Data\skse\plugins. it made, for example, the tail and hair from the mod above move and after installing CGO, the hair and tail have turned rock solid. but only those things. this patch also worked with other SMP items prior to the CGO bork. If you haven't already, maybe you could take a look at the patch file and maybe get some more insight.

 

Anywho i appreciate the help and i hope that this issue can be resolved.

[treota]

I would recommend picking up a tool called Mod Organizer, a profile in that tool lets you create multiple instances of your Skyrim with different mods. So you can keep your current setup but create an entirely new one for testing, or if you just feel like using different mod setups for different occasions.

 

https://github.com/ModOrganizer2/modorganizer/releases

 

If combat gameplay overhaul is using its own skeleton then it could indeed be what is breaking things, you could try installing XPMSE last (or reinstalling it depending on what tool you are using to manage mods).

[CobbleSansPyro]

I just made a very interesting(and a little bit infuriating) discovery. smp was not borked by cgo. for some reason the armor mod i used that relied on it got borked by something. but i dont know what... now im prettymuch at a loss. imma try a few things first. test other smp items to see if they are borked and reinstall the borked mods that relied on the smp patch. hopefully i can fix all this...

 

Results: all smp is borked

 

P.S.: when i re-enabled cgo it did say something about it replacing some xp32 files.... interesting
the exact files are the defaultmale.hkx and defaultfemale.hkx files in the mesh folder

 

Another discovery, when not in combat stance, footsteps are normal, but in combat stance you can hear multiple, this could be a bug or this might be because of the segmented body anims acting as seperate bodies with each their own footsteps but this is just a hypothesis

 

I also found the SMP log. this is what it says:

 

hello world

hdtSkinnedMeshPhysics

[Wed Jun 3 17:42:23 2020]INFO: Queue OK

[Wed Jun 3 17:42:23 2020]INFO: SKSEPlugin_Load

[3-6-2020 17:43:04]ERROR: meshes\Coco_Cloths\wedding_2b\line.xml(12,0):

xml parse error - not a float value

[3-6-2020 17:43:53]ERROR: meshes\KIMONO\kimono.xml(12,0):

xml parse error - not a float value

I took a look at your troubleshooting section. that left me with a question. why did it work normally but it changed just now?
Maybe it is because most of my pc language things got changed by the latest update? i think im on to something.

That was the solution... f*#@ windows for changing my stuff... also thank you for your assistance.

Edited June 3, 2020 by CobbleSansPyro