Help I'm stupid

[mymee]

I've installed Wrye Bash and Python, but I don't get what they do.

 

At first glance I thought it's just like OBMM but with more utilities... okay. Then someone told me you can make "bashed patches" or "patched batches" that improve stability and fix incompatibility issues between mods.

 

Okay if that's true, excellent, but how do I do that?

 

And yes I've read the Wrye Bash faqs, installation page, readme, but I'm kinda technonoob, so I really don't understand what I can or need to do.

 

Thank you kindly.

[PrettyMurky]

Step by step guide in PDF format

[David Brasher]

@ PrettyMurky

I love your signature:

I tried to quit Oblivion. I tried to edify myself by reading Crime & Punishment, but I kept thinking how Raskolinikov should have just brought an invisibilty potion and some lockpicks, and everything would have been okay.

 

@ mymee

Wrye Bash has an important modding function in allowing you to perform the bitflip to create mastered patches in which one .esp is mastered to another .esp which is a virtual .esm.

Edited June 27, 2011 by David Brasher

[MarkInMKUK]

Wrye Bash has an important modding function in allowing you to perform the bitflip to create mastered patches in which one .esp is mastered to another .esp which is a virtual .esm.

 

Huh? That's pure technobabbble when aimed at someone who has, by their own admission, not understood what Wrye Bash is doing from reading the manual. It's also not what 99% of people use it for, or at least THINK they are using it for.

 

Let me try and put it in something close to English.

 

Built into Oblivion is a limit to the number of active ESM and ESP files you can use at once - this is Oblivion.esm plus another 255 ESM and/or ESP files.

 

Wrye Bash can, in certain circumstances, combine parts of two different ESP files which alter the same category or thing, and put those combined changes into one single ESP file. You can then, still using Wrye Bash, disable those original ESP files and JUST use the newly created "everything-in-one" ESP file.

 

For example, you have one ESP which makes all of the mushrooms bright green, and another which makes all of the grass orange. Both of these can be combined into one file which makes all mushrooms bright green AND all the grass orange, thereby using just ONE ESP slot instead of two.

 

As Wrye Bash is very clever, it can combine several different bits of dozens of different ESP files, thereby freeing up lots of slots. If you run BOSS, you will see it reports suggested "tags" for the bashed Patch function - these tell Wrye Bash which bits it can combine.

 

Wrye Bash also has plenty of other functions, but the one I have described is probably the most common use for most modders. As you get more into advanced modding, or trying to make two incompatible mods behave together, then you may use some of the other functions.

[youngvampire]

I actually thought most people used it because of the bashed patches,  which I'm not qualified enough to explain, since I don't really understand all the technica bits myself, heh

[Candex]

@mymee:

You are not the only stupid one around, you and I belong to the same subspecies. I did the same thing, downloade and installed WB, Python and OBMM. Started with OBMM and found out that it was hard for me to install mods with it, so I switched to WryeBash- still don't get exactly what it does, but it is a lot easier for me to get mods running with it. One thing that I like from Wrye Bash is how its colour-shape coded and how organized is the installers tab. I started to understand a bit more after trial-and-error-touch-all-buttons; I read the manual first and was like... um if its green its ok. I guess that never having made a mod is a limitation because there is a lot of concepts that I just can't grasp from reading a manual.

 

 

@MarkInMKUK :

 

My kudos to you, that bit of plain english was brilliant. I understood that Wrye did some sort of grouping with the mods but I wasn't sure on what for. Now its obvious. Maybe you could be that plain simple and shed some light on the mysterious Python. Or maybe there already is a thread on Wrye Bash and Python for dummies which I ignore.

 

Hmmm I'm downloading that step by step guide right now.Thanks for the link PrettyMurky.

Edited June 27, 2011 by Candex

[David Brasher]

David Brasher said:

Wrye Bash has an important modding function in allowing you to perform the bitflip to create mastered patches in which one .esp is mastered to another .esp which is a virtual .esm.

 

MarkInMKUK said:

Huh? That's pure technobabbble when aimed at someone who has, by their own admission, not understood what Wrye Bash is doing from reading the manual. It's also not what 99% of people use it for, or at least THINK they are using it for.

 

@ MarkInMKUK

Wrye Bash is not just for gamers, it has a really important mod-making function as well. I bet if I looked at your load order, I would see mods that had been built with the aid of Wrye Bash.

Edited June 27, 2011 by David Brasher

[mymee]

Thank you everyone, I'm glad I'm not alone... lol

 

Okay so yeah the bashed patches thing is what I keep hearing about, is that the same as combining two esps? Also yes, excellent plain English, now I just need to figure out which button does the bashing patches thing.

[MarkInMKUK]

David Brasher said:

Wrye Bash has an important modding function in allowing you to perform the bitflip to create mastered patches in which one .esp is mastered to another .esp which is a virtual .esm.

 

MarkInMKUK said:

Huh? That's pure technobabbble when aimed at someone who has, by their own admission, not understood what Wrye Bash is doing from reading the manual. It's also not what 99% of people use it for, or at least THINK they are using it for.

 

@ MarkInMKUK

Wrye Bash is not just for gamers, it has a really important mod-making function as well. I bet if I looked at your load order, I would see mods that had been built with the aid of Wrye Bash.

@ David - maybe so, but just as you don't toss a maintenance manual at someone asking how to turn the key in the ignition of a car, you don't need to drown someone in the stuff which, to them, is pure gibberish. I mean ... "bitflip"? Sheesh!

 

 

@ mymee - Let me see if I can break it down a bit more. Please read the following along with the "basic use" pictorial guide for Wrye Bash.

 

Wrye Bash is not a totally "Stand alone" program, it uses another program (or set of programs) to work. The main bulk of the background work is done, currently, by "Python", which is what is called a scripting language interpreter. You write a series of instructions in a form Python can handle, and it uses those to automate various tasks. An example might be to tell Python to look through a list of files, and wherever the list told it to, change the file type from ".esp" to ".esp.ghost". You COULD go through several hundred files yourself to do that, but you'd be almost certain to make a mistake, whereas if you write the script it is to follow correctly, Python will not make any errors no matter how many times you do the job.

 

The upshot of this is, that running Wrye Bash at all relies on Python being correctly installed first.

 

OK, so, we will assume that you have a correct Python install, and have installed Wrye Bash, and BOSS as well. There SHOULD be a shortcut labelled "Wrye Bash Launcher" on your desktop if all went well. Double-click it as you would any other desktop shortcut, and Wrye Bash will pop up a small window while starting, then its main window.

 

At the top of the Wrye Bash window is a series of tabs labelled "Installers", "Mods", "Saves", etc. Make sure the one labelled "Mods" is selected - the others can be ignored for the moment.

 

Next, look right at the bottom of the window. You should see a series of icons, including a pale green and pale pink aquare, and the familiar Oblivion icon. Depending which other Oblivion-related programs you also have installed, you may see icons for paint.NET, Blender, Bink Video utilities, and plenty of programs which I also don't have installed. The one to look for is the word "Boss" in black lettering.

 

If you have both of those, you are well on your way to building a "Bashed Patch". Next - a little bit of setting up...

 

Firstly the second column on the screen currently shows something like "Lo...". In the same way you would if using a spreadsheet, hover your mouse next to that label until you find the vertical bar separating it from the next column (labelled "R"). Click and drag that to the right, until the header says "Load order". Once you can see that, release the mouse click, and then click ON the words "Load Order". The column below, and the associated mods, should organise themselves into numerical order, starting with "00" at the top, and increasing as you go down the column. With me so far?

 

Secondly, right-click anywhere on the bar with the "File" and "Load Order" labels in. A pop-up menu should appear. Remoce the tick from "Lock Times" if there is one, and make sure there are ticks in front of "BOSS disable lock times" and "Always update BOSS masterlist prior to running BOSS".

 

Now, click the BOSS icon at the bottom of the screen. There will be a small popup while the Masterlist updates, and BOSS runs, and then a window will open with the "Better Oblivion Sorting Software Log" in it. Read down it, and you should see familiar mod names, along with some arcane comments about "Bash tag suggestions". Check through the whole list for anything labelled "Error" or "Warning" - these need to be dealt with (or at the very least, understood) before trying to go further.

 

If you close the BOSS log and go back to the Wrye Bash window, you may well find that mods have changed order in the window. BOSS has used its Masterlist to determine what it thinks is the best load order, and adjusted the date and time stamps of the files so that they load in that order.

 

Now, left-click on ANY one of the mods, and press Ctrl+A to select all of the mods. They should all be highlighted. Right-click the highlight, and select "Mark Mergeable" from the Pop-up. After a few seconds, a window will pop up giving a list of the files that Wrye Bash believes can be merged, either partially or fully, into its Bashed Patch file. If they weren't alredy, you may now notice that the text has changed colour for some of the mod names, and the boxes to the left of the names may also have changed colour.

 

Scroll down towards the bottom of your mod list. Ideally right at the bottom, you should find a file marked "Bashed Patch, 0.esp". If this is not present, follow the instructions in the Wrye Bash readme to locate it and copy it (NOT move it) to the correct place, then re-run BOSS.

 

Once you have a Bashed Patch" file, the next stage is to USE it. Right-click the file, and select "Rebuild patch". Another popup will appear (unless you, for some reason, have no mergeable mods)...

 

"The following mods are mergeable. While it is not important to Wrye Bash functionality or the end contents of the bashed patch, it is suggest that they be deactivated and merged into the patch; this (helps) avoid the Oblivion maximum esp/m limit."

 

There will then be a list of mod files, followed by

 

"Automatically deactivate those mods now?"

 

Click "Yes".

 

The next popup has DOZENS of options in the left-hand window. The one we are interested in this first time through is the second item on the list, "Merge Patches". Put a tick in the box next to it, and then tick all of the files which appear in the right-hand window by selecting the "Select all" button. Now click the button marked "Build Patch". A popup will tell you that the program is working, and give you a progress bar.

 

Once completed, another popup will tell you what it did, so just hit "OK". It will probably prompt you to "Activate the Bashed patch" - do so by clicking the box next to it, and a tick will appear. The ticks in some of the other boxes will have disappeared now, or been replaced with + or dot marks. This tells you what their new status is.

 

You may now close Wrye Bash, and run Oblivion, and the whole things SHOULD work just as before, but with less files active, so a smaller load list.

 

There are lots of other options for building the Bashed patch, and (as David so rightly pointed out) there are myriad advanced functions in the program, but you have now performed the equivalent of turning the key in the ignition. The rest comes with practice and experimentation.

[mymee]

Woohoo, yay for detailed instructions I can understand!

 

Okay now if I'm not mistaken though, Wrye Bash just combines mods right? I mean does it actually improve stability or fix incompatibility issues that might cause crashes? If not then I'm not sure why I'd need it, since I have at most 20 or so mods installed, and I doubt I'll ever get close to the 255 cap.