Any advice on how to start modding

[ThoraldGM]

Hey CenterWing. In addition to this excellent thread, I follow any topic that has interesting questions or answers. I was a Telnet MUD programmer 20 years ago and the forums are helping me catch up. It's a good group here.

[JuJooGuppy]

You got a lot of excellent replies here. I really just want to really reiterate the last post honestly.

You cannot be afraid to dig in and try things yourself. Sometimes you won't find immediate answers (Sometimes none at all) online, so don't be afraid to just experiment. As long as you back everything up and keep duplicates and such, essentially the worst that will happen is you will crash.

Trust me when I say, I am still very new and learning, and I have crashed my game more times than I care to admit, and cussed at it many more times wondering what I did wrong. Then when I discover what went wrong (Sometimes the smallest, silliest thing...), correct it, and get my mod working... its a very rewarding feeling of accomplishment :)



I would suggest starting small, too. Do small projects, and work your way up. Keep in mind that tiny details matter. As a small example, on one of the models for the game that I was editing... it kept crashing my game, and I had NO idea why. Spent hours trying to figure it out. The problem turned out to be... that I had an extra space at the end of the material path. Thats it.. a single space at the tail end of it. Damndest thing to find, since it was basically invisible.. so, pay attention to details :) Take your time.


Lastly, and most importantly, have fun!!!!

[Kikaimegami]

Now, since you mentioned that you're a programmer, what I'm going to say is probably things you already know, but even old veterans sometimes need to keep this in mind.

 

 

2. Don't give up. Sometimes it seems that Bethesda designed the game engine only halfway (oh I could rave about this for days) but just keep in mind that there are hundreds of ways to skin a plugin.

 

To add to this: Don't be afraid to give up on your current path and try a different approach if it just isn't working out. As Reneer said, there's generally many ways to go about solving a problem, and sometimes you stubbornly beat your face against one, when really you should be taking a step back and rethinking things.

 

Relatedly, scrapping the whole thing and going back to redo the entire process the same way you did last time can help you figure out where you're going wrong and why it wouldn't do what you wanted before.

 

Don't fall into the trap of the sunk cost fallacy. Never think of starting over as having wasted all the hours you spent on the first attempt, because while it didn't end up working out, you did learn some things along the way (either how to, or how not to do something are both important!).

[CenterWing]

 

 

So that's what the script extender does huh? And I'll have to look at Papyrus too. Then there's FO4Edit, I'm not familiar with that, isn't it like the GECK?

 

FO4Edit (sometimes known as xEdit since the same program is used for many other titles) is a third party tool which decodes .esp and .esm files created by the GECK by interpreting the hexadecimal codes inside into a more human readable format and allows the user to edit them.

 

While the Creation Kit is a much more user friendly piece of software with an advanced GUI, it suffers from the same problem as most user friendly pieces of software in that it makes assumptions about what the user wants. This frequently results in minor problems with the mods created through Creation Kit, such as dirty edits (although I'm led to believe that this can mostly be avoided in Creation Kit by following the correct workflow).

 

xEdit however does exactly what you tell it to do, thus following the Garbage In, Garbage Out principle. It won't fix your mistakes, it won't make things easy on you, but it just does what you tell it to. For an inexperienced user this can potentially cause problems and occasionally causes people to think of xEdit and the mods created using it with an unfair level of suspicion. Unlike the Creation Kit however it will never cause problems without the user making a mistake, thus it is actually used by most authors to repair mistakes caused by the Creation Kit.

 

Most modders will develop the more complicated content in Creation Kit, taking advantage of the easier implementation and then use xEdit to "clean" the mods before releasing them to the public.

 

At present, the FO4Edit program is not able to interpret all the records in an .esp or .esm file. It can only recognize the ones that are unchanged from Skyrim or which have been identified by users through a process of trial and error. As such some records will display as "unknown" or just show hexadecimal code. These can still be edited, but of course this is going to be a matter of trial and error in order to get any results. Once the Creation Kit has been released though, FO4Edit will likely be improved and rereleased as it will be much easier to discover what each part of the .esp and .esm files does when you have access to the Creation Kit.

 

 

 

Another recommendation for someone starting to mod: if you see a mod that does something you want to be able to do (such as add an effect, change textures, etc..), study it to figure out how to do it yourself. Most of what I know about using xEdit/the GECK I learned by studying other mods or the vanilla files. While it doesn't help as much with model making (since looking at a model doesn't really tell you how they made it look the way they did), that's where tutorials comes in. And for anything beyond making the actual mesh (such as applying animations, collision, etc...), it still applies to some extent.

 

Hell, I've downloaded a few mods recently purely so I could figure out how they do certain things. And don't worry if you don't know anything about scripting. And you do a surprising amount with just xEdit/the GECK, although there are also a lot of things that are strangely hard if not impossible without scripts that seem like they should have been easy to do.

 

There are some wonderful suggestions here already, but I want to add just one or two things.

 

1. Don't be afraid to ask questions. Unless you are delving deep into the weeds, there will generally be another modder out there who will be willing to guide you and lend a hand.

2. Don't be afraid to experiment and try things. I can't tell you how many times I've typed something into the script editor window and found that it actually worked.

2. Don't give up. Sometimes it seems that Bethesda designed the game engine only halfway (oh I could rave about this for days) but just keep in mind that there are hundreds of ways to skin a plugin.

thanks all for the advice

[CenterWing]

Now, since you mentioned that you're a programmer, what I'm going to say is probably things you already know, but even old veterans sometimes need to keep this in mind.

 

 

2. Don't give up. Sometimes it seems that Bethesda designed the game engine only halfway (oh I could rave about this for days) but just keep in mind that there are hundreds of ways to skin a plugin.

 

To add to this: Don't be afraid to give up on your current path and try a different approach if it just isn't working out. As Reneer said, there's generally many ways to go about solving a problem, and sometimes you stubbornly beat your face against one, when really you should be taking a step back and rethinking things.

 

Relatedly, scrapping the whole thing and going back to redo the entire process the same way you did last time can help you figure out where you're going wrong and why it wouldn't do what you wanted before.

 

Don't fall into the trap of the sunk cost fallacy. Never think of starting over as having wasted all the hours you spent on the first attempt, because while it didn't end up working out, you did learn some things along the way (either how to, or how not to do something are both important!).

 

 

You got a lot of excellent replies here. I really just want to really reiterate the last post honestly.

 

You cannot be afraid to dig in and try things yourself. Sometimes you won't find immediate answers (Sometimes none at all) online, so don't be afraid to just experiment. As long as you back everything up and keep duplicates and such, essentially the worst that will happen is you will crash.

 

Trust me when I say, I am still very new and learning, and I have crashed my game more times than I care to admit, and cussed at it many more times wondering what I did wrong. Then when I discover what went wrong (Sometimes the smallest, silliest thing...), correct it, and get my mod working... its a very rewarding feeling of accomplishment :smile:

 

 

 

I would suggest starting small, too. Do small projects, and work your way up. Keep in mind that tiny details matter. As a small example, on one of the models for the game that I was editing... it kept crashing my game, and I had NO idea why. Spent hours trying to figure it out. The problem turned out to be... that I had an extra space at the end of the material path. Thats it.. a single space at the tail end of it. Damndest thing to find, since it was basically invisible.. so, pay attention to details :smile: Take your time.

 

 

Lastly, and most importantly, have fun!!!!

Hey CenterWing. In addition to this excellent thread, I follow any topic that has interesting questions or answers. I was a Telnet MUD programmer 20 years ago and the forums are helping me catch up. It's a good group here.

thanks all for the advice

[ThoraldGM]

Whether you script or not, it might be worthwhile to spend a day setting up a searchable index.

 

I extracted the ba2 scripts with Bethesda Archive Extractor, batch decompiled them with Champollion into one folder, and can search all text within that folder using Agent Ransack. Important distinction, since Windows 10 defaults to only searching titles, and I'm usually looking for a buried method/function.

 

The command prompt window feels oddly foreign to me now, but the batch decompile process is essential because there are almost 8k files including scripts, fragments, and swf files. (Swf files are for interface menus and can be viewed/edited with JPEXS.)

 

This gives me a readable, searchable archive in addition to studying esps in FO4Edit. Helpful when I need to find things, but there's still a bunch of code "behind the wall" of the esm/exe. At least I can figure out quickly if the code I'm looking for is accessible or not, a good indicator of whether I can do a project or if it's over my head.

[CenterWing]

Whether you script or not, it might be worthwhile to spend a day setting up a searchable index.

 

I extracted the ba2 scripts with Bethesda Archive Extractor, batch decompiled them with Champollion into one folder, and can search all text within that folder using Agent Ransack. Important distinction, since Windows 10 defaults to only searching titles, and I'm usually looking for a buried method/function.

 

The command prompt window feels oddly foreign to me now, but the batch decompile process is essential because there are almost 8k files including scripts, fragments, and swf files. (Swf files are for interface menus and can be viewed/edited with JPEXS.)

 

This gives me a readable, searchable archive in addition to studying esps in FO4Edit. Helpful when I need to find things, but there's still a bunch of code "behind the wall" of the esm/exe. At least I can figure out quickly if the code I'm looking for is accessible or not, a good indicator of whether I can do a project or if it's over my head.

I'm not familiar with search indexes, what is it?

[ThoraldGM]

Sorry, I should've used the word folder instead. The end result is a searchable folder of code, which is one way to find the script a function or variable is hiding in. Agent Ransack loads the results in a preview window listing file names and line numbers of located instances.

[CenterWing]

Sorry, I should've used the word folder instead. The end result is a searchable folder of code, which is one way to find the script a function or variable is hiding in. Agent Ransack loads the results in a preview window listing file names and line numbers of located instances.

Could you possibly provide a link to a video that explains it? I have a hard time learning by reading.

[ThoraldGM]

I could post screenshots when I get home. Not sure if anyone has made a video for it. All the steps I followed were written in various readme files :-/