Trouble loading/saving with GECK

[ilanaisatree]

Backstory

I've been customizing mods for only a couple of weeks now, tweaking things here and there to my liking, creating manual compatibility patches, etc. For the most part, I've been using FO3Edit extensively and avoiding GECK like the plague, but... I recently downloaded a weapons mod and I'm trying to make it compatible with FWE. I decided that I would create a script to add weapons to various FormID Lists from FWE (e.g, the type2 zoom list), rather than manually adding them one at a time. I've written the script, but as FO3Edit has no compiler, I'm trying to use GECK.

 

Problem

When I save my plugin in GECK to compile my script, a number of items in my plugin lose their relationship with the masters. I don't know how to word that less clunkily, or if it's even accurate... My plugin has a number of elements that were made specifically to override elements from the masters, as I didn't want to edit those directly. After saving my plugin in GECK, many but not all of those elements are now new, independent entities. They no longer override the master elements, nor have any relationship to them. In addition, the FormID Lists in my plugin have errors where they used to point to elements from the masters.

 

It seems like GECK is ignoring my plugin's dependence on the masters when it saves, but not completely. Selecting those masters in addition to the active plugin when loading seems to make no difference. I'm sure I must be using GECK incorrectly, but all my searches have turned up nothing.

 

Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanks!

[ilanaisatree]

Problem solved!

 

It took me a few days, and I'd actually given up on the original problem, but when I tried to edit a different mod in a similar way I figured out what the issue was. I had been trying to use a .esp as a master, and GECK didn't like that very much.

 

For anyone else having similar problems, the following article was extremely helpful:

 

De-Isolation Tutorial

 

I used the bait-and-switch method described in the tutorial, and now everything works just fine. Wrye Flash was very, very useful.